On Friday I attended Chicago Lyric Opera’s product of Jeanine Tesosi’s opera, Blue, libretto by Tazewell Thompson. I don’t usually give synopses of the operas I hear but I’ll make an exception in this case.
The first scene of Blue is devoted to a young black woman giving birth to her son. She is attended by a sort of chorus of her black women friends, counseling her that black boys are unwanted and hated. She is joined by her husband, a police officer. Both rejoice in their new parenthood. The second scene skips forward 16 years. The Son is an angry young man, disgusted that his father is a police officer. The scene consists of an extended conversation between Father and Son. They disagree. Act I ends.
In the first scene of the second act, we learn that the Son has been shot and killed by a police officer while protesting peacefully. The Father is extremely distraught. The second scene consists of the funeral of the Son. The chorus intones that all black boys have targets on their backs. Father and Mother are consoled by their faith community. The opera ends.
I thought there was a lot not to like in this opera and very little to like. I think it was an actual expression of the fears of black elites, cf. Ta-Nehisi Coates. As such it was already dated (it was written in 2019). I thought it static and flat and the production lackluster. I found it weak and woke. It violated the “three unities” (unity of place, unity of time, unity of action). All action takes place off-stage. I found it self-consciously modern, i.e. more twelve-tone than melodic. Let’s put it this way. You didn’t leave the theater humming the themes. My seatmates, also veteran opera-goers, remarked that it carefully avoided any hint of actual engagement or drama in favor of preaching at you.
I’ll close my remarks by pointing out a couple of statistics.
Population of the United States: more than 330 million
Black population of the United States: 48 million
Number of blacks killed by police officers in 2023 (the most recent year for which there are complete statistics): 249
I would suggest that if “all black boys have targets on their backs” the number of blacks killed by police would be several orders of magnitude higher than it actually was. While the number is still tragically high it’s of a completely different order than the opera would suggest. Here’s another little factoid. The number of police officers who died in the line of duty in 2023: 60. My conclusion is that police officers have an irrational fear of being killed by young black men and black Americans have an irrational fear of the police. I’m not sure how those two can be rectified.
I suspect this work will be forgotten in 10 years.
Chris Jones at Chicago Tribune
On the surface, the opera “Blue,” which opened Saturday night at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, is about a police shooting of a Black teenager. But you never see the event at the heart of the story of the Harlem family it rips apart and thus this opera, composed by Jeanine Tesori with a libretto by Tazewell Thompson, avoids the depiction of any particular circumstances.
So, free of the inevitable debate of who reached for a gun first, or who had the right to fear for his life, or what crimes were or were not being committed at the time, “Blue” is able to focus on parental dread.
Specifically, Black parental dread of an American kid not coming home alive.
Kyle Macmillan at Chicago Sun-Times
Michael Brown. Eric Garner. George Floyd.
Sadly, we all know those names and others like them: Black men who were killed at the hands of police officers.
A 5-year-old opera, “Blue,” tackles this tragedy head-on with a simple yet weighty story about a Black couple in Harlem whose 16-year-old boy dies in similar fashion. The boy is given no name. He is simply known as “The Son” — a young everyman.
concluding:
The big question, of course, is whether an opera that is so much of its time can transcend its time. Only the future will tell.
Mr. MacMillan read the code.
Lawrence A. Johnson at Chicago Classical Review
The title is “Worthy cast and music buried by ramshackle libretto, heavy polemics in Lyric Opera’s ‘Blue'”
Delayed four years by the pandemic, Jeanine Tesori’s Blue finally arrived at Lyric Opera Saturday night, having already appeared at the Glimmerglass Festival and Washington National Opera (co-producing companies with Lyric), as well as making the rounds in Detroit, Seattle, Pittsburgh and elsewhere.
Tesori’s career is on an upward fast track. Originally a composer for musical theater, her most recent opera, Grounded, about a woman Air Force drone pilot, opened the Metropolitan Opera season this fall (to mixed notices) following its world premiere at WNO in 2023.
Premiered at Glimmerglass in 2019, Blue tells of a Harlem family that is torn apart by politics and family conflicts. (The unnamed characters are portentously called The Father, The Mother and The Son.) The opera begins with the Mother telling her girlfriends that her new husband is a policeman to which they react negatively. She then informs them that she is pregnant and having a boy to which they respond by singing that the U.S. is so irredeemably racist that she should abort the child since it is not safe for a black male to grow up in this country. Eventually the girlfriends come around.
With a massive jump cut 16 years later, the teenage Son is now an angry activist and petty criminal who is resentful towards his father for being a cop in addition to what he views as the racist white establishment. After a heated violent argument, there is a reconciliation with the son breaking down in tears.
