On this date in 1935 George Gershwin's Opera Porgy and Bess premièred on Broadway. 10 things you might not know:
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The Broadway premiere wasn’t the first ever performance. Porgy and Bess was first performed in Boston on September 30, 1935, before it moved to Broadway.
The setting is the fictional neighbourhood of Catfish Row, South Carolina, in the 1920s. Catfish Row is entirely fictional but the name is a variation on a real place in Charleston: a tenement house near DuBose Heyward’s home called “Cabbage Row.”
It was adapted from Dorothy Heyward and DuBose Heyward's play Porgy, which was in turn adapted from DuBose Heyward's 1925 novel Porgy. George Gershwin wrote the music and the libretto is by DuBose Heyward and Ira Gershwin.
Critics have always debated whether Porgy and Bess is an opera or a musical. Gershwin saw it as an opera. Hence at the premiere, the audience included both opera and popular music critics from the New York Times. The Times printed both critics’ reviews in adjacent columns. Members of the orchestra came out firmly in favour of it being a musical, mainly because musicians were paid more for musicals than operas.
At the start of the story, Bess has a boyfriend called Crown. The couple arrive at Catfish Row and Crown joins in a game of craps. He’s drunk and high on drugs and loses. He starts a fight and kills a man named Robbins. Crown runs away, telling Bess he’ll come back for her. The only person to offer Bess sympathy and help is a disabled beggar named Porgy. Bess accepts help from him rather than flee to New York with the drug dealer Sporting Life. Porgy and Bess are soon a couple. Porgy persuades her to go on a church picnic without him. She refuses at first but he talks her into it. On the picnic she meets Crown, who wants her back. She says she’s with Porgy now, but he says he will force her to leave with him. Back in Catfish Row, everyone is sheltering from a storm and praying for the fishermen still at sea when Crown arrives to claim Bess. When one of the women rushes off to try and rescue her husband, Crown is the only one who goes after her. It’s assumed Crown has perished along with the others, but he comes back. Porgy kills him. The police want Porgy to go and identify Crown’s body. When he refuses the police drag him away. Certain Porgy is going to be locked up for life, Bess is finally persuaded to leave for the city with Sporting Life. However, Porgy is released after a week. He’s spent his time in jail playing craps and winning money. When the residents of Catfish Row tell him Bess has gone to New York, he sets out to go there and find her.
Gershwin believed that white singers could never master the jazz idiom, and stipulated that the roles must only ever be played by black people. This launched a number of careers and Gershwin was described as the "Abraham Lincoln of Negro music".
Gershwin’s wishes were ignored at the European premiere, which took place in in 1943 in Nazi-occupied Copenhagen. It was performed by white singers in blackface makeup. Even so, the Nazi occupiers didn’t like it. Not only were the characters African-American but the composer was a Jew. So they had the play shut down. The audiences had liked it, though. Danish radio stations took to following compulsory Nazi propaganda broadcasts with the opera’s hit number It Ain’t Necessarily So.
In New Zealand in 1965, the New Zealand Opera put on a production featuring Māori opera singers.
As well as the traditional instruments of the orchestra, the score for Porgy and Bess calls for African Drums, a wood block, a cowbell, sandpaper, a train whistle and a banjo.
In 2001, Porgy and Bess was proclaimed the official opera of the state of South Carolina.
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Beta
(Combat Team Series #2)
Steff was abducted by an evil alien race, the Orbs, at fourteen. Used as a weapon for years, he eventually escapes, but his problems are just beginning. How does a man support himself when his only work experience is a paper round and using an Orb bio-integrated gun?
Warlord is an alien soldier who knows little but war. When the centuries-old conflict which ravaged his planet ends, he seeks out another world where his skills are still relevant. There are always wars on Earth, it seems. However, none of Earth's powerful armies want him.
Natalie has always wanted to visit England and sees a chance to do so while using her martial arts skills, but there are sacrifices she must make in order to fulfil her dream.
Maggie resorted to crime to fund her sister's medical care. She uses her genetic variant abilities to gain access to the rooms of wealthy hotel guests. The Ballards look like rich pickings, but they are not what they seem. When Maggie targets them, little does she know that she is walking into a trap.
Hotel owner Hamilton Lonsdale puts together a combat team to pit against those of other multi-millionaires. He recruits Warlord, Natalie, Maggie and Steff along with a trained gorilla, a probability-altering alien, a stockbroker whose work of art proved to be much more than he'd bargained for, a marketing officer who can create psionic forcefields, a teleporting member of the landed gentry, and a socially awkward fixer. This is Combat Team Beta.
Steff never talks about his time with the Orbs, until he finds a woman who lived through it, too. Steff believes he has finally found happiness, but it is destined to be short-lived. He is left with an unusual legacy which he and Team Beta struggle to comprehend; including why something out there seems determined to destroy it.
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