Houston Grand Opera opened its 2025–2026 season on October 24 by returning to the opera that first launched it in the esteem of the arts community 50 years ago: Porgy and Bess, this time featuring Grammy-winning soprano Angel Blue and San Francisco–based, globetrotting bass-baritone (and alumnus of HGO’s Butler Studio career development program) Michael Sumuel as the titular leads. In the 90-year history of the work and its rampant metamorphoses between media, as well as changing perspectives on race and responsibility in storytelling, Porgy and Bess has become the subject of considerable critical evaluation from both detractors and defenders alike.    

Composers (and brothers) George and Ira Gershwin cowrote and debuted the libretto, which they labeled a “folk opera,” about a Black community in the fictional South Carolina town of Catfish Row in 1935. It thematically revolves around how the residents survive together under both the racism of Jim Crow laws and the economic devastation of the Great Depression. The opera was based on the book Porgy by author and lyricist DuBose Heyward, who, with his wife, Dorothy, adapted it into a play that served as the foundation for the eventual opera. The Gershwins, with George as composer and Ira as pianist, worked closely with the Heywards on their vision, crafting a story that centers on the doomed love between the disabled beggar Porgy and Bess, a woman struggling with addiction, who is also trying to rebuild her life after an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, Crown. 

Though it’s now considered a mainstay in the operatic canon, routinely performed by companies across the globe, Porgy and Bess initially struggled to find a foothold for both social and creative reasons before HGO reframed perceptions of it in 1976.  

Despite the Gershwins’ best efforts, Porgy and Bess was subject to cuts and controversies: some well-founded and eventually incorporated into future productions; others rooted in the prejudices of the time and best ignored. Written as an opera but steeped in jazz, gospel, spirituals, and other uniquely American genres originating with Black musicians, the old guard didn’t take the libretto seriously enough to let it be performed as such. “Selections from [Porgy and Bess] had been done, a movie had been produced of it, [but] not really completed with most of the music. It was, mostly, just some of the hit tunes,” says HGO chorus director Richard Bado, who will conduct some of the performances held in November. “And so, it didn’t really have a life with classically trained singers.”

Porgy and Bess’s initial Boston and Broadway runs were presented more or less as the Gershwins specified, but its 1942 revival transformed it into a musical. This trend continued when director Ella Gerber held exclusive rights to the show throughout the 1950s. Unlike opera, which is sung throughout the entire performance, a musical intersperses songs between dialogue. This alteration recontextualized story and song alike, foreshortening character and narrative nuances and reducing the music down to more conveniently consumed melodies. “Summertime,” for example, a familiar and favored jazz standard since recorded by legends like Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald, was originally the aria that opens Porgy and Bess. A young mother, Clara (here played by soprano Raven McMillon), sings it to her child as the residents of Catfish Row settle in for an evening of rest or play. It’s undoubtedly a beautiful arrangement, deserving of classic status, but the better-known arrangement still did not align with the authors’ intent.

Bado says that, in addition to this, some of Porgy and Bess’s failure to take off was due to the small productions and casts that couldn’t convey the immense feeling as well as larger-scale productions. “Much of the piece, for me, is about community,” he says.

This was the, admittedly abbreviated, cultural milieu that HGO waded into when it decided to present Porgy and Bess in 1976. Producer Sherwin Goldman worked with then-director David Gockley to honor the nation’s bicentennial with a presentation of the American opera as an opera. The only cuts made were to trim the runtime to three hours, but the Gershwins’ themes and complexities remained intact. Choral leader Eva Jessye, who worked directly with the brothers on the 1935 original, provided insight into the Black Southern perspective—specifically regarding the Gullah people of South Carolina—to ensure this production of Porgy and Bess remained better and more firmly rooted in the cultures portrayed on stage than it had before.

