"The American Repertory Theater has announced its full 2011-2012 season, which will launch with the previously announced production of Porgy and Bess, starring Audra McDonald and Norm Lewis. Also planned are world premieres of Futurity: A Musical by The Lisps and a play based on Jung Chang's Wild Swans." - Playbill.com More

“Porgy and Bess,” a show about black people, created entirely by white people, has never been a favorite of black audience. Diane Paulus’s great achievement is to cut through Heyward’s muddy folklore and to present us with us something more profound. Her Porgy (the beautiful Norm Lewis) and Bess are not archetypal “black lovers”; they are a man and a woman, human beings who are not defined by their race.  By ridding the script of its sociological and anthropological strain, Paulus allows us to see the people and, perforce, to hear the music. More

So shoot me, Porgy purists. To my mind, the retooling of The Gershwins' Porgy and Bess for American Repertory Theater, intended to make the iconic folk opera work as a Broadway show, is compelling enough to push past quibbles. And in Audra McDonald it boasts a Bess as pained as she wrestles her devils as she is languorous and melodious in her delivery of the music. When on opening night she and Norm Lewis entwined their voices around "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," toward the end of the first act (there are only two), I thought I'd died and gone to some auditory equivalent of the Promised Land those denizens of Catfish Row keep singing about. More

Operatic aspirations are replaced with the accessibility, theatricality and showbiz savvy of a Broadway musical in Diane Paulus' bright, beautiful and tuner-centric re-envisioning of "Porgy and Bess." More