UIA Artists Shine in the Met's Porgy and Bess
- ebrown9879
- Dec 9, 2025
- 3 min read
Updated: Dec 11, 2025
The Metropolitan Opera's production of Porgy and Bess opened Friday, December 2 to rave reviews, with critics especially noting the "superb" and "supremely versatile" cast, which includes tenor Errin Duane Brooks as Mingo, tenor Chauncey Packer as Robbins and Crabman, tenor Norman Shankle as Peter, soprano Adrienne Danrich as Lily, and soprano Brittany Renee in the title role of Bess. (Porgy and Bess is also assistant directed by Kimille Howard.)
"As Bess, soprano Brittany Renee navigated her role with heartbreaking finesse. The role calls for great emotional and musical complexity as Bess grapples with her relations to Crown, Porgy, Sportin’ Life, and ultimately herself. The wanton personality she entered with for the opening scene soon gave way to more affectionate and reflective tones as she tried to build a new life with Porgy and clear her image in the community. Her duet “Porgy, I is your Woman,” featured plush and rounded high notes from Renee as she swore her love.
Her interactions with Crown and later Sportin’ Life displayed tremendous inner conflict and stunning musicality. Bess’ confrontation with the former on Kittiwah featured poignant hues from Renee as she painted the image of Porgy sadly waiting for her return and translated wonderfully into the ensuing, self-deprecating number “What You Want Wid Bess?” where her anguished high notes mixed with the lurching brass and snares to create a hypnotic sense of trying to fight the inevitable. While Bess’ arc is, in the end, a tragic one, Renee’s interpretation convincingly and captivatingly embodied the woman and the sense of frail humanity that makes her downfall come from a place almost anyone could understand and even relate to."
Bess is a complicated role – a generous, beautiful woman whose addiction to drugs and the low-life are her ruination. We sympathize with her even as we watch her self-destruct. Brittany Renee used her handsome, lyrical voice and presence and held back nothing. Robinson seems to play up Bess’s flaws – she barely refuses both the “happy dust” and Crown’s advances; we root for her, but she’s an infuriating victim of her own weaknesses.
"But the biggest promotion in this cast went to soprano Brittany Renee, elevated from the peripheral role of Annie to a worthy star turn as the protagonist Bess...Gershwin’s original Bess, Ann Brown, was a young Juilliard student with exceptional powers of empathy and imagination. If Brittany Renee has a tad more performing experience than Brown did, her casting as Bess seemed to be in a similar spirit. Although she had soprano power to spare, as when she led the chorus in the spiritual “O, de Train Is at de Station,” it had to be muted in her ambivalent responses to Crown and Porgy, so that “Bess, You Is My Woman Now,” became more of a circling dance with her crippled lover than an ecstatic love duet. One imagines Gershwin would have approved of the contrast between Bess’s smoky reprise of “Summertime” after the fatal storm and the clarity of Clara’s original."
"Alfred Walker and Brittany Renee topped a superb cast in this revival...Brittany Renee is a fascinating Bess, torn between animal lust and the lure of drugs versus her yearning for a decent life with Porgy. She glowed physically and vocally when joining Walker in ‘Bess, You Is my Woman Now’, but aged before one’s eyes as she attempted to fend off Crown in ‘What You Want wid Bess?’ However, ‘happy dust’ won in the end as she headed to New York with Frederick Ballentine’s honey-voiced and loose-limbed Sportin’ Life."
"Her man was the hapless Robbins, portrayed by Chauncey Packer, who did double duty as the lively Crabman hawking his catch later in the opera."
"Review: PORGY AND BESS Raises the Roof at the Metropolitan
It was put across, sometimes sensationally, by a supremely versatile cast...Brittany Renee (a cocaine-besotted, weak-willed Bess)"
PORGY AND BESS runs through January 24 at the The Metropolitan Opera - purchase tickets below!
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