New York

Opening night of the Metropolitan Opera on Monday was a major event: The country’s largest opera company returned to the stage after 18 months. The vaccinated and masked capacity audience was thrilled just to be there, cheering when the lights went down for the orchestra to tune. And the standing ovation that erupted at the end of...

New York

Opening night of the Metropolitan Opera on Monday was a major event: The country’s largest opera company returned to the stage after 18 months. The vaccinated and masked capacity audience was thrilled just to be there, cheering when the lights went down for the orchestra to tune. And the standing ovation that erupted at the end of Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” was nearly earsplitting, a demonstration of appreciation for the Met’s first-ever opera by a Black composer.

I first saw “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” in 2019, when it had its world premiere at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis. It played differently in the Met’s much larger space, with some of its more intimate moments receding and its grand-opera aspects coming into their own. Mr. Blanchard and librettist Kasi Lemmons also added new material; the chorus was much larger; and Camille A. Brown, who co-directed the Met production with James Robinson, created several vivid new dance numbers.

Will Liverman as Charles

Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera

Based on the memoir by Charles M. Blow, a New York Times columnist, “Fire” depicts a challenging childhood, rife with poverty, infidelity and violence, in the small town of Gibsland, La. The youngest of five boys, dreamy Charles—or Char’es-Baby, as he’s called by everyone—longs for attention from Billie, his distracted mother, and is convinced of his otherness when he is sexually molested, at age 7, by an older cousin. As he gets older, his sleep is haunted by “beautiful phantoms”: Sex with a female classmate, baptism and initiation into a college fraternity can’t banish them, or the shame that he carries “in a holster ’round my waist.” The opera opens with 20-year-old Charles heading home to Gibsland with a gun to kill the cousin who assaulted him; the rest is a flashback to how he got there.

Scaled up and adapted for the Met, Allen Moyer’s spare sets, with lighting by Christopher Akerlind, looked great. A large, movable open box represented the family’s wooden shack, an abandoned forest cabin, a car, or a plain wall; Greg Emetaz’s shadowy projections—vintage black-and-white photos of houses, a highway at night, a tree-surrounded pond and, most dramatically, a huge image of Char’es-Baby’s haunted face during the assault scene—created atmosphere. The costumes by Paul Tazewell, new to the team for the Met, had a lively vibe, especially the ’70s party outfits for the scene in the seedy bar where Billie pulls a gun on her cheating husband and his girlfriend. Mr. Robinson and Ms. Brown used the expanded ensemble effectively to show the claustrophobia of the community that surrounds Charles, as well as his isolation within it.

Ms. Brown’s dances added new texture and nuance. At the beginning of Act 2, a “dream ballet”—with 12 male dancers fluidly personifying those “beautiful phantoms”—clarified the teenage Charles’s anguished guilt. At the beginning of Act 3, the dancers, now a close-knit band of fraternity brothers, stomped, clapped and slapped out a ferocious step routine. Its athleticism and sheer testosterone were riveting, and the fraternity hazing scenes that followed seemed doubly menacing.

Walter Russell III as Char’es-Baby

Photo: Ken Howard/Met Opera

“Fire” has some unusual character devices. Charles (baritone Will Liverman ) watches his younger self ( Walter Russell III, a boy treble); sometimes they sing together. Destiny and Loneliness, voices in Charles’s head, are personified by a soprano (Angel Blue). In St. Louis, the intimate relationship of Charles and Destiny/Loneliness came across powerfully; at the Met, especially in Act I, Billie (soprano Latonia Moore ) became the dominant force as she dealt with her sons, her cheating husband, her struggle to make ends meet, and her disappointments in grandly scaled emotion and vocalism.

While the big house swallowed some of its textual detail, the deftly structured, cinematic libretto maintained its theatrical momentum. The orchestra, under the enthusiastic direction of Yannick Nézet-Séguin, brought richness and sweep to the score, though it tended to overpower the singers. The women, particularly Ms. Moore and Ms. Blue, were better able to cut through the sound; Mr. Liverman’s impassioned delivery in his arias of pain and fury could not always manage it; he was most effective in quieter, rhapsodic moments, like the love scene with his college girlfriend Greta (also sung by Ms. Blue).

Ms. Blue brought warm, seductive charisma to her roles; her Act 1 aria, “There once was a boy of peculiar grace,” was particularly alluring. She was also skilled at playing with the orchestra rhythm quartet (piano, bass, guitar and drums) that inflected some of the numbers with a jazz swing; she bent pitches and took time to create a freer delivery. Mr. Blanchard’s music—catchy, up-tempo showpieces like the naughty, bluesy ensemble in the bar (its refrain is “Lord love the sinner”) and wistful laments like the Billie/Charles duet, “Where did Love lose me?”—was tuneful and expansive.

Notable supporting players in the big cast included Chauncey Packer as Spinner, Billie’s charming but cheating husband; Briana Hunter as his girlfriend Ruby; Ryan Speedo Green as Uncle Paul, who teaches Charles life lessons from farming; Chris Kenney as the jaunty, predatory Cousin Chester; and Donovan Singletary doubling as the baptizing Pastor and the scary fraternity pledge-hazer Kaboom.

The story has a happy ending—its protagonist, after all, is now a well-known journalist, who took a curtain call with the cast and production team. Even more critically, the Met has finally welcomed Black creators telling a complex, contemporary story of a Black man. May that openness be just the beginning.

—Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal.