(Photos: Karli Cadel, Glimmerglass Festival)
BREAKING NEWS – “Say their names!” has become a familiar rallying cry at protests against the death of George Floyd and many other black people killed by police in America. In the opera Blue, a powerful and deeply moving collaboration between the distinguished playwright/director Tazewell Thompson and Tony Award-winning composer Jeanine Tesori, the black protagonists are nameless in order to highlight the systemic racism of American society. The work, which had a widely acclaimed world premiere – including a review in these pages – at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019, tells the story of an African-American family living in contemporary Harlem; the father is a police officer whose teenage son is shot dead by a white policeman. Referring to the murders of Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia and Floyd in Minnesota, Thompson said that it’s clear that “the subject of Blue has no shelf life.”
Indeed, in light of recurring incidents of police brutality and the fact that communities of color have been disproportionately impacted by COVID-19, the work seems even more urgent than when it was created. In 2015, Francesca Zambello, artistic and general director of Glimmerglass, had sent Thompson an email saying she was “interested in commissioning an opera about race in America; where we are today, as a country, dealing with this issue.”
Now, in announcing a decision reached months before the current wave of nationwide protests, the Music Critics Association of North America (MCANA) has named Blue as the winner of its fourth annual Award for Best New Opera. The prize recognizes musical and theatrical excellence and honors both composer and librettist for an opera that premiered during the past year in Canada or the United States. The runners-up were Fire Shut Up in My Bones by Terence Blanchard and Kasi Lemmons (Opera Theatre of Saint Louis) and prisoner of the state by David Lang (New York Philharmonic). Previous winners were p r i s m by Ellen Reid and Roxie Perkins; The Wake World by David Hertzberg, and Breaking the Waves by Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek.
MCANA’s awards committee includes Heidi Waleson, opera critic for the Wall Street Journal; George Loomis, longtime contributor to the Financial Times and Musical America; Alex Ross, music critic of the New Yorker; John Rockwell, former critic and arts editor of the New York Times and co-New York correspondent of Opera (UK); and Arthur Kaptainis, a critic for the Montreal Gazette and La Scena Musicale. After soliciting recommendations from MCANA members, the awards committee selected Blue as the winner in March. In a statement, the committee said: “Blue, an all-too-timely story of one family’s devastating loss…is given universal resonance by Jeanine Tesori’s gripping, accessible music and Tazewell Thompson’s poignant, unflinching libretto.”
Lyric Opera of Chicago (originally scheduled to mount Blue in June) and the Minnesota Opera have announced plans to present Blue early in 2021. Unfortunately, other scheduled performances at the Washington National Opera – where Zambello is artistic director – this past March and at the Mostly Mozart Festival in July, had to be canceled due to the pandemic.
Blue is the result of inspired teamwork between Thompson and Tesori, one of the first two women commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera. Tesori said she is pleased that opera librettists, often overshadowed by composers, are now receiving well-deserved credit. She referred to Thompson’s libretto for Blue as an example of his “poetic genius.” Indeed, Anthony Tommasini wrote in his review for The New York Times that “Mr. Thompson has written one of the most elegant librettos I’ve heard in a long time.”
Upon the birth of his son, the Father sings:
I saw him in a room all glacial white –
It hurt my eyes.
White walls, white floors, white cribs, white sheets. Nurses in white –
And there was our little baby boy!
Like a black exclamation point on white linen paper.
The storyline of Blue underwent significant changes as Tesori and Thompson began to work together. It was her idea to change the character of the Father from a struggling saxophone player – which she saw as a cliché in the theater world – to that of a black policeman, a story she felt needed to be told. Thompson, whose own father was a struggling saxophone player, initially resisted Tesori’s suggestion, but quickly realized its potential. “I was able to write something I thought was deep and significant and real, as well as important and conflicting,” he said.
“There’s no escape from the injustice woven into the fabric of this country, which has been perpetuated and keeps getting revealed,” said Tesori. “What we wanted to do was dramatize a loving African-American family.” Although they love each other, the composer notes, they are “fated to struggle in a society that has decided that blackness is a target for hatred and crime.”
Tesori’s atmospheric, emotive, and deftly constructed score proved a vivid foil for Thompson’s first opera libretto, which was enhanced by the give-and-take between composer and librettist. “I love words and language,” said Thompson, who lives in Harlem and was schooled by nuns who imbued in him a love of literature and writing. “I tend to overwrite, and I can go on and on,” he said, explaining that Tesori taught him “to allow the music to enter.” With her guidance, he learned to communicate in two lines what he had initially said in ten.
