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Love me some Audra Macdonald 
The American Repertory Theater’s reconceived production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” looks well-positioned for Broadway in the 2011-12 season, if Sunday’s three-hour developmental performance in Manhattan for potential investors and others was any indication.
Sara Krulwich/The New York Times American Repertory Theater’s production of “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” may arrive on a New York stage by this fall. Above, Norm Lewis, who will play Porgy.An audience of 200 invited guests was quick to its feet with a sustained standing ovation after Porgy (Norm Lewis) left Catfish Row in search of his love, Bess (Audra McDonald), who had run off with the drug-dealing Sportin’ Life (David Alan Grier). And the project’s commercial producers expressed optimism that they would move the show to New York after its premiere run at the A.R.T. in Cambridge, Mass. “Porgy and Bess,” which was last mounted on Broadway in the 1976-77 season, is scheduled to run Aug. 17-Oct. 2 at the A.R.T.
“We’ll see in Cambridge if it needs more work before Broadway, but right now I’m feeling very, very good that we’ll bring this production to New York as early as the fall,” said Jerry Frankel, who, with his producing partner Jeffrey Richards, is developing the show with the director Diane Paulus and the A.R.T. The two men have produced a long roster of Broadway plays and musicals, including the Tony Award-winning revival of “Hair” that Ms. Paulus directed in 2009.
Ms. Paulus is working with the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks (a Pulitzer Prize winner for “Topdog/Underdog”) and the musician and writer Diedre L. Murray to adapt the original four-hour opera into a stage musical that would run under three hours. The original opera had its premiere in Boston in 1935 and then ran briefly on Broadway soon after. “Porgy and Bess” had months-long revivals there in 1942 and 1953, but in recent decades the work has remained in opera houses. Plans were announced in 2006 to mount Trevor Nunn’s musical adaptation of “Porgy and Bess” on Broadway, but the move never came after Mr. Nunn’s London production of the show was a commercial failure.
Sunday’s industry performance was the culmination of three weeks of work and rehearsals on the piece at New 42nd Street Studios. It featured the company of 22 actors in regular clothes, some reading from scripts on music stands, accompanied by three musicians for numbers for like “Summertime,” “I Got Plenty o’ Nuttin’,” “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” and “I Loves You, Porgy.” Ms. McDonald, a four-time Tony winner; Mr. Lewis, who played Javert in the 2006 Broadway revival of “Les Miserables;” and Mr. Grier are committed for at least the A.R.T. production. So, too, are the actor and opera singer Phillip Boykin as the villainous Crown and, as the fisherman Jake, Joshua Henry, who was nominated last week for a Tony Award for best actor in a musical for “The Scottsboro Boys.”
Mr. Frankel said that most of the investment slots were filled up to enhance the out-of-town production. As is common in the theater industry, the nonprofit A.R.T. (led by Ms. Paulus) is augmenting its own money for the show with enhancement funding from Mr. Richards, Mr. Frankel and their investors, who then have the option to mount a commercial production on Broadway.
Among those in the audience on Sunday were the Broadway producers Roy Furman (“The Book of Mormon,” “The Addams Family”), who has money in “Porgy,” and Lauren Doll (“Memphis”), as well as Oskar Eustis of the Public Theater, which was also a partner on the “Hair” revival. The powerful theater agent George Lane enthusiastically praised the performance to Mr. Frankel. The actor Will Swenson, Ms. McDonald’s partner and a star of Ms. Paulus’s “Hair,” popped over for the second act in between matinee and evening performances of his own Broadway musical, “Priscilla Queen of the Desert.”
