With Blue, Tazewell Thompson has created a vivid and believable story of catastrophe in current American society. I’m a privileged white guy, so I can’t speak about whether this narrative is perfectly accurate or something else, but it would be easy for me to believe that everything Thompson shows us, is true.

Either way, the story is well told. The set up, development, climax, and completion easily held my attention; I was tracking closely and needing to know what was next. That is, unlike some of these “current issues” stories, Thompson doesn’t stop to dwell on his favorite parts or educate the public unnecessarily. As a result, his message is clear and full of force.

So if you’re getting tired of the ongoing news reports about police killing innocent Black people, if you’re becoming inured to the horror of these events, Thompson will take you in a new direction, showing in detail the tragedy inflicted on the parents and the community when one of these deaths occurs. The realism and the clarity of the story, and especially our trip into the internal injury caused to the parents, make this a hard show to watch.

If we’re already generally confused or frightened about the path this country is following, Blue doesn’t help to calm any of that. Certainly, Thompson tries to put a somewhat comforting ending onto this horror story, but I didn’t quite understand that ending, so I was left angry and outraged by what I had just seen. Maybe that was his goal.

It’s fair to ask whether Blue is actually an opera, because there’s nothing traditional about the way the music is applied to the story, in my opinion. My baseline, as always, is the happy era of bel canto opera, and Blue isn’t anything like that. Jeanine Tesori’s music doesn’t strike any rhythm for me; it doesn’t deliver anything that I can take away and sing to myself, and it doesn’t even fit any consistent type or category as we move through the 2½ hour production.

For sure, there are bits and pieces that sound like songs, and moments where the rhythm and the repetition feel like conventional singing. But mostly, what I am hearing is sounds and phrases that emphasize feelings like humor, happiness, worry, confusion, terror and mourning. It is music that enhances and clarifies the emotions expressed in the words and stage action. And so, since that sentence is my definition of an opera, it works. I don’t like it much, but I can tell that that’s just me; this is a well-done libretto, with music that sharpens the story: an opera.

The best example, for me, was in the frightful scene with the Mother, toward the start of Act 2, where the music describes the desperate, searing pain of loss, better than anything I have ever heard. Good god; that hurts.

On opening night, perhaps a quarter or maybe a third of the audience appeared to be Black people, and that’s really unusual at the opera house. I don’t know whether this opera was written to provide something mainly to white people, or to Black people. I asked a couple of men in the downstairs lobby what they thought of it, pointing out that I couldn’t tell very much because I’m white. One of the points they made was that it’s unfortunate that the house was not full, and they were sorry that this “Black opera” didn’t pull in more people. Well, I was sorry about that too, because there are many demographics that are not very well represented in opera audiences these days, and staging Blue certainly might be one way to appeal to an untapped market, by offering something outside the traditional stories of old queens and princes.

I didn’t spend any time explaining my perspective on the empty seats, but what I was thinking is this: sure, it’s a story about Black people, but no matter who it’s aimed at, we have to remember that the story is only one part of what’s going on up on the stage. To me, it is primarily a modern opera, and that always seems to mean that we’re going to have modern, innovative music. Sorry, but if you put this kind of music in an opera, in a concert, in your phone video, or on the radio, not everybody’s going to like it. I’ve thought about this a lot, and even written about it: this music isn’t for the general public, in my opinion. This is clever, strange, advanced music, and here we have singers going along with that, so the combination sounds unfamiliar and harsh and uncomfortable. Probably a big success for the composers who create this sort of thing, but unless I’m very much mistaken, this isn’t music that’s going to draw a crowd or fill the seats. This music could be set to a black opera or a white opera or a green opera, and not too many of us are going to buy a ticket to go hear it.

I merely mentioned to the two gentlemen downstairs that I wasn’t enjoying this music and I didn’t understand it. They seemed to shy away from giving any response to that, but I didn’t know why. Were they loving this kind of musical presentation that resonated with their own culture and story? Were they silently thinking “this white guy doesn’t get our music”? Possibly, but because of the wide diversity in Tesori’s composition, I couldn’t believe that the score could consistently fall on welcoming ears in any demographic. In fact, it’s possible that no one at all could sit through this wild and ever-changing soundscape and think that every bit of it was precisely for them. My initial impression was that the two guys I was talking to were mainly thinking about the story, and I don’t blame them. As I said, the story is a really bitter pill to swallow.

Just as with The Righteous, another brand new opera (which I saw a few months ago), I was aggravated to hear singing where it wasn’t necessary, and where it didn’t quite belong. When I’m watching one of these shows and a character on stage sings through some banal conversational sentence, it just feels like they’ve pasted music onto a stage play for no obvious reason. On the other hand, I’m not sure how it would impact the continuity, and the overall feel if they stopped singing from time to time, and used straight speech for these simple exchanges that happen within the narrative. I’m guessing that wouldn’t feel very good either. I want music all the way through; I just don’t know what you’re supposed to do when the libretto calls for a non-lyrical, unbeautiful sentence.

(To study this, I might rewatch Cassandra, an opera that’s just a year old and has very weird music, but in my memory it didn’t have any bits of standard conversation that they had forced music upon. Somehow it flowed better and I’m kind of curious about how they did it.)

But that’s my only real gripe; it’s an opera that has a few characteristics that I don’t care for, but it definitely qualifies in the genre. No matter what demographic or culture you’re coming from, you’ll probably go away pretty upset, mostly depressed and significantly affected by Blue. And I think the music does its job, whether or not you like to listen to those sounds and rhythms.

Is there any way to create an opera that addresses modern, relatable issues, and also has touching, enjoyable music? Must we always go for tonal experimentation just because it’s composed after the year 1900? I, too, ask the question of who this opera is aimed at, and unfortunately, one of my answers is “people who understand cutting edge, musical innovation of the 21st century“. But if I’m right, then how are you ever going to fill the seats, whether it’s on opening night or at the end of the run? A lot of us don’t get this stuff, even though we’re interested in the story, and captivated by the production.