Paul Tazewell’s costumes were beautifully simple, yet evocative of the shifting periods and settings. Louis production.Īllen Moyer’s spare set - a kind of rough-hewed wood proscenium and some other shifting elements - is visually enriched with projections by Greg Emetaz. I missed the intimacy and directness - the almost chamber-orchestra clarity, with the words leaping off the stage - of the St. Though the opera still mostly avoids seeming inflated, these enhanced arias and scenes sometimes went on too long. Some scenes were extended dance sequences were added the role of Billie, Charles’s mother, was significantly expanded to create a true leading soprano part, here sung movingly by Latonia Moore. Understandably, the creative team chose to adapt the work to the larger space. In Missouri, the opera was presented in a 756-seat theater, roughly one-fifth the size of the Met. This issue is more problematic at the Met than it was in St. (Howard Drossin is credited with additional orchestrations.)īlanchard deploys this juiced-up lyrical style so persistently that passages risk slipping into melodrama. He has a penchant for cushioning these vocal lines with orchestral chords that hug them - or else he will often double the voices or write counter-melodies with extended lines for strings. Blanchard mixes sputtered spoken moments into vocal phrases that unfold in a jazz equivalent of Italianate arioso. The resulting musical setting is clear and natural. The use of spirit-like characters is another familiar device in opera, and here - with Angel Blue bringing her luminous soprano voice and unforced charisma to the dual role - it is more affecting than the cliché it could easily have been. The opera also creates a twofold female character, Destiny and Loneliness, to embody qualities that haunt Charles. During long stretches of Act I, Charles hovers around Char’es-Baby, issuing warnings the boy can’t hear, and they sometimes sing in duo, with winding lyrical lines over mellow harmonies. The device of having a character be portrayed by two singers at different stages of life goes back a long way in opera, and works powerfully here. In the next scene, his 7-year-old self, Char’es-Baby, is played by Walter Russell III, an endearingly gangly and sweet-toned boy soprano. When the opera opens, we see Charles (the muscular-voiced baritone Will Liverman, in a breakthrough performance) as a college student, speeding home, pistol in hand, bent on revenge for having been molested as a boy by his older cousin.
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