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George Gershwin had a successful Broadway career behind him when he tackled Porgy and Bess, and he put everything he'd learned about stagecraft into his tale of a troubled woman and the three men in her life in the coastal South Carolina neighborhood of Catfish Row: Porgy, the gentle outcast she loves; Crown, the charismatic thug she's drawn to; and Sportin' Life, the drug pusher she ends up with. And when you see Seattle Opera's richly gripping production, which opened Saturday, you may start asking yourself which of Gershwin's predecessors among musical dramatists honestly surpassed him in the creation of living, breathing, bleeding people. As three-dimensional personalities, knowable, memorable, and powerful, these two title characters rank with Figaro (either one), Violetta, Carmen, Rodolfo and Mimì, Brünnhilde—name your favorites.