Nathaniel Stampley, will lead the national tour of the musical “Porgy and Bess,” that kicks off a 14-state tour this weekend in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Richards Associates)
by Mark Kennedy
AP Entertainment Writer
NEW YORK (AP) — Nathaniel Stampley ached to make the role of Porgy his own in the celebrated 2012 Broadway revival of “Porgy and Bess.” Instead, he kept dying.
Stampley was an understudy for Norm Lewis in the title role and bided his time by playing the small role of Robbins in the revamped version of the Gershwin classic. Robbins is killed with a cotton hook in a fight after a dice game on page 15 of the script.
Now Stampley, who first fell in love with the musical as a teenager in the chorus of a production in Milwaukee, will finally get his shot as Porgy: He leads the national tour that kicks off a 14-state tour this weekend in San Francisco.
“Let me tell you. It’s a dream come true,” he says. “This is a full-circle moment for me many, many years later. I’m humbled by that and yet I’m really excited.”
Stampley, together with Alicia Hall Moran as Bess, are among a cast of almost 30 that will crisscross the country until next summer in the Tony Award-winning production that wowed audiences on Broadway.
Alicia Hall Moran will lead the national tour of the musical “Porgy and Bess,” that kicks off a 14-state tour this weekend in San Francisco. (AP Photo/Jeffrey Richards Associates)
The musical, backed by a 23-piece orchestra on the road, looks at life in the fictitious Catfish Row in the early 1920s. It boasts such classic songs as “Summertime,” ”Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” ”I Got Plenty o’ Nothin'” and “It Ain’t Necessarily So.”
Diane Paulus, the artistic director of the American Repertory Theater, adapted the Gershwin opera for the Broadway stage with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and Obie Award-winning composer Diedre Murray.
The team condensed the four-hour opera into a two-and-one-half-hour musical, eliminated a lot of the repetitiveness and tried to deepen the characters. Their effort generated headlines when purists including Stephen Sondheim complained that a musical treasure was being corrupted.
But powered by Lewis and Audra McDonald onstage, the revival won the best revival Tony — beating Sondheim’s “Follies,” by the way — and was a box office draw. Paulus, who since has found success reinvigorating “Pippin,” was happy to return to “Porgy and Bess” and get it ready to tour.
“It’s such a great opportunity to go back to something like this because it gives back so much,” she says. “It’s like having children — you relive the thrill through people who have never experienced it before.”
“Porgy and Bess,” which premiered in 1935, has a special place in American theater history. It was one of the first shows to showcase classically trained African-American singers to a mainstream audience.
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