The Glimmerglass Festival offers a unique opportunity to singers and audiences alike to be around living composers. The “live relationship” creates a work that breathes and where new discoveries in the process can bring about further growth and development. This has happened with having composer John Corigliano as artist-in-residence all summer serving as mentor to the Glimmerglass artists, and who, in at least one instance, made changes to his 1991 score because of the input of a singer in his opera The Ghosts of Versailles.
Being part of the birthing process of Blue, the commissioned opera by Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson, has been something even more special.
In 2015, General Director Francesca Zambello contacted composer Tesori, who had written her first opera A Blizzard on Marblehead for Glimmerglass, to create something that would speak to our times. They turned to another Glimmerglass family member in Tazewell Thompson (“Taz”) to write and direct a work that would specifically address race and racism. Selecting Kevin Kellogg to play their central character, they found not just a singer of paramount technique and vocal power but a man who embodies emotional qualities of strength, tenderness, and great dignity in equal measure.
It is a tribute to the atmosphere of trust and safety cultivated in this setting on the banks of Otsego Lake that the ensemble members have been able to do the painstaking work to create this new opera, excavating personal scars and fears “to go to that place” where they could shine a light on a disturbing truth.
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After many conversations and much work, Scene 1 of the opera exposes right up front both the tensions and the courage it took to put on something like this. With not a note sung, a drama is acted out: a dark man in jeans and a hoodie looks suspicious and is apprehended by police officers. The scene rolls into a police station, and the police motion to the man to strip off his clothes. At this point, I am asking myself how the other people in the audience are adding up the pieces of action. And haven’t we seen this repeatedly on cop shows? But our expectations are upended when the guy pulls on dark pants, boots, a navy shirt, and, as the final exclamation point to the scene, a policeman’s cap. Brilliant.
The man is “The Father” in the opera and the woman, who when we first meet is pregnant with his child, is called simply “The Mother.” This device serves to make the characters archetypal and the story both specific and universal. Another brilliant stroke in Thompson’s writing is a scene where The Father has to be taught how to hold his newborn at the hospital. Filled with touching awkwardness and humor, we are allowed not only to laugh but identify with the universality of a mother’s instantaneous enormous love and a father who moves –yes, but in his case slowly – from apprehension to a deep desire not just to love but to protect his son at all costs. Thompson and Tesori take their time, and Kellogg’s stirring aria surely breaks open the heart of this opera and unites the audience.
Blue closes August 22, 2019 at The Glimmerglass Festival. Details and Tickets
The creative team deserves high praise in the classical rigor they have applied to telling the contemporary story in setting and drama. Donald Eastman’s set is spare but impressive and functions beautifully. A 3-dimensional facade in Harlem fills the upstage proscenium. Using simple effective shifts of light and shadow, Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel indicates, in turn, an apartment building, a police station, and a church. The massive facade remains throughout and speaks to unity of place, an Aristotelian principle of highest value in drama. In this case it all adds up to spelling out community. (The windows served as eyes, representing African-American families always looking out and down, bearing witness to all that goes on in the street below.)
There were meta moments. In rehearsal, the singer-actors had felt that jumping from the scene with the parents holding their baby boy to a scene of confrontation between father and his angry teenage son was too big a leap to manage. Thompson and Tesori obliged with a new scene where a little boy (played by Kellogg’s son) runs on with a paper airplane and zooms around the space chased by his mother. Here was a singer-actor playing out the pride, fear, then anguish of raising an African-American boy in a white world full of violence, institutionalized inequity, and hate, but he was, at the same time, living before our eyes and exposed as a father to a beautiful but endangered son because of his skin color.
In the second act there is an extended scene that takes place in the Church at the son’s funeral. I think some audience members thought that it might have gone on a little too long. (I am sure the creators will have examined this and considered what changes they will make in the next iteration.) For me, the scene blurred from being theater and moved into ritual. We, the audience, were asked to partake and to mourn not just the one body, symbolized by the white coffin on stage, but to come together for all the children lost to gun violence, and especially Black boys who would never be able to grow into men because of violence.
Two other Aristotelian principles had been integrated in this central scene. First, the coffin said it all; the violence of the boy’s killing happened offstage, making his death all the more tragic. The extended ritual was intentional and perhaps necessary to serve the most important function in classical Greek theater: a community coming together to witness drama and exorcise its own ‘ailings’ through a shared catharsis.
Director Thomson has clearly walked this difficult walk with the members of his fine cast. Kellogg’s brave, outstanding performance holds the story together. As his wife and “The Mother,” Briana Hunter is a fine match. She’s a wonderful singer and dramatically holds nothing back from the heartbreak required of this role. The young Aaron Crouch portrayed “The Son” with an impressive singing voice and fully-realized physicality that was imminently recognizable as a teenager full of restless energy and emotional turmoil, lashing out at the only person he could: his father. When he charged The Father violently then crumbled in his arms, and the two sat together awkwardly, neither one of them wanting to let go, I felt acutely the healing yearned for in every ruptured parent-child relationship.
The ensemble of Ariana Wehr, Brea Renetta Marshall, Mia Athey, Aaron T. Jenkins, Edward Graves as Police Buddy #1 and Nicholas Davis a friend of the central couple, and all of them gave us both moments of comedy and joy as well as tragedy. Jayden Kellogg as the young son served the story well.
If I have a quibble, it would be that, while Gordon Hawkins as The Reverend clearly has an impressive sound and stage presence, by planting himself in the sweet spot stage right in the church scene, he missed the opportunity to interact with the grieving congregation, especially the parents. This stood out because of both the length of the scene and the nuanced and specificity of acting choices by the rest of the ensemble. (Surely this minister would have attended to his flock, giving close physical comfort.)
I love Jeanine Tesori as a composer. She writes beautiful melodies to hook us listeners but she is not afraid of moving the drama through multiple and swift changes in the rhythms, meters, and styles of popular music. She never shied away from setting Thompson’s sometime irregular lines if it served the story. We saw her accomplished compositional palette, drawing on the blues, spirituals, and jazz to root us in the traditions of a people who’ve shown they have and will come through all.
Conductor John DeMain masterfully led The Glimmerglass Orchestra through this complicated score, illuminating the swiftly changing colors and instrumentation that went from strings to brass and banjo.
Not wanting to be seen as an “over-the-top” gushing reviewer, I draw on fellow audience members to back me up, several of them students from SUNY Cobleskill, none of them having ever been to Glimmerglass or indeed any opera. Ashley said, “ I honestly didn’t know it would be that good! I thought it was just going to be a lot of singing, but this was a story about us. I would definitely go again.” Janiya told me, “It has a deep meaning. I loved it.” Tamara agreed adding, “It made me think about actual events.”
Moments felt authentic, and, while the names were archetypal, nothing about the action or character was stereotyped.
The opera is coming next spring to Washington National Opera. We hope native Washingtonian Kevin Kellogg will lead the cast again. Who knows what the creators may change or emphasize? But it will be an important work to keep the conversation alive.
Blue is an opera for our times. Long may it live! And may it serve to help heal what ails us.
Blue. Composed by Jeanine Tesori. Libretto and Directed by Tazewell Thompson. Conductor John DeMain. Set Designer Donald Eastman. Costume Designer Jessica Jahn. Lighting Designer Robert Wierzel. With Kenneth Kellogg, Briana Hunter, Aaron Crouch, Gordon Hawkins, Ariana Wehr, Brea Renetta Marshall, Mia Athey, Aaron T. Jenkins, Edward Graves, Nicholas Davis, and Jayden Kellogg. Produced by The Glimmerglass Festival. Reviewed by Susan Galbraith.
