While watching “Porgy And Bess” from high in the cheap seats, the pop songs fit in and the mix of folk, spirituals and pop are completely unique, and the spirituals have never sounded better. And it is the spirituals that push the production into the third and best one I’ve seen, and, probably the best of all times. Serena, the soprano Latonia Moore’s, “My Man’s Gone Now,” was beyond being heartbreaking, it was also as an indictment of poverty and how one can’t even grieve in peace. Serena’s husband is killed by Crown (Alfred Walker) and unless she can raise $25 to bury him, his body will be given to hospitals to be cut apart and studied. I’ve heard Ella Fitzgerald’s “My Man Is Gone” and I’ve heard Latonia Moore’s keening, distraught recent recording of the same production released December, 2019. But watching Moore’s devastating performance in person is an experience of a lifetime. I live in a small apartment building, six apartments on a floor, and I heard a man sshout in horror a couple of evenings ago, and discovered later his mother had just died, “she has no pulse,” he screamed, and then a lot of commotion and then nothing. In his voice, I could hear the horror of fresh death, it is something that can’t be faked, and it is something Moore manages to add to her voice, not just a wide ranged smooth from sky high wails to low down growls of ineluctable horror, but the sound we make when we discover someone we love has just died. It stopped the show and was the highlight of the evening.