Tesori, an acclaimed theater composer (the Tony-Award winning Fun Home; Caroline, or Change, and more), faced her own challenges while writing Blue, her first full-length opera. “I am unbearably slow at the orchestrations,” she explained. But the experience proved revelatory in other ways. “Opera means I can use everything in my harmonic toolbox,” she said, adding that she relished what she described as an “unbelievable freedom.” Tesori said she shies away from dissonance in musical theater, “which has different roots and has curated a different audience. But in opera I feel I can write exactly what I want. It’s so freeing, yet also so hard.”
Tesori’s richly orchestrated score evokes Puccini, jazz, blues, and spirituals, and features potent arias. She has a notable gift for creating characterful vocal ensembles, as in a mournful scene with the three Girlfriends and the bereaved Mother. “Enter the sad sorority / Mothers without sons,” they sing in a harmonically rich, poignant trio. “She wears the captive shroud of stony death / Dressed in forever black,” sings one. “Color of her child” responds another.
Blue, according to Tesori, “is Tazewell’s story,” one that reflects “how he filters and hears the world.” Thompson recalled various instances when he was harassed by security guards and police nationwide. “These little paper cuts occur, and it’s painful. They add up,” he said. While working on the libretto he interviewed black policemen in Washington, DC, and Harlem to better understand the complexity of their lives. Some residents of color feel comforted by seeing a black officer on the beat, he learned, while others found it a tremendous betrayal to see “black men in blue,” as the officers referred to themselves. One black policeman he met had been an aspiring musician. After marrying and becoming a father, however, he decided to swap the financial insecurity of a musician’s life for the health and dental benefits offered by the police force.
Like many artists, Tesori and Thompson are now dealing with lost contracts, canceled shows, and the despair of witnessing the sudden demise of live performance. Thompson, who was attending a final rehearsal for Blue at the Kennedy Center in March when the theater had to close abruptly because of COVID, said that while he understands it has been necessary for organizations to move online in order to stay in the public eye, he hasn’t been watching any online events. “What I love is that theater is live, and there is that connection between what happens on the stage and the audience.”
He also worries about whether people will feel safe enough to return to theaters when the lockdowns are lifted. “I love that feeling when something happens on stage and the entire audience laughs, or breaks out in bravos and applause together, or rises as an audience together at the end. That’s a great experience, which would change if people are six feet apart. You don’t feel connected, you feel isolated, and you’re reminded of the danger. Why would you leave your home and spend a fortune to have that awful feeling?”
While anxious about the future, Thompson has been inspired during lockdown by how “people have been finding wonderful ways to express friendship and kindness and support and community to their neighbors and to those on the front lines. In my profession,” he said, “costume designers are on their own in their homes making face masks.” He has been volunteering at a nursing home and food pantry.
Tesori too is struggling to comprehend the repercussions for the performing arts. “I wake up every morning feeling like I’m wrapped in plasticine, to realize what we’re up against,” she said. “I am alternatively being inspired by what I see and also incredibly grief stricken. We are all in a haze of mental fog, trying to figure out how we can make work, be of service, and pay our mortgages.” She has been angered by displays of insensitivity on social media. “I don’t want to see your ab workout, and I don’t want to see you lounging by the pool in your bikini. I want you to be of service.”
Tesori has been inspired by how artists have been working to create content and continue performing while theaters are closed. Blue’s artistic team was hoping to find a sponsor to fund a recording of the opera, a plan that has been postponed as a result of the pandemic. But the cast may explore ideas to keep Blue in the public eye, with one possibility being a virtual performance of the Father’s final aria “The Talk.” That aria, which the Father sings after the death of his son, references the many things a young black man must do (or not do) to avoid police brutality, such as not wearing a hoodie or a baseball cap backwards.
“There is a sense of injustice and inequality about how African-American men are looked on in this country” said Thompson, noting that in the COVID era, African-American men have been harassed and even beaten for wearing protective face masks.
The Music Critics Association is announcing the award on June 17 as part of a virtual conference that will replace its previously scheduled annual meeting in San Francisco; award sculptures will be presented in person at a later date. In a statement, the committee noted that the organization is proud to honor Blue “in this difficult time, when its planned productions around the country had to be canceled, and because incidents like the one at the center of the opera continue to occur. We hope that this important work will see many more performances in the future.”
