Johnson C. Smith choir recruited for Spoleto’s ‘Porgy and Bess’

If you wanted an omen, you had one: Clouds hovering over Charlotte parted long enough Wednesday for the sun to shine on Johnson C. Smith University. Administrators had reason to beam: Spoleto Festival U.S.A. will use the 22-member JCSU choir in a new “Porgy and Bess” in May 2016.

The press conference teemed with firsts. The 1935 “Porgy,” the first great American opera, will be the first opera in renovated Gaillard Auditorium in Charleston. Spoleto has never produced the Gershwin-Heyward masterpiece or invited a full chorus for a show. (Westminster Choir College annually provides Spoleto with an opera chorus.)

And Charleston artist Jonathan Green will use his Gullah-Geechee heritage in his Spoleto debut as a costume and set designer. He’ll bring West African influences to this version, making Catfish Row facades suggest an African village and using colors and fabrics women would have brought to the South.

“As an international festival, we try to avoid the obvious,” said general director Nigel Redden. “So for the last 39 years, we have not done ‘Porgy and Bess.’ It’s daunting to do an opera in the city where it was written, where people can walk out of the theater and find Catfish Row.

“In 1970, to celebrate the tricentennial of Charleston, Gaillard did a ‘Porgy’ that was one of the first shows white and black people attended together. When I came in 1986, people were still talking about that, so it seemed time to do it again.”

JCSU has taken a hand in opera in Charlotte. President Ronald Carter sits on the Opera Carolina board; Shawn-Allyce White, the university’s director of choral activities, has sent students into Opera Carolina productions of “Aida” and “Rise for Freedom.” (She has a long history with ‘Porgy,’ dating to a 1976 Houston Grand Opera production where she was a 4-year-old supernumerary. Her mother sang in it.)

Wells Fargo, a supporter of Spoleto and JCSU, provided the crucial link. Jay Everette, community affairs manager of the Wells Fargo Social Responsibility Group in Charlotte, was lunching with Redden and former Spoleto board chairman Carlos Evans. They looked across the Charlotte skyline to JCSU’s Biddle Hall, whose spire seemed like a beckoning finger.

Wells supports education and the arts and “tries to be a connector in the community,” said Everette. “So this process seems like destiny.”

This story was originally published September 30, 2015 at 4:40 PM with the headline "Johnson C. Smith choir recruited for Spoleto’s ‘Porgy and Bess’."