Word: besse
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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TITLE: PORGY AND BESS...
Once again, U.S. audiences have the British to thank for doing overdue justice to an icon of American popular culture. This first-ever TV version of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess comes not from an American network but from the BBC. The director is a seasoned hand at such transatlantic transactions: Trevor Nunn, former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the man who brought Cats and Les Miserables to Broadway...
...Haymon invest the title roles with wrenching believability. In Nunn's conception, the crippled beggar Porgy is less pathetic and helpless than in most productions, hobbling on crutches instead of pushing himself on a cart. At the end he flings away his crutches and, in search of his missing Bess, lurches off painfully, heroically into a blaze of backlighting. It's a dazzling final image, but one that also points up the drawback of Nunn's approach. This Porgy provides more compelling drama for the eye than...
...Wild Plays His Transcriptions of Gershwin (Chesky Records). Chopin's works vary widely in mood and tempo, yet Wild sustains the long singing lines that provide their pulse and shape. That singing -- with wit, warmth and Lisztian heroics -- defines Wild's Gershwin, especially his extended Fantasy on Porgy and Bess...
...acting throughout the play is almost uniformly excellent. Even the supporting cast is funny--Colin Stokes, in particular, is fantastic as Gavin, a drug counselor just discovering the wonder of controlled substances. Bess Wohl, as T.V. reporter Corinne Le Mans, is irritating in her best scenes, flapping around the stage like a bird about to take flight, but gives the single funniest performance of the entire play after meeting "Lucy...