Porgy and Bess will close at London's Savoy Theatre on May 5. The musical, directed and adapted by Trevor Nunn and starring Clarke Peters as Porgy and Nicola Hughes as Bess, is eyeing a Broadway transfer in the spring of 2008. A revival of Fiddler on the Roof will be the theater's next tenant.
Set in Charleston, South Carolina at the turn of the century in a small black enclave called Catfish Row, Porgy and Bess tells the story of Porgy, a crippled beggar, who falls in love with Bess, a woman of uncertain reputation. When Bess tries to break free from her brutish lover, Crown, after he becomes wanted for murder, the only person willing to overlook her past and offer her shelter is Porgy. Their relationship is threatened by the disapproval of the townspeople, the presence of her old drug supplier Sporting Life—and the threatened return of Crown.
Nunn's adaptation of George and Ira Gershwin and Dubose Heyward's original folk opera retains the classic music of the original. It features the songs “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o' Nuttin',” and “It Ain't Necessarily So,” which were celebrated upon their debut in 1935 for their innovative use of folk and jazz idioms in an operatic context and remain timeless standards. This production was nominated for three 2006 Olivier Awards, including Best Musical.
When the show opened at the Savoy Theatre on 25 October 2006, Matt Wolf wrote in his Theatre.com Review: “Clearly the raison d'etre for doing Porgy in any fashion is its score, bluesy and mournful, haunting and hymnal, urgent and passionate, all as required. It's entirely possible, then, that the connective tissue wasn't uppermost in Nunn's mind as he refashioned a skeletal story line, or in the thoughts of a cast who have to work hard to put across the music, which doesn't leave a lot of room and space for affective subtlety. The ensemble numbers often work best, even if too many of them are accompanied by clap-happy choreography from Jason Pennycooke that patronises the characters far more than the long-controversial patois “dere," "dat" and so on of Ira Gershwin and DuBose Heyward's lyrics. Playing the fisherman, Jake, Edward Baruwa leads a genuinely thrilling "It Takes A Long Pull To Get There"—one of the greatest of all work songs. "Leavin' For the Promise' Lan'," in turn, has a near-inspirational fervour that in an instant honours the ambition of the Gershwins to bring to the stage a race and religion that these two Jewish brothers self-evidently did not share. But empathy sometimes truly does reign supreme: Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote Oklahoma! without having ever been to a state that they only then visited after their landmark musical was already up and running.”
Details of the Broadway transfer have yet to be confirmed.
