Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which made history when it opened the Metropolitan Opera’s 2021-22 season after the 18-month Covid shutdown, has returned. Premiered by the Opera Theatre of Saint Louis in 2019, it was the first work by a Black composer in the Met’s 138-year history. Based on The New York Times’ opinion columnist Charles Blow’s harrowing 2014 memoir of the same title, it traces the story of a young Black man’s turbulent childhood in rural Louisiana and his struggle to understand his own identity.
With a large, revolving wooden frame and other shifting elements augmented by Greg Emetaz’s huge and colorful video projections, Allen Moyer’s spare set designs economically and efficiently represent the work’s wide variety of settings – a Louisiana backroad, Charles’ ramshackle childhood home, chicken factory, bar, Baptist church, and college fraternity house. Paul Tazewell’s simple costumes do a good job of evoking different periods and settings, while co-directors James Robinson and Camille A Brown keep the action moving fluidly.
The leading roles are exceptionally well cast. As Charles, bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green was terrific, singing throughout with extraordinary emotional depth and eloquence. He was tremendously moving in his despairing soliloquies, where his powerful bass-baritone and formidable physical presence contrasted sharply with his character’s anguish and vulnerability. As the complicated Billie, Charles’ loving but distracted and volatile mother, Latonia Moore used her huge soprano and warm stage presence to deliver an inspired portrayal, her scenes with Green yielding the most memorable vocal moments of the evening.
Cast in three different roles, Brittany Renee did her best as the allegorical figures Destiny and Loneliness, one of the less inspired features of Kasi Lemmons’ weak, overly wordy libretto. Renee’s lustrous soprano and laudable acting skills were put to far better use in her Act 3 appearance as the flesh-and-blood character Greta, with whom Charles has a brief but passionate affair. As Char’es Baby (Charles as a young boy), twelve-year-old treble Ethan Joseph sang and acted with the confidence and fervor of a seasoned performer.
The large supporting cast was correspondingly excellent, especially the captivating tenor Chauncey Packer, a clear-voiced, stand-out as Spinner, Billie’s skirt-chasing husband. As the kindly Uncle Paul who takes in Billie and her five sons, Met stalwart Kevin Short, with his booming bass-baritone, was a large, likeable presence. In the demanding role of Chester, the malevolent older cousin who molests the seven-year-old Charles, baritone Daniel Rich was suitably repulsive. The vocally arresting bass-baritone Blake Denson, double cast as the inspirational pastor in a rousing church service, and as the drill sergeant in a decidedly degrading college fraternity hazing, expertly carried out both assignments.
Unfortunately, the uniformly fine performances of the cast were not enough to disguise the opera’s problematic score. With no memorable melodies – and several stretches with no music at all – Blanchard’s pallid, mostly plodding musical creation offers little to praise beyond some toe-tapping tunes in a melodramatic mélange of jazz, blues and gospel with traces of big band brass. With a four-member rhythm section embedded in the Met’s huge orchestra, the score fluctuates between strongly rhythmic passages, lushly sentimental tunes and a few haunting lines. The music is its most radiant in the relatively soft orchestral interludes. In the pit, Evan Rogister conducted the Met Orchestra competently but had little success at camouflaging the fundamental blandness of Blanchard's score.
More expressive and memorable than the music was Brown’s imaginative choreography, in particular the dream ballet sequence of repressed gay desire at the beginning of Act 2 and the fraternity brothers’ energetic, showstopping step dance sequence (oddly without music) in Act 3. One wished that the score and libretto had been equally impressive.
