Riffing on Rossini, Lyric Opera’s ‘Factotum’ started as a South Side Chicago comic opera. But its creators had bigger ideas.

Sometime around his fourth “The Barber of Seville,” Chicago-based operatic baritone Will Liverman realized he’d been hounded by the same “nugget of an idea” for years.

That idea was inspired by the Rossini comic opera warhorse, in which Liverman found himself once again singing the role of the wily barber, Figaro. Premiering in 1816, “The Barber of Seville” came from the Pierre Beaumarchais comedy of the same name. And now, in 2023, the world has a new barber for a new century (ours) and a new locale (also ours).

“The Factotum,” its title from Rossini’s delicious entrance aria for Figaro, “Largo al Factotum,” relocates the story mainly to Master Kutz. This is a South Side Chicago barbershop and salon where everybody knows everybody. The shop’s owned by two brothers: upright, God-fearing community pillar Mike (Liverman) and numbers-running, cops-evading Garby (Norman Garrett). This rivalry of baritones is matched only by the brothers’ protective feelings toward their niece, Cece (Nissi Shalome). She is off to Howard University in the fall; she’s also mourning the death of her mother.

The score of “The Factotum” is the result of a long collaborative friendship between Liverman and his high school classmate now known as DJ King Rico. (The project’s libretto is credited to Liverman, Rico and the director, Rajendra Ramoon Maharaj.)

The arias, quartets, octets and musical styles roam widely, from trap and hip hop to rhythm and blues and Broadway, showcasing performers both opera- and musical theater-trained. It’s nothing like “The Barber of Seville” really; this isn’t one of those quaint, one-joke updates of a classic, partly because it isn’t joking. It feels fresh and, at its best, the score is terrific.

The day after a preview performance I talked to Liverman (who returns to the Metropolitan Opera later this year in a new work about Malcolm X) and Rico, just before their official world premiere by Lyric Opera at the Harris Theater. Chicago’s reviews of “The Factotum” ranged from “vibrant, often heartwarming” (Sun-Times) to nothing less than ”an extraordinary event in Chicago’s cultural history” (Tribune). The entire creative team comprises Black artists and artists of color; the same goes for the ensemble delivering on stage.

The conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Phillips: The definitions of musical theater and certainly opera are slowly, finally broadening, enough so that we get something like I saw yesterday: “The Factotum.” Will, when did you start thinking about taking the building blocks of the Rossini opera to the South Side?

Liverman: The fall of 2018 was when we started work in Rico’s studio in Brooklyn, sharing ideas of characters, the music, the sound we wanted. Two or three years before that, I wrote an essay to Three Arts (the Chicago nonprofit funding agency) about my dream projects. And this was one of them. It was sparked by a Jonathan Larson documentary about how he came up with “Rent,” which was based on Puccini’s “La Bohème.” But I sat on the idea for a while. I thought someone else should write it.

Phillips: Why someone else?

Liverman: I was a singer! I mean, creating was always there for me, but I didn’t study composition, I didn’t know orchestration, I hadn’t done enough with lyrics. Too many roadblocks, I guess. But when Rico and I started to collaborate, he really helped me get out of the box. In his studio, the possibilities felt limitless.

Rico: Those early conversations were about me getting into Will’s brain space. “What do you like about the Rossini score?” “What about ‘Barber of Seville’ attracts you to it?”

Liverman: That following year, 2021, we came back together on “The Factotum.” This was around the time I made my Met debut (”Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” later presented by Lyric Opera). Then we started finding our sound. That’s when started bringing in other singers. We had a demo session, enough material for four, five songs. We had a storyline and some material. The challenge was to find the cohesiveness. We had to figure out what our story was and how far to leave specific references to “Barber of Seville” behind.

Phillips: Rossini wrote an opera buffa, an essentially frivolous piece with a whole lot of gorgeous music. It’s a comedy. With “The Factotum” you’re pushing a lot of the storyline right to the edge of tragedy, up to and including an instance of police brutality. I’m sure this is the first time the phrase “bitch-ass pigs” has been spoken or sung in a Lyric Opera production. And it’s dramatically motivated, at a moment of peak frustration!

