After praising Audra McDonald's performance, Ben Brantley had this to say about the production, which is still pretty much the way it is:
"Though her emotion-packed soprano has rarely been more penetrating or (dare I add?) operatic, Ms. McDonald makes you forget whether she’s speaking or singing the words of the loose-living, terminally conflicted Bess, who improbably but persuasively falls in love with Porgy (a dignified but hamstrung Norm Lewis). You just know that you feel what she’s feeling at any given moment, and that it is often unbearably painful.
No such sustaining power, never mind mere cohesiveness, informs the rest of this production. And the problem isn’t with making the recitatives mostly spoken instead of sung. I’ve seen that done before, most recently in Trevor Nunn’s 2006 London production. Nor are the widely (and prematurely) disparaged liberties taken with the text nearly as egregious as they were rumored to be. (The show’s original ending, which had been replaced in the early previews, has now been restored.)
Anyone who has seen or heard this show before will recognize it. This is “Porgy and Bess” for sure. But it’s “Porgy and Bess” in limbo. Ms. McDonald’s performance aside, all the new stratagems to specify and anchor the show’s themes, people and plot have instead made it oddly abstract and diffuse.
The fabled Catfish Row, one of the most robustly and specifically physical neighborhoods in American theater, is here only a state of mind, represented by a single, sparsely detailed set (by Riccardo Hernandez) that evokes the inside of a rotting ship, the kind that doubles as a coffin for unlucky sailors or, perhaps once upon a time, slaves.
The characters who gather to gamble, gossip, brawl, do their laundry and mend their fishing nets often seem to be (pardon the metaphor) treading water, looking for something like real land on which to rest their weary bones. And because the staging (including Ronald K. Brown’s frolicsome choreography) lacks focus, the story lacks urgency. The most attention-grabbing visual effects are the melting shadows occasionally cast on the wall, via Christopher Akerlind’s lighting. They seem more fully defined than many of the people onstage.
It might help if they all spoke the same musical language. But the Broadway-burnished mellowness of Mr. Lewis’s voice hails from a different planet than that of the operatically trained Phillip Boykin, who plays Porgy’s rival (and Bess’s sometime man), the murderous Crown. As the dope-peddling, strutting Sporting Life, David Alan Grier brings a winning, period-precise Cab Calloway style to the showstopper “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” then becomes a contemporary pop balladeer for his second big number, “There’s a Boat That’s Leaving Soon for New York.” Other performers seem to switch in mid-song between conversational lightness of singing and operatic heft. And much of the choral work, which demands precision, is hazy and ragged."
"Be on your guard! Jerks on the loose!"
http://www.roches.com/television/ss83kod.html
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