Prima Facie – Golden Theatre – New York, NY

Jodie Comer stars in this play by Suzie Miller that is now playing on Broadway. Miller and Comer won Olivier Awards for Best New Play and Best Actress at this year’s Olivier Awards. Could Tony Awards all come their way?

For tickets and more information, please go here.

Good Night, Oscar – Belasco Theatre – New York, NY Sean Hayes stars in this play about Oscar Levant written by Doug Wright and directed by Lisa Peterson. The show originated in Chicago and received rave reviews for both the play and for Hayes.

For tickets and more information, please go here.

TRADE/Mary Motorhead – LA Opera at REDCAT – Los Angeles, CA – April 27^th – April 30^th

These two one-act operas by composer Emma O’Halloran and her librettist uncle, Mark O’Halloran, debuted at the Prototype Festival in New York earlier this year. Now they are in Los Angeles with original cast members Kyle Bielfield, Mark Kudisch and Naomi Louisa O’Connell in tow.

For tickets and more information, please go here.

Dee Dee Bridgewater & Bill Charlap – SFJAZZ – San Francisco April 27^th – April 30^th

Rarely have two artists so perfectly melded their talents the way jazz singer Bridgewater and pianist Charlap do in concert. I’ve seen them twice and would go again and again given the opportunity. You have the opportunity to hear how great this duo is even if you don’t live in San Francisco. Their performance on April 28^th will be streaming live at 7:30 PM PT (with an encore showing on April 29^th at 11 AM PT).  

For in-person tickets and more information, please go here. For streaming tickets and information, please go here.

Champion – Met Opera Live in HD – Cinemas Worldwide – April 29^th – 12:55 PM ET/9:55 AM PT

This Saturday the Metropolitan Opera will present Terence Blanchard’s first opera, Champion, in a live transmission from the Met in New York City. Ryan Speedo Green, Eric Owens, Latonia Moore, Stephanie Blythe, Paul Groves and Eric Greene star in this opera based on the true story of boxer Emile Griffith. The production is directed by James Robinson with choreography by Camille A. Brown (both of whom were involved in the world premiere of Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones.) Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts.

To find a theater near you, please go here.

Photo: Ryan Speedo Green in Champion (Photo by Ken Howard/Courtesy Met Opera)

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“I’ve always seen all those nuances and everything that’s written on the page and I’ve tried to do them as best I could. But then in French what’s amazing is that it just works,” he said during a recent Zoom call. “It makes more sense. In Italian you had to make sense of it and in French it already makes sense. It makes it easier to sing, but it also makes it easier to understand, not just for us, for the audience. Things are clearer. The text is clear. The intentions are clearer.”

Verdi’s opera tells the story of Don Carlos of Spain (Matthew Polenzani) and Élisabeth de Valois (Sonya Yoncheva) who are betrothed to one another. They have never met. Don Carlos sneaks away to meet this unknown woman. They fall in love. However, their happiness is quickly ruined when Carlo’s father, Philippe II (Eric Owens), announces that he’s in love with her and she is to be his bride.

Even though she is now his stepmother, Don Carlos tries multiple times to woo Élisabeth away from his father.

With the Spanish Inquisition ongoing, the affairs of all three and the appearance of a mysterious monk lead to murder plots, revenge, unrequited love and thievery.

Verdi’s opera debuted in 1867 in Paris in French. Three months later it was performed in London in Italian. That version is the one most commonly performed.

This Saturday’s performance is the last opportunity for audiences to see Dupuis as Don Carlos’ best friend, but it’s also the performance that is being made available around the world as part of Met Opera Live in HD series.

Don Carlos is Verdi’s longest opera, but Dupuis finds much to like in these lengthy works even though they might be a bit convoluted.

“I think that’s a little point, isn’t it? Let’s make this as long as complicated as we can,” he says rhetorically. “You have to understand it from going back in time when they were writing them. These people had nothing like we do to to change their minds and just turn on a machine in their living room. So when they finally got the time to dress up and go to the opera it was a six hour long business. Every opera needed to have a minimum of five acts and a ballet. The only problem when Verdi wrote it was that the opera was too long. The people would have to catch the last train. So you have to shorten it enough so that people had time to go and catch the last train. But he had written even longer than what we’re doing.”

