The imposing Phillip Boykin provides the production's most operatic singing as Crown, and David Alan Grier is a stylish, slinky Sporting Life, dangling his uptown lure and "happy dust." But it is McDonald, conveying not just with her magnificent pipes but in expression and gesture great and small the difficulty of Bess's trek toward an outward decency to match her inner, that kicks this Porgy from melodrama to sublimity. In his curmudgeonly prejudgment, Sondheim called her voice "one of the glories of the American theater." Well, he got that right.
Topics:
Theater
, Tin Pan Alley, Opera, Ira Gershwin, More 
, Tin Pan Alley, Opera, Ira Gershwin, George Gershwin, Suzan-Lori Parks, Loeb Drama Center, Loeb Drama Center, Audra McDonald, racism, Riccardo Hernandez, Less 