It was a hit. A cast recording, featuring baritone Donnie Ray Albert as Porgy (who appears in the 2025 production as the fraudulent Lawyer Frazier) and soprano Clamma Dale as Bess, was nominated for six Tony Awards. And after the HGO production wrapped and moved to Broadway—a significant rarity for an opera—it won both a Tony Award for Most Innovative Production of a Revival and a Grammy for Best Opera Recording. The same show continued after its Broadway debut, touring the US and Europe, where it introduced international audiences to homegrown musical forms and showcased what American opera composers are capable of.

The major success of Porgy and Bess revitalized interest in the opera. It changed HGO’s industry status from a regional theater to a world-class opera house, with national critics attending shows. Unsurprisingly, the Gershwins’ libretto ended up in the company’s repertoire. Albert, a go-to actor for Porgy in productions across the world, reprised his role on the HGO stage in 1987 (in an interview with the opera’s media team, he estimated that he’s played the part 450 times). And in 1995, Porgy and Bess returned to HGO once more before touring Japan and performing at Milan’s historic Teatro alla Scala (a.k.a. La Scala) and the Paris Opera. “They love jazz in Paris, and in Japan, it was a huge sellout crowd,” says Bado. “It doesn’t have to just play in the United States for it to be successful… In my mind, it’s one of the—if not the—greatest American operas ever written.”

Today, after a 30-year hiatus from the HGO stage, Porgy and Bess is back to commemorate the opera’s inextricable and historic involvement. But as a Depression-era opera penned by white men in a Black vernacular, attitudes toward the show have shifted based on factors such as the Civil Rights Movement, insensitive and reductive stagings (particularly during Gerber’s reign), and evolving views on racial justice over the decades.

Soprano Anne Brown, who originated the role of Bess in 1935, recalled her father expressing disappointment in her participation in a show he considered regressive and stereotypical. Harry Belafonte, the late civil rights activist, actor, and calypso musician, turned down the role of Porgy in the film adaptation for the same reason. The role eventually went to Sidney Poitier, though he, too, did not consider himself a Porgy and Bess fan, either. Playwright and author Lorraine Hansberry, best known for A Raisin in the Sun, was a notable critic, as reported in the 1959 Variety article “Lorraine Hansberry Deplores Porgy.” She acknowledged the Gershwins’ good intentions, but still believed they perpetuated stereotypes rather than challenged them. Her public comments, initially made to the Chicago Sun-Times, coincided with the release of the movie adaptation of the musical.

Though James Baldwin admitted to enjoying the original opera, the writer and activist still considered Porgy and Bess “a white man’s vision of Negro life,” rather than a nuanced, authentic portrayal. In his essay “On the Horizon: On Catfish Row,” he wrote, “When it should be most concrete and searching it veers off into the melodramatic and the exotic. It seems to me that the author knew more about Bess than he understood and more about Porgy than he could face—than any of us, so far, can face.”

Many critics express similar concerns: That its depictions of Black life in the 1930s—particularly as it pertains to gender dynamics and addiction—use stereotyping in lieu of character building and ignore many cultural and contextual nuances in favor of an unchallenging, self-contained narrative intended to pacify audiences.

Bado believes that many of the criticisms stem from Porgy and Bess being whittled down to fit the musical format. He reasons that rewriting the libretto as a play flattened much of the emotion and nuance the Gershwins hoped to convey. To avoid continuing this mistake in the 1976 revival, HGO consulted with and employed Black leaders and creative professionals to ensure its staging didn’t reinforce racist tropes—a measure referred to as “sensitivity reading” in current parlance. This entailed removing many of the problematic details Gerber had previously insisted upon during the musical run, such as the white gloves required of chorus members—a humiliating, degrading relic of the minstrelsy era. Bado also points out that HGO never made any alterations to the libretto to keep up with social shifts, because all changes in response to criticism had already come directly from the Gershwin estate.

