In refashioning it in the style of musical theater which Americans were used to hearing from Gershwin, Crawford produced a drastically cut version of the opera compared with the first Broadway staging.

The cast included Todd Duncan, Anne Brown, Ruby Elzy, Eloise C. Uggams, Avon Long, Edward Matthews, Harriet Jackson, Georgette Harvey, Jack Carr, and the Eva Jessye Choir; the WOR Symphony was conducted by Alfred Wallenstein.

[11] This production's original cast featured Americans Leontyne Price as Bess, William Warfield as Porgy, and Cab Calloway as Sportin' Life, a role that Gershwin had composed with him in mind.

A historic yet tense premiere took place in Leningrad in December 1955; it was during the Cold War and the first time an American theater group had been to the Soviet capital since the Bolshevik Revolution.

The experience of working with a Broadway musical director, Ella Gerber, and being in the cast (from chorus to a minor character role) was a unique opportunity for New Zealand opera singers.

[21] The two-million dollar production included cast members Marquita Lister, Alvy Powell, Terry Cook, Larry Marshall, and Stacey Robinson; musical conductor John DeMain; and director and choreographer Hope Clarke, who became the first African American to direct a professional U.S. staging of Porgy and Bess.

This original cast of this version included Clarke Peters as Porgy, Nicola Hughes as Bess, O. T. Fagbenle as Sportin' Life, and Cornell S. John as Crown.

Critic Hilton Als countered in The New Yorker that Sondheim had very little exposure to black culture and that the Paulus version succeeded in "humanizing the depiction of race onstage.

The original cast included Audra McDonald as Bess, Norm Lewis as Porgy, David Alan Grier as Sportin' Life, Phillip Boykin as Crown, Nikki Renee Daniels as Clara, and Joshua Henry as Jake.

Cast members included Rufus Bonds Jr (Porgy), Nicola Hughes (Bess), Cedric Neal (Sportin' Life), Phillip Boykin (Crown), Sharon D. Clarke (Mariah), Jade Ewen (Clara) and Golda Rosheuvel (Serena).

[38][39] It featured a cast including Golda Schultz, Latonia Moore, Angel Blue, Elizabeth Llewellyn, Denyce Graves, Eric Owens, Frederick Ballentine, Alfred Walker, and Ryan Speedo Green.

Little by little, other characters in the opera enter Catfish Row, among them Mingo, another fisherman, and Jim, a cotton-hauling stevedore who, tired of his job, decides to give it up and join Jake and the other fishermen.

Crown, a strong and brutal stevedore, storms in with his woman, Bess, and buys cheap whiskey and some "happy dust" off the local dope peddler, Sportin' Life.

Bess, who has been sitting in silence slightly apart from the rest of those gathered, suddenly begins to sing a gospel song and the chorus joyfully join in, welcoming her into the community.

As the rest of Catfish Row prepares for the church picnic on nearby Kittiwah Island, Sportin' Life again offers to take Bess to New York with him; she refuses.

"[51] Several of the members of the original cast later stated that they, too, had concerns that their characters might play into a stereotype that African Americans lived in poverty, took drugs, and solved their problems with their fists.

A planned production by the Negro Repertory Company of Seattle in the late 1930s, part of the Federal Theatre Project, was canceled because actors were displeased with what they viewed as a racist portrayal of aspects of African-American life.

According to Barbara Cyrus, one of the few black students then at the university, members of the local African-American community saw the play as "detrimental to the race" and as a vehicle that promoted racist stereotypes.

When the play was revived in the 1960s, social critic and African-American educator Harold Cruse called it, "The most incongruous, contradictory cultural symbol ever created in the Western World.

Goldman, a white Texas native and a graduate of Yale and Oxford Universities, recalled, "I was auditioning singers all around the country, I guess thirty cities in all, from theater groups to church choirs, but was having a hard time finding directors ...

[55] Betty Allen, president of The Harlem School of the Arts, admittedly loathed the piece, and Grace Bumbry, who excelled in the 1985 Metropolitan Opera production as Bess, made the often cited statement: I thought it beneath me, I felt I had worked far too hard, that we had come far too far to have to retrogress to 1935.

While the Hungarian State Opera, in discussions with the Tams-Witmark Music Library originally agreed to the casting requirements, it ultimately declined to do so when the wording was not included in the written contract.

Rouben Mamoulian, who helmed the 1935 Broadway premiere, was hired to direct, but was subsequently fired in favor of director Otto Preminger, following a disagreement with the producer.

Rhapsody in Blue (1945), the Warner Bros. biopic of Gershwin, features an extended musical scene recreating the opening of the original Broadway production of Porgy and Bess.

Director Taylor Hackford pointed out in a special edition DVD release that it was necessary to locate a Russian woman of color (Helene Denbey) to portray Bess, as per Gershwin's stipulations.

All performers lip-synched rather than singing live on set, leading The New York Times to write: "What you hear is basically Mr. Nunn's acclaimed Glyndebourne Festival production, the original cast intact.

On December 1, 1935, during the Broadway run, Todd Duncan and Anne Brown performed "Summertime", "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" and "Bess, You Is My Woman Now" on NBC's The Magic Key of RCA radio program.

Duncan and Brown also appeared on the 1937 CBS Gershwin memorial concert on September 8, 1937, broadcast from the Hollywood Bowl less than two months after the composer's death, along with several other members of the Broadway cast, including John W. Bubbles and Ruby Elzy.

It is based on Gershwin's original scoring, though for a slightly different instrumentation (the piano was removed from the orchestral texture at the request of the conductor Fritz Reiner, for whom the arrangement was made).

[89] The pianist Earl Wild prepared a virtuoso piano arrangement in the manner of Franz Liszt, entitled Grand Fantasy on Airs from Porgy and Bess.