Word: bess
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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George Gershwin maintained that Porgy and Bess was a real opera, not a glorified Broadway musical, but until recently, few believed him. Early productions generally truncated his ample (more than three hours) score, cut down its lush orchestration and substituted spoken dialogue for the recitatives. But there has been growing interest in an authentic Porgy, beginning with the Houston Grand Opera's 1976 production and followed by an even more opulent version seen at New York's Radio City Music Hall two years ago. Last week, 50 years after its premiere, Porgy came all the way uptown to the Metropolitan...
...sold out even before the opening. The piece's unique claim to be the American national opera is partly responsible, of course, as is the curiosity value associated with any first. But the Met delivers the goods: in the hands of a major conductor like James Levine, Porgy and Bess emerges as something ; richer than the overblown musical comedy it once appeared to be. Although many singers have used Porgy as a springboard to fame (Leontyne Price, for example, in 1952), the Met production reveals it as essentially a choral opera. It is in choruses like Gone, Gone, Gone...
...Juilliard School, where her teacher, Florence Page Kimball, economically taught her to "sing on your vocal interest, not on the principal." In 1952 she was discovered by Composer Virgil Thomson, who cast her in his opera Four Saints in Three Acts. That led to her first popular triumph, as Bess in a revival of Porgy and Bess. A great career was launched...
...undeniable clunkiness ("Brian's mental capabilities did not include that of judging what was too obvious to require saying....Sandy gave him a look of hatred.") But because of Silver's lack of pretensions, these shortcomings rarely prove troublesome and sometimes even help. For instance, Lauren's own Bess and George--her wacky Southern Californian roommate Carol, who wears hotpants and lame sandals, and her best friend Michael, a gorgeous gay preppie from an old Boston family--are funny largely because they are overdone...
...choked room, of presidential campaigns, congressional hearings ("Nothing that Washington has to offer comes closer to theater") and state visits. He is at Nikita Khrushchev's elbow when the Soviet leader praises the bleak industrial landscape of the New Jersey Turnpike as a symbol of American dynamism; with Bess and Harry Truman as the couple, in bathrobes, bid good night from the back of their campaign train to an impromptu crowd of fellow ordinary Americans. Rovere's political analyses-about the Truman Administration's crippling venality, John Foster Dulles' domination of the Eisenhower Administration, John Kennedy...