Word: besse
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...Broadway season staggered into the Month of Birthdays with a famished look and faintly bloodshot eyes. Since Christmas night, not a new show-and only one revival, Porgy and Bess-had really managed to click on Broadway. There had been 16 shows in all, half of them by well-known playwrights-Clifford Odets, Charles MacArthur, Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John van Druten, Samson Raphaelson, Henrik Ibsen, Ben Hecht; and last week there was Marc Connelly. But this week Connelly had joined the rest: his Flowers of Virtue withered after four performances...
Porgy and Bess (by DuBose Heyward; music by George Gershwin; produced by Cheryl Crawford) seemed better last week than when first produced in 1935. With most of its dull, draggy recitative deleted, Gershwin's folk opera of Charleston's swarming "Catfish Row" came warmly to life...
Musically Porgy and Bess is least good when most operatic. The top songs in Porgy and Bess-Summer Time, I Got Plenty o' Nuttin', A Woman Is a Sometime Thing, It Ain't Necessarily So, the duet Bess, You Is My Woman Now-flash out like perfect stones in too heavy a setting...
...Porgy and Bess" is not only this love story with its surrounding characters, Maria the dowager of the community, Sportin' Life the peddler of "happy dust," and the many other finely drawn minor parts. It is really a story of the Negro and the life he leads. Here are all the sudden joys and sorrows, the fear of death, of the white man's law, and of God. Above all here is portrayed the spirit of lazy sunshine and happiness and the native rhythm which enables the Negro to sing of his pain as well as of his pleasure...
This present production is filled with excellent singers and actors. Todd Duncan as Porgy and Anne Brown as Bess, both from the original production, give outstanding performances. Duncan's rendition of "I've Got Plenty of Nuttin" is especially fine. Harriet Jackson who sings "Summer-time" is a stunning Negress with a beautiful voice and a fine presence. The entire cast played with the ease and rhythmic grace that is so typically Negro and the staging of the show is very fine especially in the love duet and the group scenes...