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On this day in New York · October 10, 1935

Porgy and Bess Opens on Broadway

George Gershwin brought Catfish Row to the Alvin Theatre with an all-Black cast and a full orchestra pit, and the critics spent the next four months arguing about what to even call it.

Porgy and Bess Opens on Broadway
Wikimedia Commons / George Gershwin

The facts

Date
October 10, 1935
Venue
Alvin Theatre, New York City
Creative team
Music by George Gershwin, libretto by DuBose Heyward, lyrics by Ira Gershwin
Original run
124 performances on Broadway

George Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, with a libretto by DuBose Heyward and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, opened at the Alvin Theatre in New York City on October 10, 1935, after a world premiere tryout at Boston's Colonial Theatre on September 30. Todd Duncan sang Porgy and Anne Brown, a 20-year-old Juilliard student, sang Bess. Gershwin had built the opera around Brown's voice after hearing her sing during the writing of the score. The Broadway run lasted 124 performances, a short life for a show that would end up outlasting almost everything else that opened that season.

In their words

The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.

  1. falsely conceived and rather clumsily executed...crooked folklore and half-way opera

    Virgil Thomson, composer and critic, reviewing the premiere for the New York Herald-Tribune, 1935

    Source: History.com

  2. much to commend it from the musical standpoint

    Olin Downes, music critic for The New York Times, reviewing the premiere, 1935

    Source: History.com

Why it still matters

Critics couldn't agree whether Porgy and Bess was an opera, a musical, or something in between, and that argument kept it off the Metropolitan Opera stage for decades. The songs settled the question anyway: Summertime and It Ain't Necessarily So outlived every review written that October.

Sources

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