RIALTO CHATTER: PORGY AND BESS to be Made Into a Musical?

According to an article in the NY Times, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright, Suzan-Lori Parks is collaborating with Diedre Murray, to create a new musical version of "Porgy and Bess." The show would feature rearrangements from George Gershwin's opera.  Diane Paulus is set to direct the production, which is to premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts next September.

Paulus said of the show, "It won't be an opera - that the big deal her. The Gershwin estate was interested in a team that would take this amazing classical work, that people know as an opera, and turn it into a musical. They wanted to make it more fully realized in terms of characters. They were eager to have a writer bring it to the audiences of today."

In response to questions about a possible Broadway run, Paulus added, "If the show has a future life in New York, that's great. There is an intention for it to have a future life."

To read the full article, visit: http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/04/porgy-and-bess-will-be-reincarnated-as-a-musical/?partner=rss&emc=rss

Porgy and Bess is an opera, first performed in 1935, with music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, and lyrics by Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward. It was based on DuBose Heyward's novel Porgy and the play of the same name which he co-wrote with his wife Dorothy Heyward. All three works deal with African American life in the fictitious Catfish Row (based on the real-life Rainbow Row) in Charleston, South Carolina, in the early 1920s.

Originally conceived by Gershwin as an "American folk opera", Porgy and Bess premiered in New York in the fall of 1935 and featured an entire cast of classically trained African-American singers-a daring and visionary artistic choice at the time. Gershwin chose African American Eva Jessye as the choral director for the opera. Incorporating a wealth of blues and jazz idioms into the classical art form of opera, Gershwin considered it his finest work.

Photo Credit: Peter James Zielinski