Lewis.

It’s bad form when critics attack each other in print, but after the shocking stupidity on display in the mixed reviews of the new Broadway production of Porgy and Bess, the temptation to open fire stretches from here to deadline. Cognizant of the boundaries of good taste and a dedicated defense of any critic’s right to an informed opinion, I won’t name names. But in this case, stupidity still reigns supreme.

It’s been years since I have been part of an opening-night audience so slam-dunked by greatness that people rose to a thunderous ovation the minute the opening bars of the Gershwin overture began and refused to stop screaming at the end, bringing back the entire cast for so many curtain calls that it felt like the applause might extend well into the night. The fear of paying union overtime to the stagehands was the only reason the cast and creative team ever left the stage at all. I am yelling “Bravo!” still and join the disillusionment of theatergoers who were crestfallen over the lack of enthusiasm in the next morning’s reviews. If there is any sanity left after The New York Times called The Book of Mormon “the greatest musical of the century,” I’d like to urge every living person who loves the theatre to ignore the critics and run to the Richard Rodgers Theatre immediately.

When the denizens of Catfish Row come alive in the dank ghetto of Charleston, S.C., they are not in Technicolor. They are black and white and real as breathing, scars and fake dreams in unison. As their characters develop in moment-to-moment tapestry of hearts in rhyme, Ira Gershwin’s triumphant lyrics feed the brain and massage the heartstrings with indescribable pleasure. During the two years it took for George to complete his masterpiece, Ira wrote two other shows and dozens of songs, including “I Can’t Get Started.” He made more money from that one song than the entire score of Porgy and Bess. Still, songs like “I Loves You, Porgy” and “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” deliver goose bumps the size of goose eggs every time they are played and sung, and the cast of this production sings them magnificently. From the robust choirs to the passionate arias, the songs are pluperfectly performed by a uniformly dedicated, polished and professional cast from the smallest roles to the center-stage showstoppers.

The star-crossed love between Porgy, a crippled beggar, and Bess, a wanton hussy in a red dress, has never been so poignantly realized. I hate to burn The New York Times in effigy, but that paper’s insulting insistence that nothing in the production is up to the greatness of Audra McDonald not only is untrue, it’s utter rot. Everyone is up to her standards, and this may come as a big shock, but she is not the best thing in the show. She possesses a pulsating, God-given instrument of purest intensity, but it is more than evenly matched by the fabulous voice of Norm Lewis as Porgy. In fact, this is the first time I have ever seen a Porgy with so much stature despite his deformity, or any Porgy as invincible and penetrating, as Mr. Lewis. Likewise, the matronly thread of God-fearing maternity that Natasha Yvette Williams brings to Mariah has humor and presence as ample as her bosom. Nikki Renee Daniels is poised and fragile as the tragic Clara and her “Summertime” opens the show with a lithe power that softly dazzles. Joshua Henry is a pungent Jake, and Phillip Boykin is a hardy, potent and terrifying Crown with a voice of booming iron and the malevolent force to enslave anyone within range. When he appears from the swamp after the picnic to rape Bess and drag her back from decency into a life of shame, the scene on Kiawah Island sizzles with the energy of a sexual tango that leaves not only Bess, but the entire audience, limp as a discarded condom.

Cavils? Yes, I have a few. I miss the “Buzzard Song,” an important prediction of ominous things to come when the vulture circles over Catfish Row after Crown kills Serena’s husband. Ms. McDonald is no Dorothy Dandridge, who electrified the movie version with her beauty and sex appeal, but is there any reason for the hideous razor slash across her face that only makes her ugly? I’ve never seen a Bess with a scarred face, which makes her less of a desirable yet unattainable dream for Porgy. From the minute she enters in a red dress, we know she’s traveled a hard road. We can imagine what she’s been through. We don’t need a gash that disfigures her face to imagine what men have done to break her body and soul. With a cast this strong, there’s no need to embellish. I also resent the replacement of Porgy’s goat cart with a slick cane. When he leaves for New York to find the wayward Bess, the finale is less doleful and the lyrics “Oh lord, I’m on my way to the Promised Land” are not as arduous without that pitiful little cart. And the chief disappointment in an otherwise splendid cast is David Alan Grier. The greatest Sportin’ Life of all time was Avon Long. In second place, there’s Sammy Davis Jr.—both of whom were dangerous, sinewy symbols of evil, preying on Bess’s weaknesses with empty promises that we know will lead to addiction and prostitution. Sportin’ Life should be slithery as a water moccasin. Mr. Grier never grows above or beyond the calculated study of a pinstriped dandy, and his two big songs, “It Ain’t Necessarily So” and “There’s a Boat Dat’s Leavin’ Soon for New York,” are nothing more than predictable padding. The role needs more work.

