People were, for the most part, dressed to the nines for early afternoon; not many attendees wearing jeans or Giants jerseys. This being an opera about Black people from the Gulla culture (South Carolina and the Georgia Sea Islands), I expected to see more African-American people, but didn't see many.
A member of management whose name escapes me came out on stage, and announced to the crowd that the man playing Porgy was singing with a "very bad cold" (you wouldn't have known it) and was going to soldier through it rather than cancel. The overture started, and I thought, "Oh, this will be good."--and musically, I was certainly not disappointed.
Individual performances were strong, especially Met veteran Denyce Graves, who played Carla, the matriarch of Catfish Row, and Angel Blue, the well-meaning but ultimately easily-swayed Bess. Men in the cast also played their roles well, and all the hit tunes with which we've become so familiar over the years were given their due. This production of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess is the only production of this opera that I've seen, so I don't have anything with which to compare it.
But:
1) The HUGE, rotating, skeletal set piece that served as the Catfish Row neighborhood frankly took up too much room on stage.
2) As a result, the already too-large chorus was crowded into the front third of the stage, leaving too little room for the dancers.
3) The more I watched, the more Gershwin's Porgy and Bess (1935) reminded me of another piece of that period--Jerome Kern's Show Boat (1928), with highly stylized dancing, outlandish characters that veered dangerously into the gray area of caricature, and a script that treated the male characters as deeply flawed and the female characters as virtuous and noble, except for Bess, who was led astray by two men--Crown, and Sportin' Life, with whom she left Catfish Row for New York City, presumably to be pimped out by Sportin' Life.
