When someone mentions “opera,” what words come to mind? For many, old, white, pale, and stale would slip off the tongue. The Washington National Opera’s revival of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess, which ran last month, subverts this stereotypical conception.  The WNO’s Porgy and Bess is a love story of a drug-addicted woman in an abusive relationship who seeks refuge and romance with a destitute man who is physically disabled, set against the backdrop of Catfish Row, a lower-income Black-majority community in 1950s South Carolina.

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