Conjuring Up Catfish Row

By Christopher Porterfield

TITLE: PORGY AND BESS

TIME: OCT. 6, 8 P.M. PBS, ON MOST STATIONS

THE BOTTOM LINE: Trevor Nunn's staging dominates a stirring production of the Gershwin classic.

Once again, U.S. audiences have the British to thank for doing overdue justice to an icon of American popular culture. This first-ever TV version of Gershwin's Porgy and Bess comes not from an American network but from the BBC. The director is a seasoned hand at such transatlantic transactions: Trevor Nunn, former head of the Royal Shakespeare Company and the man who brought Cats and Les Miserables to Broadway.

In putting an opera on TV, Nunn faced the usual dilemma: whether to televise an opera performance, with the camera tagging along as the music impels the action, or create a made-for-TV drama, with the camera shaping the action and the music being incorporated. Nunn opted for the latter, and it proves a dubious choice.

Shooting in a studio, he adapted his celebrated 1986 staging of Porgy for England's Glyndebourne Festival, reassembling most of his Glyndebourne cast of black American singers. He vividly evokes the opera's Catfish Row in swirling crowd scenes intercut with sharply detailed close-ups, in smokily languorous tableaus that erupt into brutal fights and sensual embraces. Instead of letting the performers sing, however, he has them lip-synch to a sound track of their own cast recording, issued by EMI Classics with Simon Rattle + conducting the London Philharmonic. It's a vibrant recording in its own right, but the miming shows -- and jars with the quasi-naturalistic style of Nunn's staging. And because the music seems once removed, the production often lacks the one quality that every directorial stroke was intended to achieve: immediacy.

The young, attractive actor-singers give heartfelt performances nonetheless, never condescending to the characters but finding dignity in their primal passions. In particular, Willard White and Cynthia Haymon invest the title roles with wrenching believability. In Nunn's conception, the crippled beggar Porgy is less pathetic and helpless than in most productions, hobbling on crutches instead of pushing himself on a cart. At the end he flings away his crutches and, in search of his missing Bess, lurches off painfully, heroically into a blaze of backlighting. It's a dazzling final image, but one that also points up the drawback of Nunn's approach. This Porgy provides more compelling drama for the eye than for the ear.