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Like its Met premiere,Fireis both festive and tense.
For all its newsworthiness,Fire Shut Up in My Bonesis an old-fashionedoperaopera.
This is just the kind of situation that has always given opera its narrative fuel.
The passions are vintage verismo.
Not many composers outside Hollywood can glide quite so effortlessly from raunchy banter to plaintive confessional.
That occasional murkiness doesnt spill over into the production, co-directed by James Robinson and Camille A.
Brown, which deals handily with flashbacks, emotional swerves, and subtle changes in the familys economic status.
Projected photographs fill in the humid Louisiana foliage, rendered mostly in black and white.
We see Charles as a young boy trying to absorb the available lessons of manliness.
He endures his brothers bullying; he craves nothing more than a long embrace from his mom.
The men in his life, menacing or unreliable, make fleeting appearances.
His lifes, and the operas, true anchors are two female presences.
Liverman is an elegant singer, precise in his phrasing, timbre, and diction.
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