Act II picks up the action after the Son has been shot and killed by a policeman at a demonstration. (The details are left unexplained except that the protest was “peaceful” and that the shooting officer was white.) The Father suddenly does a 180 and becomes as vengeful and filled with hatred as his dead son, telling The Reverend of his plan to shoot the cop that killed his son. In an extended dialogue the Reverend preaches forgiveness and Christian charity. After an extended funeral church service an uneasy solace is reached. The opera ends with a flashback of the previous family argument and a fantasy sequence of the family sitting down happily together for a prayer and meal.
There are worthy things in Blue, not least Jeanine Tesori’s music. The style is derivative at times with near-cribs from Barber, Bernstein and Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess flitting by. A loud chord or high vocal note ends nearly every number as if to cue an invisible “Applause” sign.
Still, at its best, Tesori’s score is attractive and almost defiantly tonal and traditional. There are luminous swelling chords and quasi-minimalist rhythms at dramatic peaks and the arias and ensembles have undeniably beautiful moments.
While the story is compelling and topical, the opera is most successful in the scenes of high family drama. The extended Act I confrontation between father and son is intense, riveting and hard to watch as the resentful youth unleashes his hatred and vitriol on well, virtually everything—his father, the police, white people, capitalism, and the country.
There are two main problems that ultimately prove fatal to Blue: the dubious nature of its main argument and the ramshackle narrative by librettist and director Tazewell Thompson.
Though only created five years ago, Blue already feels like a dated period piece. The central conceit, repeated ad infinitum, is that white cops are evil and bent on killing black males and all of white society is responsible. (The Greek chorus of Girlfriends repeat “We see you” five times while pointing at the audience.)
Come on, man. While there have indeed been some horrific incidents of police shooting blacks, most seem to be due to poor training and fatal incompetence rather than racial hatred as a motivation. Most police, of all ethnicities, just want to do a decent job, make it through their shift alive, and get home to their families. Repeating a simplistic false narrative ad infinitum doesn’t make it true.
Some of Thompson’s text is offensive and incendiary. Outside of prime time on MSNBC, one will rarely hear the word “white” repeated so many times and with such hostility and venom as in this opera’s two-hour span. After the son is killed, the Girlfriend trio refers to police as “The uniformed and packing great white hunter” and “Butchers sharpening their knives/Hunting the dark meat” as well as “These sons of bitches. These indifferent men hacking our children to pieces like a squealing pig.”
Consider the dystopian state of Chicago in 2024 when all citizens are captive to epidemic violent crime and people are getting carjacked at gunpoint in the middle of the day on Michigan Avenue. Having to deal with that constant threat on a daily basis, even progressive opera-goers have reached their capacity for self-flagellation over social justice issues and are unlikely to agree that the police are the enemy.
The other issue is that Thompson’s libretto is poorly structured and convoluted with a crucial lack of convincing character development. Moments of gloppy Hallmark Channel sentimentality alternate with unfunny comic bits (the goofy Nurse) and tepid scenes that go on forever. The second act in particular seems interminable with an extended funeral church scene and two or three possible endings followed by a jarringly dissonant dream sequence. The Mother sings joyfully of the food she is preparing and the son suddenly becomes a smiling Ricky Nelson-like model son. Hateful as his vitriol was, the kid was more credible and engaging when he was an angry Commie.
Ultimately, the positive musical elements in Blue are weighed down by the awkward narrative, problematic libretto, and bludgeoning polemics
It continues in that vein. Mr. Johnson heard the same opera I did.
At some point in the last 50 years, or so, black culture died, especially black musical culture. No blues, gospel, rhythm and blues, jazz, Motown…
Having come of age in working class Boston in the 50’s and 60’s, I think race relations are much worse, too.
First, I think the music for the modern opera I have heard mostly sucks. Granted, I only go to make the wife happy but at least with the classic operas there are usually at least one or two pieces I actually like.
On the meta issue while the police shoot and kill relatively few unarmed black people there is a ladder you are ignoring. They shoot many more who survive. They beat without cause even more as the police themselves report they beat without cause more black people than white and when you survey black and white people the number is even larger. Over the years torture is a recurring issue across the country. We know that police are more likely to arrest black people than white for the same drug crimes, they are more likely to be prosecuted and more likely to be convicted.
So what they should be singing is that its a lot safer to be a black boy than it was 50 years ago but its best to avoid the police if possible and if stopped go completely submissive. A white person can argue or complain but it’s awfully risky if you are black.
Steve
I agree. Also, that’s what my parents taught me.
As to your point about torture, I believe that as long as the political leadership is completely absolved of all wrongdoing, I believe there will continue to be episodes. Jon Burge is dead. The accountability he will face for his actions is beyond human accountability. But Richey Daley was the Cook County DA when this stuff was going on and that he knew nothing about what was going on stretches credulity. He has never been held accountable.
For me, it’s mostly about the music with opera. Like Steve, all the modern opera that I’ve heard sucks in that department. Adding a preachy storyline doesn’t make it any better.
Pretty politically safe plot.
Reminds me of the Blacksploitation films from the ‘70’s.
Would “Mandingo” go over well on stage?