Dupuis counts himself amongst those who are usually most comfortable when opera hues primarily to the way fans and audiences usually see them. But with Don Carlos he thinks there is a great argument for performing Verdi’s work in the original French language.

“We like things the way we know them,” he says. “It is assembled this way, conducted this way, stage like that. And so it’s really hard for anyone to come up with something new. What’s interesting is that in this case we’re not changing what Verdi wrote. We’re using what Verdi wrote. What the French triggers is perhaps the sense that you’re hearing it for the first time. It allows you to re-hear it for the first time to possibly re-experience that first-time experience of the initial moment you actually heard this. But I know it’s not easy for everybody to open up their mindset to that.”

To make his point he brings up an example of his first aria in the opera which he describes as being a bit on the boring side…until it is sung in French.

“My first aria can be very boring. It might still be, I don’t know, but it’s two verses of the same music. The entire goal of this aria is to convince the Queen to have a meeting with Don Carlos. That’s all I’m doing. But I never understood how every word is carefully chosen so that it would make sense for the Queen to accept this invitation. So it’s very interesting how I get to play with those words so much better in the French. Even though I do speak Italian, when I sing the Italian it’s an inversion of the lines. It’s so intricate to be fitting the music that I feel like I’m losing this sense that the whole time my character is talking on a second degree. That’s lost in the translation because they had to make every word fit the the musical line. Instead of fitting the music on the words it did the opposite and it didn’t allow them to have these layers of understanding.”

One of the best known arias in Don Carlo is Dieu, tu semas dans no ames. To be performing an opera that features an aria about devotion to liberty at a time when the world is crisis adds additional meaning to Don Carlo for Dupuis.

“Every word that I say just made more sense. It already made sense in a generic context of war. But if you think of my character as this guy who is following the army. He goes to Flanders and he sees what the king and most importantly, the church, the Inquisition, he sees what they’re doing to those people because they’re not of the same religious belief. They’re Protestants and so the only response that they have is we kill everyone that doesn’t think like of us. And boom! Immediately we’re like, wait, is that what Putin was saying? This country right next to us they don’t think like me. Therefore, I must crush them like this. It seemed to me that that’s exactly what was happening.”

A different language and a new awareness are just two factors that allow Dupuis to try to achieve perfection in this production and in his art. Verdi said, “I have striven for perfection, it has always eluded me, but I surely had an obligation to make one more try.” Dupuis completely agrees with the composer.

“I don’t think perfection is achievable, but I think it’s a great goal. I think the people that have obsessed a bit too much about it definitely either changed careers or drowned in their careers. I think one of the hardest things to do is to strive for perfection and then have the humility to recognize that you did your best.”

One of Dupuis’ best attempts at that was in Jake Heggie‘s opera Dead Man Walking in Montreal.

“It was by far the most successful show I’ve ever been in opera. Not one review, not one person had anything bad to say about it. But it wasn’t perfect and I know it wasn’t. What was great about it though is that there was emotion. People lived something. They experienced something. Did we go to the theater for a reason? Do we live something that made us interested in going back? I think that’s what we should strive for, but I don’t think perfection is attainable. And I think that’s OK.”

There is so much more to my conversation with Etienne Dupuis. To see the full interview, please go to our YouTube channel here.

Main photo: Etienne Dupuis (Photo by Dario Acosta/Courtesy of the artist)

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In June of 2019 we spoke with composer and musician Terence Blanchard about the world premiere of his second opera, Fire Shut Up in my Bones at Opera Theatre of St. Louis. On Monday, September 27th, the opera will have its first performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. This marks the first opera written by a Black composer to be performed at the famed New York venue. The opera will be performed eight times. The final performance on October 23rd will be streamed into theaters as part of their Met Opera Live in HD series.

The cast for the Metropolitan Opera production features Angel Blue, Will Liverman and Latonia Moore.

This is a great time to re-visit our conversation with Blanchard about Fire Shut Up in my Bones. 

Last week we spoke to Grammy winner Terence Blanchard about his gig with the E-Collective at the Playboy Jazz Festival. We also mentioned in that interview that his second opera, Fire Shut Up in my Bones, is having its world premiere this weekend at Opera Theatre of St. Louis.