Rico: (laughs) It was interesting yesterday at the final dress performance. We had lots of students, and at some moments, we got some nervous laughter. But they seemed to be really listening to the story. I think in a lot of our communities, we have to laugh at certain things to keep from crying.

We want to help people through some of what they’re feeling, through our work. It’s part of all of our experience. And that’s why we tried to keep it authentic no matter what we were doing with the music or the story.

Liverman: Exactly. I started with the idea that we need more comic operas in the world, let’s write one. But then thinking about our points of view, and who were are, Rico and I couldn’t leave out the real world. We wanted to show Black people as complete human beings, who know joy, tragedy, everything. We wanted to show how families can come together, even after disagreements and a falling-out. That’s what we wanted to add to the repertoire.

Phillips: In Act 2 especially, you can feel the audience steeling itself for the worst. We’ve all seen Black stories play out that way, on screens, in life, over and over. Yet that doesn’t happen here. Did earlier versions play around with different ideas on where to take the story?

Rico: Yeah. We thought about, well, what if the system won, in the sense of the family breaking up, the brothers breaking up. It certainly happens all the time: The system wins, whether it’s someone going to jail, or someone getting murdered. But no, I don’t think we ever tried any too-tragic versions.

Phillips: In musical projects and non-musicals, whether it’s the work of a Black creative team or not, we’ve seen plenty of “relocation” productions or adaptations based on opera, Shakespeare, other sources, where something feels utterly fraudulent. Gimmicky. In the past, these were often white artists appropriating Black culture and basically failing to transcend the gimmick. Can you talk about the challenge of culturally relocating source material in ways that felt right to you?

Rico: I mean, that goes both ways, right? You look at something like (the film version of) “The Color Purple” directed by Steven Spielberg. It’s all a matter of gatekeepers and who’s in charge. For us, going the other way, we wanted a complete re-imagining. We were creating a new lane for ourselves. There are hints of “The Barber of Seville,” but only hints. We borrow bits and pieces. All artists do that — Black, white, whatever. Look at Elvis. Look at what Elvis Presley did! What Elvis did didn’t really come from Elvis. (laughs)

Phillips: According to Baz Luhrmann’s movie, that’s OK because Elvis stole his sound from Black folks in the nicest possible way.

Rico: (laughs) Look, at the end of the day, art transcends color. It’s about telling stories from your most authentic self. Pulling from what you know, and what you’ve been through.

Liverman: That’s paramount. With our storyline, we’re trying to fit our authentic selves into what we think opera should or could be.

Rico: Will and I were very intentional that we weren’t going to shy away from using 808s (a low-end, high-impact electronic percussion sample) or hip-hop or R&B and then incorporating opera into all that. And all that allowed space for Maleek Washington, our choreographer, to really use the dancers.

Liverman: The scary thing was to see if it all clicked, and how people responded. We were reexamining our work all the time. The role of Chantel, played by Melody Betts — we originally thought of that character as a pure operatic voice. But as we rewrote it, we had Melody do the second workshop. She’s more of a straight-ahead musical theater singer. And the way she delivers, it’s exactly what we needed.

We always hear about how opera encompasses all the other art forms. So why not have a few musical theater singers? Why not have a strong dance element?

Phillips: And now? What’s next?

Rico: We’re always looking for ways to elevate what we’ve got. By the time we get to Houston, it’ll be elevated even more.

Liverman: Houston in December, and then Portland and Washington, D.C., in 2024. Those are official. And there’s more interest as well. We’re looking forward to more negotiations. I can’t say a lot, but: Whoever hasn’t talked to us about “The Factotum” yet, they’re missing out! And I’m pretty sure we’ll be back in Chicago at some point, this time on the Lyric stage.

Lyric Opera of Chicago’s production of “The Factotum” continues at the Harris Theater, 205 E. Randolph St., through Feb. 12; tickets (the run is mostly sold out) and more information at www.lyricopera.org

Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.

mjphillips@chicagotribune.com

Twitter @phillipstribune