The Metropolitan Opera premiere of “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” on Sept. 27, 2021, was a momentous event. Doubly so: “Fire” was the company’s first staged opera after an 18-month pandemic closure, and it was, after 138 years, its first work by a Black composer.
The opera, with a score by Terence Blanchard and a libretto by Kasi Lemmons, took on some of the grandeur and excitement of that moment. The raucous fraternity step dance that opens the third act brought down the house.
That step dance still stopped the show on Monday evening, when “Fire” returned to the Met. Two and a half years later, the work is a test case. The company has sharply increased its diet of contemporary operas — some of which, including “Fire,” sold very well as new productions. But how will these operas perform when they’re brought back, without the same promotional push?
On Monday, at least, the audience seemed robust and, as it was during the initial run, notably diverse. And “Fire” remains a heartfelt piece, emanating a touching if vague sadness. But without the exhilarating sense of occasion it had at its Met premiere, the opera’s shortcomings were clearer.
Based on the New York Times columnist Charles M. Blow’s memoir of his turbulent upbringing in Louisiana, “Fire” is a progression of episodes — some upbeat, some forlorn. It takes the form of a search: The lonely Charles, his psyche wounded as a child by his cousin’s sexual abuse and his mother’s real but distracted love, looks for belonging and healing.
He tries church, fraternity membership, his siblings, a woman, another woman, but none offer what he’s seeking; all want him to be different than he is. Only after a hasty, therapy-speak conclusion in the final minutes, presided over by an ethereal choir and the voice of his younger self, can he finally accept himself and sing, “Now my life begins.”
His tone focused and secure, the bass-baritone Ryan Speedo Green was the best change from the last run, with his imposing height, physique and voice — especially in Charles’s brooding soliloquies — making a poignant contrast with the character’s suffering and vulnerability.
But even Green can’t convince us that his endless singing in unison with his younger self, “Char’es-Baby” (the treble Ethan Joseph), is anything but a clumsy way to keep the older Charles onstage during the long first act. And particularly early on, the density of the libretto makes the vocal lines a mouthful for the singers — and a lot for the audience to take in, even with the Met’s seat-back subtitles.
When the work, which had its premiere at Opera Theater of St. Louis in 2019, was new, it seemed like charmingly idiosyncratic poetic license to give the main soprano a human part to play as well as the abstract qualities of Destiny and Loneliness. But while Brittany Renee sings the tripartite role at the Met with a clear, tender tone, it’s never quite clear when she’s playing Destiny and when Loneliness — or what the distinction between the two is. (They both more or less encourage Charles’s worse instincts.)
As in “Champion,” which played at the Met last year, Blanchard sometimes gives disproportionate attention to secondary characters, especially mothers. Ending the second act of “Fire” with a big aria for Charles’s mother, Billie (the hardworking but only intermittently soaring soprano Latonia Moore), doesn’t get us deeper into her emotions than we’ve already gone, but it does distract from our focus on Charles and his pain.
On Monday, the soprano Kearstin Piper Brown made her company debut sounding bright but creamy in the cameo role of Evelyn, with whom Charles loses his virginity. James Robinson and Camille A. Brown’s staging still moved fluidly between scenes. Played with precise vitality under Evan Rogister, the principal conductor of Washington National Opera, the score sounded leaner and less overpowering (in a good way) than in 2021.
But even with a couple of haunting tunes woven throughout (as in the film scores for which Blanchard is best known), the music toggles blandly between lushly anonymous sentiment and genially percussive bluesy swing — with a four-player rhythm section embedded in the orchestra, to limited effect.
Brown’s choreography remains, as it was in 2021, the highlight of the performance. The dream ballet of stunted, guilty gay desire that opens the second act is more eloquent, concise storytelling than the opera’s sung parts. And the step sequence, rightfully central to the Met’s marketing of “Fire,” still bristles with energy, aggression, virtuosity.
But it says something about an opera when its most memorable moments are dance.
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