The opera is based on Charles M. Blow’s memoir of the same name. Blow is an Op-Ed columnist for The New York Times. The title comes from a passage in the Bible from Jeremiah 20:9. The King James version has it as:  “Then I said, I will not make mention of him, nor speak any more in his name. But his word was in mine heart as a burning fire shut up in my bones, and I was weary with forbearing, and I could not stay.”

Collaborating with Blanchard on Fire Shut Up in my Bones is filmmaker Kasi Lemmons. Blanchard scored her films Eve’s Bayou, The Caveman’s Valentine and Talk to Me. He’s also writing the score for her new film, Harriet, about freedom fighter Harriet Tubman.

Fire Up in my Bones is Blanchard’s second opera. His first, Champion, was written with Michael Cristofer and was based on the life of boxer Emile Griffith. Champion had its world premiere in 2013.

In this column we pick up our conversation from last week and focus on Fire Shut Up in my Bones.

You’ve said that writing film requires you to put aside your ego. What does writing opera require of you?

Prayer. [He lets out an enormous laugh.] It’s hard to say. Writing opera is such a different animal. It requires a high level of focus and dedication. With this new opera, that’s two years of my life sitting down writing these melodies and putting this whole show together. It also takes great collaborators. Kasi Lemmons wrote a beautiful libretto. Jim Robinson, the director, is putting together an amazing show. 

Your life and journalist Charles Blow’s would seem to be very different. What resonated about his story and did you find commonality in his life experiences?

Obviously the first thing in the book was being molested by a family member, which is a tragic thing to go through. I’ve never been through that, but that had to be such a traumatic thing for any kid to go through. I did resonate with how his family labeled him a peculiar kid. He was smart, he had different interests. I experienced that growing up, not from my family, but the neighborhood. There weren’t too many kids going to piano lessons on Saturday and who had a father who sang opera. [Joseph Oliver Blanchard] I don’t know how to explain it. I knew those things were different, but it didn’t mean I hated those things. I loved opera. I knew others wouldn’t listen to it. I can see the same thing in Charles, his character. That’s what resonated. When you’re a kid you don’t know which way your life is going to go, but you can look back and look at those as an amalgamation of all those events.

Memoirs cover a lot of ground. How did you as Kasi Lemmons narrow the focus to make a manageable story for the opera?

A lot of that was due to Kasi. We did have a meeting with Charles Blow at the Opera Theatre of St. Louis where we sat down and talked to him and let him talk to us. He was open about major events in his life. Kasi used that session as a springboard to send her in a direction.

This is your second opera. What does writing for that form offer you that your other writing does not?

It’s different in that I have more control of the creative process. When I’m working on a film I’m helping someone else do a story. When it’s the E-Collective, it’s my own thing, but it’s within the confines of that sonic palette. With opera I have words, voices and a full orchestra at my disposal. The wild thing about it is I sit in my room and in my studio and create this music. Then you get to the point where singers are moving about the stage. It’s a phenomenal experience. Every time when we’ve gotten to this stage it blows my mind. I don’t know. It takes so much energy. One of the singers said to me, “For your third opera” and I said “Whoa. Slow your roll. This is a lot of work.”

Charles Blow said, “Trying hard and working hard is its own reward. It feeds the soul. It affirms your will and your power. And it radiates from you, lighting the way for all those who see you.” Do you agree and how does that apply to your career and life to date?

Oh yeah. This is what I try to tell my students. If you have passion for something and you work hard and study hard and put forth the effort, the sky’s the limit. One thing I believe as an artist is when you’re honest about what you are creating, you are creating something that will touch other people who are dealing with the same issues. How many times have you heard, “That songs speak to my soul?” Or “I went to a performance I was swept away and was in tears?” That only comes from people who are honest about what they do. To get there you have to get over the hump of technique and theory. You learn and you refine, but those are just tools to where we can speak clearly in a musical fashion.

Main Photo:  Walter Russell III and Will Liverman in Fire Shut Up in my Bones

Photos from Fire Shut Up in my Bones by Ken Howard/Courtesy Metropolitan Opera

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