GERSHWINS’ PORGY AND BESS

FROM SAN FRANCISCO OPERA

SATURDAY, OCTOBER 18 @ 6:00PM

In the 1920s, George Gershwin had an ambition to compose an American opera. In 1926, he read a powerful novel by an upper-class white South Carolinian, DuBose Heyward, called PORGY. Written the previous year, it was a series of vignettes of life in a black Charleston ghetto called Catfish Row, where a cripple named Porgy falls blindly in love with a woman named Bess, whose inconstant affections both torment and inflame him. Bess is torn between the rough men of Catfish Row, like Crown, who offers her a more glamorous life, and Porgy, who can only offer her his pure devotion.  (3 Hours)

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