But these are small gripes. The adaptation of the massive original book by Dorothy and Dubose Heyward, by Suzan-Lori Parks and Diedre L. Murray, and the condensation of a four-hour opera into 2 hours 45 minutes of workable Broadway dramaturgy without making you feel like you’ve been cheated, have been accomplished with an inspired proclivity toward practicality. Director Diane Paulus has mercifully excised encores, reprises and extraneous repetitions, reducing the time to a workable dynamic that won’t encourage walkouts. Ronald K. Brown’s exciting choreography brings Catfish Row to teeming life with so much imagination that there’s a slide to everybody’s movement. Even the hips act. Invest a pinch of patience and you will be rewarded with a lusty, brawling, brilliant evening in the theater. It surpasses all expectations, and between the heart and guts of the Gershwins’ music and the stage that encompasses it, this Porgy and Bess establishes an interplay with the audience, a rapturous splendor, of the disciplined energy that is art.

rreed@observer.com

"We feel we really had a strong showing and we came back," Trippi said. Hillary Clinton "clearly did the robo-call thing last night because we were coming up on her—and they knocked us down."

Trippi said the Edwards campaign was "already ahead of this" on a lot of states. He cited Oklahoma and Missouri as states in which they expected to perform well. (So, Missouri really is a state!)

As for South Carolina: "We fought back, we got our share of the vote."

And! "Don't look at the numbers," he said. "We could go all the way..... We have the money to go on." He said that they'd raised a lot of money in the last 23 days—something like more than they had in the last quarter, but I couldn't really hear that part that well, nor do I tend to believe statements like that anyway, so no matter. And not to be ungrateful, but the rather paltry buffet table does not look much like the snack offerings of a rich campaign.

Aww. They're playing John Cougar! Ain't that America.

There are just a phenomenal number of reporters here—they've just gotta be excited at pulling Edwards detail on this triumphant night for the man that Hillary Clinton has called "a son of the south" at every opportunity this week.

Oh wow, now they are playing the Arcade Fire, a band popular with the urban young! Very preliminary results are coming in, over the T.V. waves, but not very much at all is going on here besides—wait, there is a man in a big spiky rooster hat and a patterned silk coat. I cannot identify a single reporter here! One woman is saying that service is "super-super-slow here"! That is okay because there are only dozens and dozens of people trying to dine, while the majority of people (the press) are eating from the free buffet, which I am about to plow into like a mack truck. More information to come on the status of the buffet and my eating of it as those events warrant.

Wait, I've just met two young white girls, one 18 and one 17, who are here in the front of the restaurant for a birthday party! The 18-year-old declined to vote in her very first primary. "I didn't know the hooplah about all this stuff," she said. But it was such a crazy election, how could she pass, I asked. "I was watching the thing on TV, who was it Edwards, Obama and Clinton, it was just between Clinton and Obama, they were just dissing each other, they weren't telling each other about anything," she said.

"I have no idea,” Rangel responded. “I'm campaigning for Hillary Cllnton and this is my first stop...I'm here to do what campaigning is all about."

The second question was about why people should vote for her versus Obama.

"I know Senator Clinton. I knew her when she was the wife of the governor of Arkansas, worked with her campaign to get her elected as Senator, I worked with her during her term her outstanding term as the New York State Senator...Therefore there is no question in my mind that she can best serve our great country. As relates to Obama, I have a great deal of racial pride as relates to his candidacy and I would assume that someone better than I would be better able to compare the candidates."

Then I asked him a question—if he'd been in South Carolina before, maybe when he was in the military—mostly in an attempt to get him to say something interesting.

He seemed displeased.

"Goddam, there's a lot of cities I've been in!"

I followed up by asking if there was any difference in campaigning for black votes in Harlem or South Carolina.

He said, "I just got off the plane. ... I'm here for a campaign now and you're asking me if I've found a difference. I haven't talked with anybody different yet but I would invite you to talk to me on Saturday."

