Did "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess" Meets Its Goal? The creative impetus behind "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess," the adaptation of the classic 1935 opera that opened at the Richard Rodgers Theater on Thursday, was to make the work more accessible, fresh and realistic for today's musical theater audiences. In a New York Times article last August, before the production was introduced at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass., Audra McDonald, who portrays Bess, said "none of us wanted to do a "Porgy and Bess" where the audience would sit back comfortably and just, ahhhhhhh, soak in the big gems from the Gershwin score." Yet perplexing elements of this thinned-out, reorchestrated and heavily cut adaptation by the director Diane Paulus, the playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and the composer Diedre L. Murray undermine the stated goals. The treatment of "Summertime" in the opening scene is one example. In the original opera the residents of Catfish Row slowly dance to a honky-tonk piano playing music described in DuBose Heyward's libretto as "low-down blues." Then Clara, a young mother holding her baby boy, sings "Summertime" as a dreamy, aching lullaby. On the vibrant 1988 recording of the complete opera conducted by Simon Rattle, based on a production at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, the London Philharmonic supports the soaring voice of the soprano Harolyn Blackwell, singing Clara, with slowly breathing waves of warm string sound and mellow woodwinds. Mr. Rattle treats the music like something out of Debussy's "Pelléas et Mélisande," which is exactly right. The women of the Glyndebourne Chorus sing the song's consoling "ooh" refrains with hushed, tremulous expressivity. In "The Gershwins" Porgy and Bess," Nikki Renée Daniels, as Clara, looks adorable and sings "Summertime" sweetly. But the amplified orchestra, reduced to Broadway pit-band size, sounds thin and tinny. Then Clara's husband, Jake, a fisherman, the appealing Joshua Henry, joins Clara, and "Summertime" is transformed into a duet. If anything is going to make this song seem a safely familiar Gershwin gem, it is bringing Jake into Clara's sad solo. As conceived, "Summertime" is a solitary expression from a burdened but steadfast wife and mother. "Livin" " is not easy on Catfish Row, and Daddy is hardly rich. To show a young, handsome couple singing the lullaby together sentimentalizes the music and the moment. So much for visceral realism. Those who strongly admire "Porgy and Bess" as an opera, like the audiences who cheered the 2002 production by Tazewell Thompson at New York City Opera, will probably have the biggest problems with this new adaptation. The best thing about it is the wrenching, humane performance of Ms. McDonald as the tormented Bess. She sings with lustrous sound and utter vulnerability, portraying a woman "tearing herself to pieces before our eyes," as Ben Brantley wrote in The New York Times. And if Norm Lewis is a vocally underpowered Porgy, he brings earnestness and grace to the role. Still, at the risk of sounding like a snobby purist, I have to stress that "Porgy and Bess" is an opera, a big opera, and it makes its most powerful impact when treated as such. George Gershwin's attempt to fold disparate musical strands - Broadway songs; jazz; the European modernism of the 1920s that he was so enthralled with, especially the music of Berg - into a seamless operatic whole was not completely successful. Still, in a good production, this exhilarating, painstakingly detailed and continually inventive work keeps you hooked for the duration of its score, which has more than three hours of music. In striving for a streamlined "Porgy and Bess," a version that might seem more urgent, intimate and dramatically lucid, the new adaptation just makes the piece seem slighter. Gershwin did not help the cause of "Porgy and Bess" by calling it a "folk opera." But he was sensitive about presuming to write a work focused on a black community in Charleston, S.C. There is no real folk music in his score. Gershwin even composed his own spirituals rather than quoting existing ones: a more respectful choice, and more original. As he explained in an article for The New York Times that appeared in October 1935, during the Broadway run, Gershwin wanted the music of his opera "to be all of one piece." After the tryout premiere in Boston, Gershwin and his co-creators made large cuts, some 45 minutes in all, before taking the work to Broadway. This would seem a clear expression of insecurity from a team of opera neophytes. But in the world of musical theater - where Gershwin and his brother Ira, who wrote the lyrics with Heyward, had thrived - if any song, scene or show was not working, the problem was immediately assumed to be that it was too long. And to borrow a lyric, that "ain't necessarily so." In that Times article George Gershwin sounded almost defensive about the number of songs in the score. "It is true that I have written songs for "Porgy and Bess," " he wrote. I am not ashamed of writing songs at any time so long as they are good songs. He added that songs "are entirely within the operatic tradition" and that he used "sustained symphonic music to unify entire scenes." He prepared himself for that task, he wrote, "by further study in counterpoint and modern harmony." Still, the opera was soon considered a deeply flawed work. Versions were produced that lifted the songs from the score and presented the piece as a musical with dialogue. Yet when the full-length original version was restored and produced in 1976 by the Houston Grand Opera, it was a revelation to critics and audiences. Here was an audaciously original opera with a compelling musico-dramatic arc. How could it ever have seemed too long?