ART musical is Broadway-bound

Porgy, the crippled, love-struck beggar, will not be helped into his goat cart at the end of Paulus’s production, setting out from Catfish Row to seek his Bess in New York. That’s the ending of the opera George and Ira Gershwin wrote in 1935 with DuBose and Dorothy Heyward, which premiered at the Colonial Theatre in Boston 10 days before it opened on Broadway. Audiences at the American Repertory Theater will see something different when “The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess’’ starts performances there Aug. 17, en route to its own Broadway run in December.

With a cast of 22 and an 18-person orchestra, this “Porgy and Bess’’ will be a musical, not an opera. Most of the songs, widely acknowledged to be the work’s greatest strength, will remain. But the recitatives, sung passages of dialogue between the songs, will often give way to speech. And while some lines and scenes are being added, this show is meant to be shorter, a theater-friendly 2 ½ hours, with a clearer narrative and a new ending.

Adapted by Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Suzan-Lori Parks and Obie Award-winning composer Diedre Murray, both of whom are black, it’s also meant to address what has been the greatest obstacle for “Porgy and Bess’’ over the decades: the perception that this depiction of a black community in the American South, written in dialect by whites, is a racist work.

“I think I absolutely would have thought so as recently as a year ago,’’ said Audra McDonald, the four-time Tony Award winner who’s playing Bess. She had long performed songs from “Porgy and Bess,’’ and even recorded them. But she had strong reservations about being in a production of the show.