Can opera, an art form that is more than four centuries old, address the high-profile spate of unarmed Black boys and men being shot by police in the United States?
That’s the tough question that was tackled by the creators of the 2019 opera Blue, a shared and much-traveled co-production of Glimmerglass Festival, Washington National Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago. After a pandemic delay and playing other cities like London, Amsterdam and Washington, D.C., Blue is finally making its Windy City debut in a heart-wrenching production through Dec. 1.
Blue is the thoughtful and emotional brainchild of librettist and director Tazewell Thompson (Constant Star, Jubilee) and Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori (Fun Home, Kimberly Akimbo). It’s a compelling mix that strives to be both reflective of the concerns of a modern African-American police family in New York’s Harlem neighborhood, but also so elemental in its storytelling that Blue draws from the roots and conventions of ancient Greek tragedy.
Rather than focus on one specific incident ripped from the headlines, the opera’s creators instead opt to be more universal. Hence Thompson and Tesori give the characters generalized names like Father, Mother and Son.
Tesori begins Blue with a series of discordant chord progressions as Thompson stages a wordless introduction against set designer Donald Eastman’s white bas-relief backdrop sculpture of a Harlem streetscape that suggests a classical Greek frieze. Here we meet the character of the Father (Kenneth Kellogg), who starts out in urban street wear before changing into the dark navy blues of a police officer.
We then meet the expectant Mother (Zoie Reams), a restauranteur who shares the background of her whirlwind romance to Father with her trio of Girlfriends (Ariana Wehr, Adia Evans and Krysty Swann). Thompson injects plenty of humorous banter here, but haltingly brings on the gloom once Mother reveals that her husband is a cop and that she is expecting a male child.
It’s here that the Girlfriends take on the duties of a commentating Greek Chorus. The women portentously and pessimistically detail the societal hurdles and stacked odds faced by Black men in America.
By contrast, the Father’s buddy policemen (Terrence Chin-Loy, Jonathan Pierce-Rhodes and Christopher Humbert, Jr.) in the next scene are far more welcoming of his news about a son as they divide their attention watching a football game and share their newborn struggle stories. But Tesori telegraphs the opera’s forthcoming tragedy with a siren orchestration that blares the moment the men toast to Father’s son.
Ending Act I is the central family conflict between Father and the teenage social activist and graffiti artist Son (Travon D. Walker). Resentments and hatreds spew out against each other as Father demands respect and obedience from his Son as an officer of the law, while the Son lashes out at what he sees as his Father’s complicity in forcefully oppressing and policing the underclasses.
Like Greek tragedy, the opera’s defining moment of violence and death is mercifully kept offstage. At the top of Act II in a meeting between Father and The Reverend (Norman Garrett), it’s revealed that the Son was shot dead by a white police officer.
The rest of Blue sits powerfully in the heightened feelings of the characters’ grief, anger and sadness with searing solo arias and emotionally wracked ensembles. Father expresses his desire for revenge, despite the countering Christian counseling from The Reverend. Mother also delivers an aria wailing despair before the funeral in a key scene buttressed in support by her Girlfriends.
Thompson and Tesori don’t offer any pat societal solutions for the family’s anger and despondency. Instead by the opera’s end, they emphasize the tenuous tragedy of how easily promising African-American lives can be shot down at any moment.
There’s no denying the affecting political and protest nature of Thomson’s libretto for Blue, and he’s not afraid to shy away from so many uncomfortable truths about the U.S. today. My one qualm with Thompson’s text is that it does jolt at times when the characters abruptly start delivering very purple poetry, or inserting Greek mythological references.
Compared to her Broadway scores with catchy pop moments like Caroline, or Change or Fun Home, Tesori’s recent opera scores of Blue and Grounded (about a female U.S. drone fighter pilot) are very much weighted down to match the seriousness of their subject matters. I hope that Tesori will receive a commission for a comic opera in the future to show off more of her eclectic and buoyant composing skills.
Conductor Joseph Young leads a fleet reading of the score with the Lyric Opera Orchestra in fine form. My only quibble is that some of the climaxes in the score slightly overpower the production’s fine singers.
And all around, Thompson as director has coaxed honest and expressive performances from the entire ensemble in his stark production. Watching Reams and Kellogg respectively as Mother and Father go from new parent bliss to the silent numbness at their Son’s funeral is a difficult, but ultimately cathartic journey.
Blue achieves the author’s intentions of invoking the operatic heights of Greek tragedy to reflect the contemporary pain of so many African-American families who have lost loved ones in police shootings. If Blue gains a foothold in the standard operatic repertoire, it will do so by being honestly reflective of the time it was created and for its tragic universality.
Blue plays three more performances at 7 p.m. Friday and Tuesday, Nov. 22 and 26, with a 2 p.m. matinee Sunday, Dec. 1, at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive. Tickets are $49-$269. Sung in English with projected English titles. For information, visit LyricOpera.org or phone 312-827-5600.