The world premiere of Terence Blanchard’s searing “Fire Shut Up In My Bones”; a remarkably modern production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea”; a generic take on Verdi’s “Rigoletto.”
Davóne Tines as Charles Blow in ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ Photo: Eric Woolsey By Heidi Waleson June 25, 2019 2:43 pm ET
Webster Groves, Mo.
Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” now in its world premiere engagement at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, which commissioned it in partnership with Jazz St. Louis, demonstrates opera’s remarkable ability to get inside a character’s head. Like its source material, a searing memoir by the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow, the opera goes deep, exploring the years of loneliness and confusion that resulted from a sexual assault by an older male cousin when Charles was 7 years old.
The poetic libretto by Kasi Lemmons jumps into the story with startling abruptness: The college-age Charles is speeding down a road, a gun at his side, ready to kill someone. The rest of the opera clearly plots the emotional journey to that moment: Throughout his childhood as the youngest of five brothers in a poor black family in Louisiana, he was always different (“a boy of peculiar grace”) and longed for his distracted mother’s love. Overwhelmed with guilt and uncertainty after the assault, the teenage Charles looks for help through baptism, sex with a girl, joining a college fraternity with brutal hazing rituals, and falling in love with a woman who leaves him. Only when he decides to kill his abuser—and then doesn’t—is he freed to accept himself. (The memoir explains that Mr. Blow is bisexual; the opera leaves the question open.)
Character layering deftly articulates this internal struggle. In Act I, the older Charles (the powerful Davóne Tines) shares the stage and sings with his child self, Char’es-Baby (treble Jeremy Denis). Destiny/Loneliness, sung by the remarkable Julia Bullock, is a voice in Charles’s head, tempting him to submit to his feelings of alienation and vengeance.
His environment is also richly drawn: There are the neighbors who sing the recurring barbershop-style ensemble, “Char’es-Baby, youngest of five…Such a big baby / What’s wrong with you?” and his hardworking mother, Billie (Karen Slack, a big-voiced soprano, prone to exaggeration), who threatens her philandering husband and his women with a gun, but gives Charles advice that he will finally heed: “Sometimes you gotta just leave it in the road.”
Mr. Blanchard’s attractive music is oddly lyrical and tonal for this turbulent story, more a cushion for Ms. Lemmons’s words than a voice in itself. The orchestra includes a jazz rhythm quartet, but its sound is peripheral rather than central, only appearing in occasional moments, such as the scene when Chester (Charles’s assailant, sung by Markel Reed) makes the child complicit in a theft of candy. Catchy, up-tempo numbers include a comic ensemble in a chicken-processing factory and the gospel-tinged church service. Arias like Charles’s “Tears from a walled-off place” recur, keeping his anguish at center stage. Yet it is Destiny/Loneliness’s music, with its seductive allure, that has the most impact.
The production, directed by James Robinson, with a simple set by Allen Moyer, costumes by James Schuette, projections by Greg Emetaz, and lighting by Christopher Akerlind, evokes the impoverished Louisiana town of Gibsland; five dancers, choreographed by Seán Curran, become, among other things, the confusing sexual images that visit Charles in his dreams. The assault is staged without physical contact, but the context makes clear that something bad happened. The large, excellent cast also included Chaz’men Williams-Ali, a charming rogue as Charles’s father, Spinner, and Rehanna Thelwell as Ruby, one of Spinner’s women. William Long conducted.
***
OTSL’s first-ever production of Monteverdi’s “The Coronation of Poppea” (1643) brought out the remarkable modernity of this opera, whose musical language, stripped of artifice, is direct and communicative and whose story is a vicious satire cloaked in beauty. Director Tim Albery’s production was staged in a tiled space that looked like a cross between an empty swimming pool and a morgue, with modern costumes; Hannah Clark was the designer. Mr. Albery’s trenchant English translation captured the savagery of what’s at stake as the Emperor Nerone and his mistress, Poppea, mow down all the obstacles in their path. As Nerone tells his tutor, the Stoic philosopher Seneca, “It’s the people who need to be subjected to the chains of reason, and not me. I am the Emperor.” (He later orders Seneca to commit suicide.)
The taut, focused staging matched the incisive musical direction from harpsichordist Nicholas Kok, leader of the eight-member period instrument band that played from the rear corners of the set, and the excellent diction of the singers. As Poppea, Emily Fons’s soprano oozed sensuality; as Ottavia, Nerone’s repudiated Empress, mezzo Sarah Mesko sang through her teeth in barely repressed fury; and tenor Brenton Ryan gave Nerone a dangerous edge. (In a nontraditional choice, Nerone stabs Ottavia to death instead of merely exiling her; clearly no one is safe in his orbit, not even Poppea.) David Pittsinger sang Seneca with deep-voiced authority; Devon Guthrie’s purity of tone was just right for the innocent Drusilla; countertenor Tom Scott-Cowell brought a frantic terror to Ottone, who tries and fails to murder Poppea on Ottavia’s orders. Notable supporting singers included tenor Matthew Cairns as Liberto, the pistol-packing guard who reluctantly brings Nerone’s order to Seneca, and mezzo Michaela Wolz as the exuberant Amore, who bets on Poppea’s triumph and wins.
***
Verdi’s “Rigoletto” (1851) got a light updating in Bruno Ravella’s production. It was set in Paris in the 1880s, instead of Renaissance Mantua, so there were can-can dancers in a cabaret instead of the Duke’s dissolute court (costume designer Mark Bouman went to town on their flouncy costumes and the sinister top hats and capes of the Duke’s followers). As Rigoletto, the Duke’s jester, Roland Wood used a ventriloquist’s dummy for his nasty jibes, supposedly to separate his performance persona from his secret life as the loving and overprotective father of Gilda. He was also given a large scarlet birthmark on his face instead of a hunchback. However, Mr. Wood didn’t vocally demonstrate this duality over the course of the evening. He pummeled the music, making his large baritone seem oversized for the space. Even as Rigoletto begged the courtiers to return his stolen daughter, there was no real pathos to his performance.
Despite the opera’s updating and the idiomatic English translation by James Fenton, Mr. Ravella’s directing, apart from a few dramatic flourishes, was generic; so was Roberto Kalb’s pedestrian conducting. Tenor Joshua Wheeker was, for the most part, a mildly caddish Duke; So Young Park, a prettily innocent Gilda. Two potent low voices—Nicholas Newton’s Count Monterone and Christian Zaremba’s Sparafucile—supplied menace. And in a brief #MeToo moment, Lindsay Ammann’s Maddalena recoiled from the Duke’s brutal advances. Then it was over—she let him seduce her in the opera’s famous Act III quartet, the strongest musical performance of the evening.
—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).
AndyManshel.nyc 