Word: catfishing
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...cripple Porgy, this time with music for himself and the 75 other blacks living in Catfish Row, returned last week to Manhattan. He was still the brainchild of Playwright DuBose Heyward, still the protege of Manhattan's Theatre Guild which took him under its wing eight years ago. For one week Porgy and Bess, with a 700-page score by Composer George Gershwin (TIME, Sept. 30), played in Boston, won high praise. On opening night in Manhattan half the Somebodies in town crowded in to hear this latest attempt at a U. S. folk opera...
With DuBose Heyward as his librettist, Composer Gershwin kept his work faithful to the play. The Negroes of Charleston's Catfish Row live in the same rickety tenements. They still quarrel and kill over their crap games, still shout their religion, their love and fear of ''Lawd Jesus." Porgy, the crippled beggar, appears driving his seedy goat. The simple love story is his. Bess belongs to the murderer Crown. According to the neighbors she is "a liquor-guzzlin' slut," a "Happy Dust" addict. Porgy gives her shelter, buys her a divorce although she never has been...
...Gershwin, Brother George's collaborator in many a Broadway show, was called in to supply special lyrics. Director Mamoulian, who made his name with the original play, was willing to leave Holly wood. Mamoulian liked working with Negroes, had a steadfast admiration for the primitive tragedy of Charleston's Catfish Row. This time, though, his problem was harder. His actors had to be singers, trained to time themselves to the subtlest beat. To match the Gershwin counter point, Mamoulian planned counterpoint in movement which would have the effect of a dramatic ballet. Porgy was to start one song simply, with...
Porgy and Bess, so named to prevent prospective customers from regarding it as a revival of the play, begins with droning "Do-doo-da's" interspersed with "wawa, wa-wa." Catfish Row will be on view, with its dilapidated tenement fronts, its old street lamps, its "Gawd-fearin women" and its "Gawd-damnin' men.'' As in the play, the crippled beggar Porgy drives his ribby goat, hunched in a cart made of packing box labeled "Wild Rose Soap, Pure & Fragrant." The whoring Bess again finds shelter and love with Porgy after the bullying Crown commits his drunken murder...
...women of Catfish Row lull their babies, keen over their dead. The men have their fishing, their crap games Saturday nights. Both cringe before the white folks' laws, the ill-omened buzzards, the lashing hurricane which provides the play's great climax. There are such numbers as A Woman is a Sometime Thing, Bess, You is My Woman Now, A Redheaded Woman Makes a Choo-Choo-Jump its Tracks, It Ain't Necessarily...