Bess has been traditionally performed by an all-black ensemble, as its writers intended. Their production moved the story from Catfish Row in Charleston, South Carolina, to an airplane hangar, reframing it as a story about refugees. In order to perform the opera in the manner they did, Hungarian State Opera, as part of the agreement with Tams-Witmark, the licensor of the work, had to print "unauthorised [and] contrary to the requirements for the presentation of the work' on all of its marketing materials. Some cultural critics saw the staging as part of an effort to drum up support for Viktor Orban, with the next Hungarian general election upcoming. Ádám Fischer, a prominent Hungarian conductor, described the production as being done in bad faith and political in its intent: "It's part of the whole election campaign against what they see as the double standards of the west and to allow them to say the west is racist and we are better than the west. Why else would Hungarian state opera stage a production of Porgy and Bess two months before the election?" In opposition to these remarks, opera company director Ókovács said that the rumor that Viktor Orban was somehow connected to the production was false, and that he had not seen it. He described the controversy thusly: "There was really silly fake news about our Porgy production." While the production drew anger from foreign critics, Hungarian critics largely praised the work. An Orban-friendly website, Origo, said: "Only blacks used to be able to perform this opera because of racist restrictions." Another conservative columnist: "Political correctness is slowly devouring aesthetics." Not all foreign critics saw the idea of a non-black Porgy and Bess as inherently bad. Years before the Hungarian production, Anthony Tommasini argued in The New York Times that opera has never been concerned with appearance to suggest authenticity - he notes that people were accepting of Luciano Pavarotti as a starving French artist. He goes on to quote African-American opera singer Simon Estes, who said, "This may sound extreme, but I think it's almost unconstitutional for Porgy and Bess to be performed only by black artists." He notes many casting choices where race was not part of the consideration. If what he calls "nontraditional casting" is going to be used at all, it has to be applied to all operas, even one with the specific kind of stipulations attached