He also said that he hoped that there was no lasting harm from the racial stuff going back and forth between the campaigns, and that all the Democrats would come together behind the eventual nominee.

Some other state legislators from South Carolina, all black, where lingering around. One of them, State Senator Robert Ford, a rotund fellow in a camel-hair coat, said he expects Obama to win tomorrow based on Jesse Jackson’s performance in 1984 and 1988. Ford said about the Obama campaign: "It was good before they started playing the race card. Now it's about racial pride. You can't beat that."

Ford added about Obama: "His whole campaign switched to black, black, black, black."

Then the legislators and Rangel went off to a conference room where there was a buffet set up. There were maybe five or six other tables in there—I guess it was a restaurant-type setup. He shook hands with some people. It looked to be about 50-50 white and black. Then the Clinton deputy press secretary on hand, Darrel Jackson, Jr., kicked us all out, explaining that the state lawmakers wanted Rangel to themselves.

In Kingstree, around 6 p.m., Bill Clinton was taking questions and doing his Great Explainer thing for an almost entirely African-American audience in a municipal center. In the back of the room, the New York Times' Kit Seelye was typing away at her story that ran today. "Bill Clinton Accuses Obama Camp of Stirring Race Issue" was the headline, with contributions from two other reporters in other cities and scripts of new campaign ads provided by her editors. The story was largely about Clinton's unexpected (by the media, at least) remarks that took place a bit after 1 p.m. down in Charleston.

(A long aside here: Also in the back of the room in Kingstree: the local police department's Sgt. Huckabee, standing guard. According to research by one of his family members, he said, he is something like a fifth cousin to the Republican presidential candidate Mike Huckabee. Sgt. Huckabee is neither a Republican or a Democrat, and said that the relationship did not influence his vote but did get his phone calls returned a lot faster these days. He also noted that presidential candidates talked a lot about salaries for teachers and, since 9/11, for firefighters, but not at all about salaries for cops, and that he believed the starting salary for police officers in South Carolina was somewhere just north of $24,000 a year.)

Anyway! Most of the reporters present earlier in Charleston couldn't actually get close enough to Clinton to hear these allegedly impromptu remarks; the Daily News and the Observer were provided with a transcript by Glenn Thrush of Newsday, and a handler tried valiantly to keep the press away from Clinton throughout the event. One wire service reporter was scolded by his editors for not being able to get into the scrum, and was told to never leave Clinton's side again.

At 4:57, CNN emailed out their transcript of Clinton's remarks; they ran video of the "event" in their 4 p.m. Wolf Blitzer-cast.

According to someone who watched Chris Matthews on MSNBC at 7 p.m., "they played it like 100,000 times."

And around 11 p.m. last night in Myrtle Beach, at President Clinton's final appearance of the day (before a nearly all-white audience and with nearly no press in attendance, besides that nice redheaded boy from the AP), a woman in the audience stood up to complain about the media.

"I'm very frustrated with the media," she said. "They just bash her and bash her"--meaning Hillary Clinton.

"I'm glad you noticed," Clinton said.

"Chris Matthews drives me crazy," the woman said.

Then Clinton cited a Howard Kurtz story— presumably this one, from mid-December— in which the media "admitted they had a double standard" in covering Hillary Clinton. Then he went on to praise the importance of Thomas Friedman's "synthetic" work; he defined what he meant by "synthetic" for the audience.

So he's working a very complicated tactic, encouraging public sentiment against the press, but also wrapping us around his finger for reasons that remain fairly opaque.

Because Bill Clinton likes the press, he wanted the people of Myrtle Beach to know. "I like most of them a whole lot better than they like me," he said.

One might not expect anyone attending an Obama rally to come easily to Clinton's defense. But it was striking that even audience members who were not committed Obama supporters expressed strong disapproval of the tone struck by the former First Lady and her husband recently.

Joseph Myers, a local man who watched Obama speak in a high school gymnasium in this struggling town in the north-east of the state, said he had been leaning toward John Edwards until he saw Monday's CNN debate, replete with its rancorous Clinton-Obama exchanges.

"That swayed me" in Obama's favor, Myers said, accusing Clinton of "trying to deflect" legitimate questions by attacking her main rival.

