You know this story, right? There was this left-wing black revolutionary movement called MOVE. They set up headquarters in Philadelphia, and apparently they were annoying their neighbors by making too much noise and leaving garbage all around. The police tried to evict them, but they refused to leave, so they reacted in the only reasonable fashion: by firebombing the building from a fucking helicopter, burning down sixty-five houses in the area and killing eleven people, including five children. It's one of those stories where if you don't know it, you think, wait, that can't be real--that can't be something that happened in America. Well, maybe you wouldn't think that these days. Regardless...there it is.
Anyway, this is definitely the most topical opera I could possibly have chosen to watch. It takes place in present-day Philadelphia. After semi-accidentally killing a kid who's causing trouble, five teenagers decide to take shelter in one of the condemned, bombed-out houses from the 1985 bombing. A Latina cop tries to get them to leave, and accidentally shoots and wounds one of them. They wrestle away her gun and take her captive. But this house is haunted by the ghosts of the past. What will happen?
Well, actually, "what will happen?" probably is not the most relevant question here. This opera does have a plot, but it's mainly about interrogating the forces shaping these people's lives, the injustices of our society, and the ways that the past isn't even the past. It's definitely willing to be intersectional and complicate narratives: one of the kids is white, and of course, there's the fact that the cop--the putative antagonist, though you couldn't really call her a villain--is a woman of color; police culture may be fundamentally a white-supremacist construct, but that doesn't mean, obviously, that all cops are white, nor indeed that all of them are propping up the system, at least not intentionally. Perhaps most strikingly, one of the kids is trans, and how all these factors go together is interesting and powerful. The libretto is, admittedly, occasionally a bit clumsy and perhaps overly didactic, but it's telling an important story.
Well, actually, "what will happen?" probably is not the most relevant question here. This opera does have a plot, but it's mainly about interrogating the forces shaping these people's lives, the injustices of our society, and the ways that the past isn't even the past. It's definitely willing to be intersectional and complicate narratives: one of the kids is white, and of course, there's the fact that the cop--the putative antagonist, though you couldn't really call her a villain--is a woman of color; police culture may be fundamentally a white-supremacist construct, but that doesn't mean, obviously, that all cops are white, nor indeed that all of them are propping up the system, at least not intentionally. Perhaps most strikingly, one of the kids is trans, and how all these factors go together is interesting and powerful. The libretto is, admittedly, occasionally a bit clumsy and perhaps overly didactic, but it's telling an important story.
The music definitely has a core of operatic romanticism, but it's also strongly inflected with gospel, R&B, and hip-hop. It's very good; I'd never heard its like before. The cast is good too, the highlight for me being John Holliday as John Blue, the transgender kid. I may be biased in favor of countertenors (okay, I definitely am), but he has an interesting voice and I'd love to see him in baroque repertoire. His wikipedia page says he's sung both Handel and Vivaldi.
Porgy & Bess is all very well, but as far as operas about the African-American experience (recognizing of course that that is not a singular, homogenous thing), this somehow seems more relevant--and of course, the fact that it has a black composer and a black librettist (Marc Bamuthi Joseph) makes things feel less implicitly uncomfortable. Opera Philadelphia actually commissioned it back in the day, and they couldn't have picked a more appropriate time to put it up for streaming. These days, I'm a bit jaundiced about art's ability to actually effect social change, but that doesn't mean that that art shouldn't be celebrated when it's well-done.
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