Suzan-Lori Parks, the Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright of “Topdog/Underdog,” and Diedre Murray, the musician and composer, are developing a new version of “Porgy and Bess” that features rearrangements of George Gershwin’s famed score and plays down its roots as an opera.
The show is scheduled to debut in September at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where it will be directed by Diane Paulus, the theater’s artistic director.
“It won’t be an opera — that the big deal here,” Ms. Paulus said in an interview. “The Gershwin estate was interested in a team that would take this amazing classical work, that people know as an opera, and turn it into a musical. They wanted to make it more fully realized in terms of characters. They were eager to have a writer bring it to the audiences of today.”
Also involved behind the scenes are the producers Jeffrey Richards and Jerry Frankel. Ms. Paulus, Mr. Richards, Mr. Frankel and the Public Theater helped to bring the Public’s summer staging of “Hair” to Broadway, where it became a moneymaker and won a Tony for Best Revival of a Musical.
Ms. Paulus said she and the producers had been looking for another project together. She reached out to Ms. Parks because she is a longtime fan of her writing, she said, and she had successfully collaborated for over a decade with Ms. Murray, who won Obie awards for her scores of “Running Man” and “Eli’s Comin’. ” Ms. Murray will create new arrangements for the Gershwin score.
The show will open the ART’s 2011-2012 season. Asked whether there were Broadway aspirations, Ms. Paulus said: “If the show has a future life in New York, that’s great. There is an intention for it to have a future life.”
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