Myers also expressed skepticism about Bill Clinton's record on issues affecting the African-American community.

"I like Bill but, speaking as a black man, Bill didn't do all that much for black men," he said.

Myers cited the former president's role in promoting NAFTA and his support for the 'three strikes and you're out' model of criminal justice as two instances where Clinton's political stances had hurt African-Americans disproportionately.

At the same event, Roger Jordan, a 70-year-old preacher at the Vision Missionary Church in nearby Little Rock, said he had also been spurred to Obama's defense by a feeling that he was under siege from the Clintons.

"I think Hillary has good points," Jordan said, "but recently I see her attack Obama for no reason. What is that? If you were just walking down the street and I punched you, how would you feel about that?"

Jordan said he thought some of the attacks on Obama by Clinton surrogates had a racial component. Though not supplying specific examples, he said, "You can see it sometimes in the words that are used, sometimes even in the body language."

The Clinton campaign has vigorously pushed back at any suggestion that it has played the race card against Obama. In its view, Hillary Clinton's jabs have done nothing more than raise legitimate questions about the young senator's record—a record that the Clintons believe has been viewed through rose-tinted glasses by the media.

Supporter Brenda Williams was given the role of introducing him at the earlier event in Sumter yesterday. In an interview afterwards, she said that some of the "other parties" in the contest—she declined to name names --"have tried to inject racism as a scare tactic to remind people of the Old America."

The 56-year-old doctor added: "It is an old kind of hidden language that some of the people are using to remind America that this is a man of color. And that is something that still antagonizes some people in this country."

Obama's campaign may be encouraged by the notion that the Clinton attacks have served to galvanize support. They would be well-advised not to become too complacent. Last night's rally in Dillon was, unusually, barely half-full. Obama's lyrical, lofty rhetoric can seem incongruous in a setting where young children have room to wrestle each other on the edge of the crowd and teens can be spotted drifting away.

Obama nevertheless appeared to have shaken off the chronic tiredness that characterized some of his campaign trail performances in the days after his shock loss in New Hampshire. Hitting his usual stump speech points, he highlighted the sorry state of a local school. "Every time a train goes by the building shakes and the teachers have to stop teaching," he said.

He drew applause when he added: "If we as a society are building new prisons and putting our kids in old schools, that tells you something about who we are."

He had made almost exactly the same point earlier, in Sumter.

And it was at that earlier appearance that he also made a blunt comment about his religious faith—presumably in an effort to immunize himself against ongoing anonymous smears suggesting he is a secret Muslim.

"I have been a member of the same church for almost twenty years," he said, before adding with emphasis, "Praying to Jesus. With my Bible."

After the "mean things" he's said about me, Mr. Clinton responded, "I should be the last person defending anybody." But, he said, "I regret some of the acrimony in this campaign the last few days."

"As an American," he said, "I hope you're not right."

He said that the opposite was true: That he had met people who were voting for his wife because they wanted to pull the lever for a woman for president before they died.

At the start of the town meeting, he'd said "I dont mind when Hillary and Senator Obama argue... I think it's important not to overreact to it."

Sincere thanks to the reporter who very kindly shared this write-up.

The first thing I noticed when I walked into my mother's house, where I'm staying, was a flashing red light on the answering machine. I pushed the button, thinking my mom might have left an update on the status of the supply of cold cuts in the fridge, but instead, there was a drawling recorded voice:

And this:

It went on in this vein for a minute or so. (In one particularly ludicrous bit of slander, the robo-caller accused the Clintons of stealing or killing Kathleen Willey's cat, concluding with the following punchline: “Hillary thinks cats are expendable; can you trust her?”

It would have been funny if it weren't so sad.TPM Muckraker was on these calls (apparently the work of a unaffiliated Black Helicopter-type) yesterday, so they're not exactly news, but somehow this kind of mud seems dirtier when it's being flung in your (or your mom’s) direction.

Should be an interesting few days.

"One candidate with four pollsters said she was poll-driven--she only had one," he said.

This was in the Q&A; earlier, he had been talking primarly about the economy. His opening line: "Yesterday the federal reserve announced they are cutting interest rates." He gave an excellent explanation of the subprime mortgage disaster and promised that "we will retrofit every building in the country," starting with the schools. Also cars that get 100 miles a gallon! Maybe there will be ponies!