Word: besse
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...without hope. The most promising seedling on the midseason schedule is NBC's All Is Forgiven, created by Glen and Les Charles and James Burrows, the team responsible for Cheers. Last week's initial segment, though jam-packed with jokes and characters, sweated less than most sitcom pilots. Bess Armstrong stars as Paula, a career woman who gets married and stumbles into a job as producer of a TV soap opera on the same day. The series will apparently shuttle between conflicts at home (her husband Matt has a punkish daughter who resents her) and at work, where the gallery...
...Broadway for the next decade and beyond. When the style changed, it was again Kern who reshaped it, along with Oscar Hammerstein II. Their 1927 Show Boat, with its sweeping seriousness and its near operatic transformation of blues and folk music, paved the Great White Way for Porgy and Bess, Oklahoma! and West Side Story...
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...
...soloists are not nearly as strong. Soprano Grace Bumbry's shrill, edgy Bess fails to communicate either that lady's sultry eroticism or her ambiguous moral nature. Better is Bass-Baritone Simon Estes' dignified, sympathetic Porgy, though his voice is not as robust as it should be. (Injured during the dress rehearsal, he played the crippled hero on real crutches.) Individual honors go to Mezzo-Soprano Florence Quivar as the soulful Serena and the dashing Gregg Baker as the villainous Crown. The production, designed and directed by Robert O'Hearn and Nathaniel Merrill, is handsome, if not as spectacular...