Dictionary Definition
porgy
Noun
1 lean flesh of fish found in warm waters of
southern Atlantic coast of the United States [syn: scup]
2 important deep-bodied food and sport fish of
warm and tropical coastal waters; found worldwide
User Contributed Dictionary
English
Noun
Extensive Definition
Porgy is a novel written by DuBose
Heyward in 1925, as well as a
play Dorothy
Heyward helped him to write which debuted in 1927.
Even before the play had been fully written,
Heyward was in discussions with George
Gershwin for an operatic version of his novel, which debuted in
1935 as
Porgy and
Bess (renamed to distinguish it from the play).
Novel
The novel tells the story of Porgy, a crippled street-beggar in the black tenements of Charleston, South Carolina in the 1920s. The character was based on the real-life Charlestonian Samuel Smalls. The novel features passages which have the characters speaking in the Gullah language.Play
DuBose Heyward's wife, Dorothy Heyward, began working on a staged adaptation of her husband's novel soon after it was published in 1925. Some elements of the storyline in the play differ considerably from those in the novel. George and Ira Gershwin, along with DuBose Heyward, based the libretto of their opera version, Porgy and Bess, not on the original novel, but on the play. (In the novel, after Bess leaves Porgy and goes to New York, he merely returns, disillusioned, to being a beggar. At the end of both the play and the opera, he goes to New York, hoping to find her.)Porgy debuted on Broadway at the Guild Theatre
(today's Virginia
Theatre) on October 10,
1927 and ran
for 367 performances. It was directed by Rouben
Mamoulian.
A 1929 revival was less successful, opening on
September
13, 1929
and closing one month later after only 34 performances at the
Martin Beck Theatre (today's Al
Hirschfeld Theatre).
External links
Novel
- Full text of Porgy plus criticism and commentary by Kendra Hamilton, hosted by the University of Virginia
Play
- Credits for original 1927 Broadway play from IBDB.com
- Credits for the 1929 Broadway revival from IBDB.com