Blue’ Review: Opera in the Age of Black Lives Matter

The story of a Black police officer’s family struck by tragedy when their son is killed by a white police officer.

By Heidi Waleson

Sept. 14, 2021 1:09 pm

Detroit

Michigan Opera Theatre embarked on a new chapter of its history last year with the appointment, as artistic director, of Yuval Sharon, best known for genre-defying, site-specific projects like “Sweet Land” with the Industry in Los Angeles. Mr. Sharon immediately made his iconoclastic presence felt with October’s “Twilight: Gods,” a one-hour version of “Götterdämmerung” performed for audiences in cars, staged in MOT’s parking garage. His distinctive stamp continues: The company’s 2021-22 season includes “Bliss,” a performance art piece that repeats the same three minutes of “Le Nozze di Figaro” for 12 hours, “La Bohème” staged with its acts in reverse order, and the first production of Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X ” since its 1986 premiere.

By those standards, the company’s most recent offering was almost conventional: “Blue” by composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson, presented last weekend at the Aretha Franklin Amphitheatre. This searing 2019 work is the story of a Black police officer’s family struck by tragedy when their son is killed by a white police officer. Several productions of “Blue” were planned to follow its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival but fell victim to the Covid-19 pandemic, so this was the work’s second staging. The venue choice of the 6,000-seat, open-air amphitheater, better known as a home for large-scale, nonclassical concerts, was in part for Covid-era safety reasons, but also an effort to make the work feel more accessible to residents of this majority-Black city who might not gravitate to a traditional opera house. (The socially distanced audience was kept to about 1,300 people.)

Director Kaneza Schaal embraced the vastness of the stage and the space, tapping into the intimate opera’s grander Greek tragedy aspects—it is the story of a family, but also of a community. Three long ramps projected from the stage into the audience; translucent hanging panels at the rear of the stage left the river, and its passing boat traffic, partly visible. Eight dancers, performing in the angular styles of Krump and Detroit Jit, physicalized the emotions of the characters; a live video feed occasionally picked up a dancer or a singer and expanded that image onto the panels. The funeral cortège arrived through the audience. Stage pieces were deliberately small and makeshift—a few chairs; tables and boards quickly assembled and disassembled to evoke a bedroom, a bar, a funeral bier—to keep the focus on the people.

Amy Rubin designed the set; Jessica Jahn the costumes. Joshua Higgason’s projections were mostly abstract, giving the figurative ones—for example, a sea of Black men holding up their arms in surrender—extra punch. Jeanette Oi-Suk Yew’s lighting helped focus attention in the large space.

The grand stage had one big drawback. Amplification was necessary, and MOT employed L-ISA Immersive Hyperreal Sound technology, with sound design by Mark Grey. I saw the first act from a side rear section of the amphitheater, where the sound felt distorted and the text was almost completely incomprehensible, especially in the higher ranges of the female singers. Supertitles were available via smartphone—if you saw the note in the program and scanned the QR code to get them. I hadn’t, and that was a huge disadvantage, since Mr. Thompson’s wrenching libretto is fundamental to the experience of the piece.

The second act, seen from a closer, more central seat, with the titles, was an improvement. More of the text was intelligible, and I got a sense of the sound system’s possibilities: For example, when a singer walked up the ramp closest to me, her voice moved with her. However, the amplification still made loud, intense singing harshly overpowering and the ensembles lost their rich harmonic texture. The vocal/orchestral balance favored the voices, resulting in a loss of instrumental nuance, and many of the tender subtleties of the opera did not come through.

Still, “Blue” retained the power I felt in 2019, and new moments in the work jumped out. With male voices shown to better advantage by the sound system, bass Kenneth Kellogg (The Father) was even more potent than he was at Glimmerglass, particularly in the first scene of Act 2, as he railed at The Reverend ( Gordon Hawkins ) in a nihilistic fury after the killing of The Son ( Aaron Crouch ). I also loved the final scene: After the rage, the mourning and funeral, we get a flashback to a family meal. The father-son conflict flares, but is soothed by The Mother (Krysty Swann), who playfully lists all the foods she’s prepared “for my boys” in a rhythmic blues. Her line, “The food of our ancestors, putting its arms around us,” encapsulated the opera’s underlying theme about the endurance of love and community, even as they coexist with terrible loss. Ms. Schaal made that loss clear: The parents exit together, leaving The Son alone with a giant projection of an empty silhouette.

The strong cast included Kimwana Doner, Nicole Joseph and Olivia Johnson as the Girlfriends (their dirge in Act 2 was haunting); Camron Gray, Edward Graves and Christopher Humbert Jr. as the Policemen. Conductor Daniela Candillari, positioned with her 30-member orchestra behind the singers, did admirable work keeping everyone together and pacing the show. It was all the more frustrating that the sound system couldn’t deliver their vision.

—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).

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