UTAH FESTIVAL OPERA DELIVERS ‘PORGY AND BESS’
By Charlie Schill,
The Herald Journal
Published: Thursday, July 14, 2016
If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it’s probably a duck.
The show now being staged by the Utah Festival Opera and Musical Theatre under the title “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess” was adapted in recent years to supposedly make the 80-year-old classic American folk-opera more like a contemporary musical.
The local production still looks like an opera, however, with stylized acting and recitatives rather than spoken dialogue. And it sounds like an opera, with thunderously strong individual and ensemble vocal performances.