New and old faces imbue Met’s “Porgy and Bess” with fresh drama and impact
Like a successful business enterprise, the Metropolitan Opera’s production of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess is carrying on through the years with a combination of old standbys, new faces and promotions from within.
If you were there when the current James Robinson staging made its bow in 2019, or when it returned post-pandemic in 2021, you would have seen many familiar faces in the cast that opened a seven-week run Tuesday night.
Inhabiting designer Michael Yeargan’s skeletal, rotating representation of Catfish Row were such role-reprising favorites as Latonia Moore as the devout, bereaved Serena; Chauncey Packer as her husband, the ill-fated crapshooter Robbins (doubling later as the Crab Man); Frederick Ballentine as the slick drug dealer Sportin’ Life; and, first in the hearts of Tuesday’s audience, mezzo-soprano Denyce Graves, capping her performing career with a pre-retirement turn as the cook-shop owner Maria.
Camille A. Brown’s eye-catching dancers again animated the crowd scenes, making for a grand opera even grander than Gershwin himself imagined, which is saying something. While the story has been through many iterations and abridgments—novel, play, Broadway musical, movie—the Met’s three-and-a-half-hour version presented nearly every note the composer wrote.
Bass-baritone Alfred Walker was back on Tuesday as well, this time not as the violent stevedore Crown but as Porgy himself. Taking his place as Crown was Ryan Speedo Green, previously cast as the fisherman Jake.
But the biggest promotion in this cast went to soprano Brittany Renee, elevated from the peripheral role of Annie to a worthy star turn as the protagonist Bess.
First among newcomers was the South African soprano Vuvu Mpofu, making her Met debut in the most conspicuous way imaginable, as Clara, sweetly intoning the indelible lullaby “Summertime” to open the show. Her terror at the approaching storm and fear for her husband Jake was one of the dramatic poles of the show.
New to this production, if not to the Met, was Benjamin Taylor as Jake, compact of stature but vocally sturdy as he led the male chorus in the work song/spiritual “It take a long pull to get there.”
As the portrait of a community, Porgy and Bess features the chorus to an extent few other operas do. Tuesday’s all-African-American ensemble not only mastered director Robinson’s complex blocking but produced, under Tilman Michael’s direction, evocative choral timbres ranging from the grief-stricken whispers of “Gone, gone, gone” to the jubilant shouts of the picnic chorus “I ain’t got no shame.”
But the newsmakers of this new-old cast remain the two lead characters.
As Porgy, Walker was dignified of manner and a little gruff of voice, and had some of the physical presence that had made him a scary Crown in previous runs. (How much did he really need that crutch?) His kindness to the not-quite-respectable Bess was that of one social outsider to another, and despite his protestations of contentment (“I got plenty o’ nuttin’”) his exultant shout after killing Crown (“You’ve got a man now. You’ve got Porgy!”) said it all about the character’s feelings of inadequacy.
Gershwin’s original Bess, Ann Brown, was a young Juilliard student with exceptional powers of empathy and imagination. If Brittany Renee has a tad more performing experience than Brown did, her casting as Bess seemed to be in a similar spirit. Although she had soprano power to spare, as when she led the chorus in the spiritual “O, de Train Is at de Station,” it had to be muted in her ambivalent responses to Crown and Porgy, so that “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” became more of a circling dance with her crippled lover than an ecstatic love duet. One imagines Gershwin would have approved of the contrast between Bess’s smoky reprise of “Summertime” after the fatal storm and the clarity of Clara’s original.
Green’s Crown was physically and vocally imposing, not to mention sexy enough to overcome many a woman’s better judgment. As for Crown’s somewhat improbable fate, David Leong’s ingenious fight choreography almost made one believe a crippled beggar could overcome a brawny stevedore in a fight to the death.
As in previous runs, Latonia Moore, a singer for whom the term “dramatic soprano” might have been invented, stopped the show with her anguished, all-stops-out rendition of the grief-stricken “My Man’s Gone Now.”
Ballentine’s oily Sportin’ Life made a convincing snake in the garden, but better direction would have made his seduction of Bess—and of the crowd in the anti-sermon “It Ain’t Necessarily So”—more understandable.
In her farewell role, Denyce Graves brought a strong voice and stage presence—and surprisingly youthful energy—to the local matriarch Maria. This was, truly, going out at the top.
The other crucial Met debutant was the African-Canadian conductor Kwamé Ryan, who had only intermittent success getting the Met orchestra to swing, and faced wind intonation problems in some exposed passages, but could be counted on for the orchestral countermelodies that deepened the impact of this opera’s many hit tunes.
Porgy and Bess runs through January 24. metopera.org
One Response to “New and old faces imbue Met’s “Porgy and Bess” with fresh drama and impact”
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Posted Dec 06, 2025 at 12:18 am by David Barrett
Saw it tonight. Wonderful! But only 2/3 of a house.