The production’s direction is co-credited to James Robinson and Camille A. Brown. Robinson is the artistic director of the St. Louis company, and in effect commissioned Fire, as he had Blanchard’s previous opera, Champion, which is about the bisexual boxer Emile Griffith, now unfortunately remembered chiefly for the death of Bernie Paret at his hands in the ring. Robinson is the director of the aforementioned Met Porgy; I also recall an updated La Bohème at the NYCO. Brown, a choreographer, also collaborated on Porgy and has choreographed a number of Broadway productions.^(I) On the whole, I thought that they and their design team (Allen Moyer, set; Paul Tazewell, costumes; Christopher Akerlind, lights; and Greg Emetaz, projections) dealt about as well as they could with getting this somewhat reluctant opera forward on the Met stage. The primary set piece was an open shed-like structure that, at different angles and under changing light sets, adapted well—sometime evocatively—to the sequence of scenes. I am seldom a fan of projections in live theatre situations, but these at least stood still once in place, and gave some sense of locale. The staging per se seemed fine to me, and was in some transitional passages aided by Brown’s morphings from naturalistic behavior to a more abstract, “sculpted movement” style of action, trying with some success to navigate the shifting levels of reality and time.

Then there were the “dances.” Male bodies writhing seem to be à la mode. We had them in Nico Muhly’s Marnie, where the writhers doubled as stage hands, and the intended affect of the writhing escaped me. Here that affect is nominally sexual, but the writhing is the same. And fairly extended writhing it is, at the top of Act 2, in a sequence apparently added for the Met presentation, intended as a fantasy of Charles’ homoerotic desires. This is, I believe, where Blanchard’s score comes closest to sustained theatricality. In an evening marked mostly by subdued, tentative applause at widely separated junctures, there were two genuine ovations. They were of a sort I associate with the annual high school musical, cheering on that quirky or sexy classmate doing his or her thing up there with heady bursts of “WOO!” over furious clapping, but they were ovations, nonetheless. One was on the appearance of the evening’s conductor, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, in a garment of many colors—”WOO!”—and the other at the conclusion of a step dance number in the hazing scene. This was sheer divertissement, again as in Baroque opera or sometimes in 19th-Century Romantic ballet insertions, having no dramatic function, but giving the boxholders a real good time for their money. And a rouser, for sure—the moves were great fun. So, “WOO!” No music here, of course.^(II) Finally, abashed though I am to evade for the second consecutive post any serious evaluation of the conducting and playing, there is again, for different reasons, little that would be responsible to say about it. Nézet-Séguin is a very accomplished musician who professes a liking for the score; his orchestra, including an imported rhythm section, is also expert; the score is not only new but in an unusual idiom, operatically speaking; everything seemed to go fine. It would be presumptuous to talk about “interpretation” with no more to go on than that.

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Fire is being celebrated for its symbolic significance, its precedence-setting example, in relation to social justice and diversity. That is understandable and appropriate, but as I implied at the top, it is not the same as considered evaluation of the work itself, which should not be made to answer for the fraught atmospherics surrounding it. As reflected in the day-to-day headlines and video images, those have settled somewhat since I wrote about their artistic implications in The Racial Moment and Opera (11/9/20). But the problems I tried to address then have by no means receded in importance. With respect to their impact on opera and on the High Culture in general (which is, obviously, predominantly AngloEuroAmerican), they are in fact gaining in importance. This review is not the place for extended further commentary on this complex and conflicted topic, though that may at some point seem necessary, in the light of new developments. Two aspects of it, though, do seem to touch on Fire. I strongly believe that in  art, artistic considerations should, insofar as practicable, govern judgments made and actions undertaken. It’s not a question of being against diversity or inclusion, but of a reluctance to give those goals priority over artistic ones. And though Fire strikes me as no worse an opera than two or three of the other contemporary ones the Met has brought us over the past decade or two, it frankly defies credulity to suppose that Peter Gelb, and/or anyone else on the Met’s artistic staff, would have seen the St. Louis production of this work and exclaimed “What a great opera! And what a perfect fit for our big old opera house!” It also seems highly unlikely that, having decided to nonetheless beef it up a bit and schedule it for a later season, these same folks decided that, artistically speaking, it was now the ideal work and cast to move up into the opening night slot of this one, the one that signaled the rebirth of opera after the longest hiatus in the institution’s history. It is patent on the face of it that nonartistic considerations influenced the first decision, and were determinant with the second. That was a disservice to the piece, which, if it had a viable future, would certainly have found it in a smaller venue, let us say the Rose Theater, where the Met could still have acted as presenter, but the auspices would have seemed less pretentious and the standing of the work vis-à-vis the canonical repertory would not have been on people’s minds. (One friend suggested it belonged on Broadway, but it would not have thriven there—no good tunes.)