Today, the rights holders will only license Porgy and Bess if an all-Black cast is assured (with the exception of a small number of mostly silent white police officers), and the libretto’s official language has been updated to excise words that today are considered slurs. The script also allows producers, directors, and actors to make dialect changes that more accurately reflect contemporary sensibilities.

While recent Black-penned operas, like Levi Taylor’s The Seer and Omar, by Michael Abels and Rhiannon Giddens, are gaining more attention and acclaim, for now, Porgy and Bess remains one of the rare opportunities for a large cast of classically trained Black opera singers to tell a Black story. For some performers involved, erasing it from the canon would mean erasing an important moment in the history of the arts. “I think it’s important to continue to have this opera, because it is a part of American history. And I’m a very big believer of if you don’t know your history, then you are doomed to repeat history,” says baritone Blake Denson, who plays Crown in HGO’s current run (he has also portrayed the young fishing boat captain, Jake, in previous shows).

Now, in 2025, HGO’s cast and crew intend to present Porgy and Bess as the story of deeply complex human characters whose community is inexorably shaped by external circumstances that remain prescient today. Eight years after Harvey, it’s difficult to witness the beautifully choreographed, yet utterly heartbreaking hurricane and not immediately be reminded of environmental racism, and the disproportionate impact climate change has on under-resourced—if not outright neglected—Black neighborhoods. Peter, an elderly honey vendor played by tenor Marlin Monroe Williford, is jailed for Crown’s accidental murder of Robbins, simply because the police wanted to arrest someone for the crime (the opera emphasizes the implicit racism—any Black man would do, no matter the alibis or witnesses).

For Denson, playing Crown is an opportunity to add dimension and compassion to an antagonistic role so often dismissed as just another “happy dust” (cocaine) addict, murderer, and abuser both in-story and out. Even though the scripting remains the same, his approach to characterization is a contemporary upgrade, one that examines addiction and social stigma with deep care. “It’s such a fascinating story to me personally. As an opera singer, we always want to cheer for the leading lady and leading man,” he says. “But I think when you watch Porgy and you understand what’s going on, and you listen to the things that they’re saying, it’s like, ‘Oh man, I really don’t want to cheer for anyone. It’s a very hard story to watch, because you really see the ins and outs of addiction.” 

Denson notes that he approached Crown’s character without making apologies for his injurious and deadly actions, but contextualized them as those of a man whose community never reached out a helping hand when it was clear he was starting to struggle with addiction—especially considering, he says, that they justified consuming illegal liquor while chastising those using illicit drugs. This detail may not be explicit in the opera’s text, but for Denson it became a grounding point for developing Crown. Such care shows in his performance. While Bess’s ex still does and says horrific things, the subtleties and painstaking attention given to the role push Crown past a mere stock operatic villain.

Denson also urges audiences to reconsider the “codependent” dynamics in Porgy and Bess. He sees Porgy as alienated from society in a manner similar to Crown. Both are disabled: Porgy physically, Crown as a person with an addiction, and the men find it more challenging to experience kindness and belonging in their community than a fishing boat captain or a honey seller would. Each also clings to Bess as their only source of comfort, despite that being an unfair expectation for a woman herself grappling against her own addiction. 

“[Crown] is a very difficult role, not just singing-wise, but physically, and acting and understanding the in-depthness [of] the character. I’ve seen most people play Crown, and he’s just constantly angry. It’s like, ‘Yeah, but why is he angry like that?’” Denson says. “So, I’m just very grateful to my company [for allowing] me to go in-depth with learning all of these characters, and not just my character.”

He also expresses gratitude that he got to perform alongside Albert, the man who may not have played the first Porgy, but probably gave the most definitive and influential performance. Noting that “opera, in general, is always going to be offensive to someone,” he also credits Donnie Ray Albert and HGO for their roles in pushing and challenging the art while also taking the criticisms seriously. “It was very rare during that time that a Black man was in a leading role, let alone be able to make Porgy the opera that it is,” Denson says.