‘Champion’ Review: Terence Blanchard Comes Back to the Met

The composer’s second opera at the New York institution is a visceral, jazz-influenced work about the closeted bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, who killed his opponent in a 1962 fight.

Ryan Speedo Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

April 12, 2023 5:55 pm ET

New York

After its huge success with the New York premiere of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2021, the Metropolitan Opera moved quickly to get Mr. Blanchard’s first opera, “Champion,” on the schedule; it opened on Monday. “Champion,” which had its premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2013, is tighter and less abstract than “Fire”; it is a propulsive and percussive score firmly rooted in the composer’s jazz idiom. The production has been expanded to fill the Met’s much larger stage, and the orchestra, under Yannick Nézet-Séguin, supplies some lush effects, but it’s the rhythm quartet, led by drummer Jeff “Tain” Watts, that drives the evening.

“Champion” is based on the true story of Emile Griffith, a champion boxer in the 1960s from the Virgin Islands and a closeted bisexual. In a 1962 title bout in New York, he killed his opponent, Benny Paret, who had taunted him at the weigh-in with homophobic slurs. Michael Cristofer’s libretto deftly outlines and deepens the tale: The elderly Emile (Eric Owens), who suffers from dementia and is still haunted by both the killing and guilt about his sexual identity, conjures up the turbulent odyssey of his younger self (Ryan Speedo Green). Structural fragmentation and repetition in the piece poignantly reflect Emile’s dementia—the clipped, often rhyming, text, insistently set; the flashes of clarity; the punctuation by the boxing announcer and the bell; and Emile’s frequently repeated line: “In my head, it happens fast. / Something good / Turns into something that don’t last.” 

Mr. Blanchard’s music gives the story’s episodes a visceral intensity. A Caribbean carnival call-and-response chorus, accompanied only by drums, dispatches Emile from his island home to make his fortune in New York; an ensemble of overlapping voices urges Emile to “stay in the game” during the Paret fight. Sometimes the vocal parts are more rhythmic than melodic, as when Emile’s ambitious mother, Emelda (Latonia Moore), narrates his transformation from gentle hat-maker to prizefighter in a speedy, rap-like extravaganza, “Tarzan knows which tree to climb.” 

Latonia Moore

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

When he does write melodies, Mr. Blanchard’s style is unpredictable. The line of Young Emile’s musing aria, “What makes a man a man,” is questioning and inconclusive, appropriate for his unresolved question of whether love makes a man strong or weak. The skillful dramaturgy alternates these types of scenes. In Act 2, a fast-paced sequence has reporters badgering Emile with the same banal questions—how does it feel to win the fight? To be the champ? To kill a man?—after each win. Then the chaos retreats, and Howie Albert (Paul Groves), Emile’s manager, expansively explains that “the truth don’t fit in a three-inch column.” 

Mr. Green (center), Paul Groves (purple jacket) and Ms. Moore (right)

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

James Robinson and Allen Moyer, who directed and designed the original production in St. Louis, have effectively scaled up the show for the Met with a large boxing ring and a big chorus. Montana Levi Blanco’s eye-catching costumes encompass St. Thomas carnival stilt-walkers, New York drag queens and flashy 1960s nightclub denizens; Greg Emetaz’s scene-setting projections and videos establish the crowd of Madison Square Garden fight fans and Emile’s Long Island apartment complex; Donald Holder’s sensitive lighting limns the difference between splashy public moments and solo musings. Camille A. Brown, who created the show-stopping step dance for “Fire,” supplies compact cameos here, like a group of boxers warming up and sparring at a gym. The fatal fight itself was staged with heart-stopping verve.

Mr. Green and Mr. Owens, in splendid voice, made a powerful team; one could discern the deep-seated insecurity both in the vibrant excitement of the younger Emile and in the pathos of the older one. The roots of that insecurity are disturbingly explained by a child Emile (Ethan Joseph), who appears in a still more distant flashback, forced by his strap-wielding, fundamentalist cousin Blanche (Krysty Swann) to hold cinder blocks above his head in order to drive out the devil. As Emelda, Ms. Moore was game, if not entirely secure, in her rhythmic numbers in Act 1; she sounded more comfortable in her dreamily lyrical Act 2 aria, accompanied only by plucked string bass, about her sad past. 

Eric Owens and Mr. Green

PHOTO: KEN HOWARD / MET OPERA

Mr. Groves brought humanity to Howie, especially in the scene where Emile’s early dementia becomes apparent. Stephanie Blythe had an all-too-brief bluesy cameo as Kathy Hagen, the foul-mouthed proprietor of the gay bar where Young Emile goes looking for company and solace. A distinctive moment for Brittany Renee, as Emile’s wife, is an imploring duet with Emelda, begging Young Emile to come home as he goes to Kathy’s bar for the last time (he is assaulted by gay-bashing thugs outside). Other notables in the cast included Chauncey Packer as the kind Luis, Emile’s adopted son and caretaker; and Eric Greene, playing both Benny Paret, who haunts Emile, and Paret’s son, who helps Emile find peace at the end of the opera. 

As was the case with “Fire,” the capacity opening-night crowd seemed unusually young, diverse and enthusiastic. The Met, noting how well pieces like “Fire” and “The Hours” did at the box office, has declared its intention to devote a substantial percentage of its season to contemporary works, starting with 2023-24. With original voices like Mr. Blanchard’s to draw from, that should be no hardship for its audience. 

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).

Appeared in the April 13, 2023, print edition as ‘A Composer’s One-Two Punch’.