Word: bess
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More than a quarter of all current Broadway shows-seven of them-are black. Porgy and Bess, returning in the full operatic panoply of George Gershwin's original version (TIME, July 19), has for four straight weeks broken all box-office records for a legitimate Broadway show. The black edition of Guys and Dolls, the long-running The Wiz (Oz over a different rainbow), and Bubbling Brown Sugar, a revue celebrating Harlem in its Cotton Club heyday, are all doing turnaway business. So is For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide/ When the Rainbow Is Enuf, a "choreopoem" about...
...Clamma Dale, for instance, brings to the role of Bess high musical polish and dramatic intelligence, a voice of molten gold and the fierce grace of a stalking leopard. Porgy made her, at 28, an instant star; she is booked for theater, opera and concert appearances through 1978. The youngest child of a middle-class family in Chester, Pa., the incomparable Clamma learned to play the cello, clarinet, piano, saxophone and guitar guided by her father, an oil-refinery worker and part-time jazz musician. Before winning a Naumburg Foundation Award and a contract with the New York City Opera...
...home in Texas and five nearby states; next month, for instance, Sousa's saucy operetta El Capitan again takes to the road. Gockley is perhaps most proud of the two Houston shows that reached Broadway: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha last fall and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess this week. "Why can't grand opera produce something like Kiss Me, Kate"? he asks. If anyone is going to come up with the answer some day, it could well be Houston's Gockley...
Since Porgy's music makes the same demands on singers as does any other opera, Houston has assembled two sets of soloists to alternate the roles of Porgy, Bess and Serena. Both are fine, but it is the first-night cast that will be especially remembered. Tall, willowy, insinuating Clamma Dale, a Juilliard School graduate who made her debut with the New York City Opera last fall, is a marvelous Bess. At 28 she has a luscious soprano voice that has a little bit of the young Leontyne Price in it and soon ought to be just right...
...crippled hero he acts on his knees better than most young operatic hopefuls do on their feet, and he has a booming bass-baritone voice. Wilma Shakesnider has just the right blend of vibrant lyricism and common-sense demeanor to make Serena an appropriately righteous foil to Bess. Larry Marshall's Sportin' Life could use a touch more evil but is admirable in his dandified elusiveness. The depth of this cast is suggested by the presence of the veteran contralto Carol Brice, a regular on the concert scene since the 1940s, in the minor role of a neighborhood...