In Missouri, the opera was presented in a 756-seat theater, roughly one-fifth the size of the Met. This issue is more problematic at the Met than it was in St. (Howard Drossin is credited with additional orchestrations.)īlanchard deploys this juiced-up lyrical style so persistently that passages risk slipping into melodrama. He has a penchant for cushioning these vocal lines with orchestral chords that hug them - or else he will often double the voices or write counter-melodies with extended lines for strings. Blanchard mixes sputtered spoken moments into vocal phrases that unfold in a jazz equivalent of Italianate arioso. The resulting musical setting is clear and natural. The use of spirit-like characters is another familiar device in opera, and here - with Angel Blue bringing her luminous soprano voice and unforced charisma to the dual role - it is more affecting than the cliché it could easily have been. The opera also creates a twofold female character, Destiny and Loneliness, to embody qualities that haunt Charles. During long stretches of Act I, Charles hovers around Char’es-Baby, issuing warnings the boy can’t hear, and they sometimes sing in duo, with winding lyrical lines over mellow harmonies. The device of having a character be portrayed by two singers at different stages of life goes back a long way in opera, and works powerfully here. In the next scene, his 7-year-old self, Char’es-Baby, is played by Walter Russell III, an endearingly gangly and sweet-toned boy soprano. When the opera opens, we see Charles (the muscular-voiced baritone Will Liverman, in a breakthrough performance) as a college student, speeding home, pistol in hand, bent on revenge for having been molested as a boy by his older cousin.
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