The Father reaches out to Gordon Hawkins’s The Reverend for comfort. The second act opens with the characters plunged into tragedy, and we soon learn The Son has been murdered by a police officer while attending a political rally. Act I closes with the two embracing: The Father is emphatic that, despite their differences, he loves his son. He resents his father’s profession and, in an argument, The Father struggles to explain how he is trying to keep his son alive. The Son, portrayed by Joshua Stewart, is now a rebellious teen, passionate about his art and social activism. The next scene jumps 16 years into the future, where we spend the rest of the opera. In a parallel scene, three fellow officers tell The Father, played by Kenneth Kellogg, that they envy him for fathering a son – setting up the coming disconnect between The Father’s expectations and reality. In these moments the crux of the opera’s drama is established as they warn her about the dangers her Black, soon-to-be son will face. Swooning and playful teasing about The Mother’s new beau is upended when the Girlfriends learn he is a police officer – and that she is expecting a son. The opera opens with The Mother, played by Briana Hunter, explaining to her trio of Girlfriends that she has quickly fallen in love, married and is now pregnant. The characters are known to the audience only by their titles: ‘Father’, ‘Mother’, ‘Son’ and so on. Thompson’s libretto follows a family raising a Black son in New York City’s Harlem. Blue received its debut performance in the summer of 2019, but COVID shelved plans for the opera to tour – until now. The project paired Thompson, who had directed several festival productions, with Tesori, who had composed the music for another Glimmerglass commission, A Blizzard on Marblehead Neck. So, what does opera look like in the first two decades of the twenty-first century? Blue, a recent opera by librettist Tazewell Thompson and musical theater composer Jeanine Tesori, provides us with one concise answer to this question.īlue began as a 2015 commission from Upstate New York’s Glimmerglass Festival, which sought to create an opera exploring race in America today. It is, in a sense, the original musical theater: an attempt to synthesize dramatic storytelling, instrumental music and singing into a unified grand artistic statement. Opera has always been attached to social and popular trends. Girlfriend 3/Congregant – Cheryse McLeod Lewis Girlfriend 1/Nurse/Congregant – Ariana Wehr Librettist and Director – Tazewell Thompson (ZC) Kenneth Kellogg and Briana Hunter in Blue © Philip Newton United States Jeanine Tesori, Blue: Soloists of the Seattle Opera, Seattle Symphony / Viswa Subbaraman (conductor).
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