Noted director and producer Cheryl Crawford produced professional stock theater in Maplewood, New Jersey, for three very successful seasons. The last of these closed with "Porgy and Bess", which she co-produced with John Wildberg. In refashioning it in the style of musical theatre which Americans were used to hearing from Gershwin, Crawford produced a drastically cut version of the opera compared with the first Broadway staging. The orchestra was reduced, the cast was halved, and many recitatives were reduced to spoken dialog.