Opera Star, Broadway Star, But Always In “Porgy”

By LINDA BUCHWALD

At the curtain call of a recent preview of The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess, actor Phillip Boykin gave a dainty curtsy. The crowd was delighted, since they’d just seen him play the burly, brutal Crown. “I want to let the audience know that I’m not really that bad,” says the actor, who describes himself as someone who loves to laugh, give, and cook.

So how does this nice guy play a villain eight times a week? For one, he doesn’t consider Crown a villain: “[He’s] a regular person just like everybody else.”

Crown, Bess’ lover, sets this classic story in motion when he murders a man and goes into hiding. Bess must find a new home in Catfish Row, a rundown tenement in South Carolina, so she turns to Porgy, a disabled beggar. They fall in love, and there are violent consequences when Crown returns.
 
To humanize his character, Boykin pictures him as a man he knew from his own childhood in West Greenville, South Carolina. “He would fight you or he would fight for you: You never knew,” he recalls. “You had to be careful around him, and if he got a drink or some alcohol in him, he would be so unpredictable.”

Boykin says the adaptation lets him go deeper into his character than ever before. In the opera, he explains, he has to project his voice over a large orchestra and hold his body in a way that maximizes sound projection. In this production, the use of microphones makes it easier to make subtle choices. “If you want to grab Bess and sing upstage or go down on your knee and sing to her, you can do that,” he says. “You have that freedom to do that without the loss of the voice.”

Boykin’s history with this show dates back to before he was cast in his first production. When he was a child, he looked through his uncle’s albums and saw the Porgy and Bess recording with Leontyne Price and William Warfield on the cover. “I remember thinking at that time that if these African-Americans could make a living singing, then maybe I could, too,” he says. “I remember so clearly looking at that album at around 13 years old and wanting to be a singer. And here I am.”

Linda Buchwald also contributes to StageGrade.com. She’s on Twitter as @PataphysicalSci.