Review: ‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’ at Lyric Opera is Terence Blanchard’s groundbreaking work, full of joy and pain
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“Love with a laugh only goes so far.” Those eight words, which I heard sung Thursday night from the stage of the Lyric Opera of Chicago, have interfered with my sleep.
They convey a great truth about parenting and allyship; they are a poetic encapsulation within a fine libretto but also the ultimate revelation of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the richly emotional 2019 opera from the acclaimed jazz musician Terence Blanchard and the librettist Kasi Lemmons. The dominant conflicts within almost all other operas are interpersonal or situational. “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” which is based on the book by the columnist Charles M. Blow, is driven, musically and dramatically, by one man’s psychological journey. This is an operatic journey toward self-awareness and it is a voyage of considerable complexity.
On the one hand, it argues, we all must learn that “sometimes you just gotta leave it in the road.” On the other, Blanchard and Lemmons’ opera rails against denial and complicity with every note. To put all that more simply, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” declares you must learn not to be subsumed by pain but you must be loved in full dimensions to be able to do so.
Thursday at the gilded Lyric Opera House, the historical weight of this opening night was not formally remarked upon but self-evident. Aside from the relative rarity of any contemporary opera, here was the work of a present Black composer, and multi-Grammy winner, watching a production of his second opera, a Black lyricist, a Black co-director and original choreographer in Camille A. Brown (James Robinson co-directs; Brown’s choreography is riveting) and a rich leading performance from Will Liverman, a rising international baritone with roots in Chicago, singing with an almost entirely Black company.
The audience was more diverse than any opening night at this august institution than I’ve ever attended. Much of this also was true, of course, when “Fire” opened at the Metropolitan Opera in New York last September, with much the same company and creative team. The piece premiered in a more intimate setting at the Opera of St. Louis in 2019 and thus the Lyric’s production is not just a return to the Midwest but a landing in a city where generations of talented young Black men from small-town Louisiana long have aspired to go, once they’d decided to escape to points north.
Add to all of that the subject matter of the opera: a prodigiously talented man from Louisiana (Liverman) trying to recover his life following an incident of childhood abuse by a visiting cousin (played by Chris Kenney), a man looking back on his boyhood and confronting both his own shame and his lack of protection by adults, both his brothers and his mother Billie (the soprano Latonia Moore). Lyric has presented operas about most every subject under the sun but it’s still impossible to imagine this in the repertoire even half a generation ago. And while it may seem paradoxical, given the theme, Thursday was filled with constant joy.
Blanchard’s work is often described as contemporary opera infused with gospel, blues and jazz. That’s not quite how it landed with me: Rather, under the baton of Daniela Candillari, you hear Blanchard’s driving confidence in operatic mode, both harmonic and dissident, both aware of European formative precedent and sharply critical in subtle ways. Under of all that, you feel a bubbling undercurrent of recognizably contemporary music flowing in and out from the specific circumstances of the setting. It’s always far more than background, but it tends to exempt both Charles and Billie, an expressionistic decision, I think, by a composer whose dominant theme is striking out from the calcified expectations of small-town life and who has a hero constantly referenced in the libretto as being of “peculiar grace.”
Sure, Blanchard is influenced by these American forms and their roots in community; he sees their possibility, as manifest by the girlfriend, Greta, in whom he hopes and yet fails to find salvation. (Greta is played Brittany Renee, who also plays other parts on Charles’ “everyman”-like journey and who innately grasps all of her characters’ roles.) But Blanchard surely is also interested in probing musically a kind of third way for a Black man journeying back into his own past and trying to decide how to confront its legacy.
At one point, Billie references having raised five sons (they all are exuberantly sung in the opera, both as boys and young men) and being, well, finally done now.
Blanchard, though, is exploring her unfinished business with her youngest son, as the remarkable Moore surely understands.
Coupled with conversation with his boyhood self Char’es-Baby, movingly rendered by Benjamin Preacely, Livermore’s performance truly has an aching vulnerability, as if his character is lost on the Lyric’s huge stage, rushing through set designer Allen Moyer’s remarkable physical renderings of childhood, college hazing, expectations, abuse. Livermore is heading to a place as hard to sing about as it is to reach.
Review: “Fire Shut Up in My Bones”
When: Through April 8
Where: Lyric Opera of Chicago, 20 N. Wacker Drive
Running time: 3 hours
Tickets: $49-$299 at 312-827-5600 and lyricopera.org
