“The good news is that the Music Critics Association of North America announced today that composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist Tazewell Thompson are the recipients of its 2020 award for best new opera for their two-act tragedy and breakout [2019] Glimmerglass Festival hit, ‘Blue,’ ” writes Michael Andor Brodeur in Wednesday’s (6/17) Washington Post. “The bad news … is that … the coronavirus crisis [cancelled] the show’s scheduled March run … by Washington National Opera … as well as performances slated for the Lyric Opera of Chicago in June and Lincoln Center’s Mostly Mozart Festival in July…. ‘Blue’ paints a wrenching portrait of a black family living in Harlem and torn asunder when their only child … is shot dead by one of his father’s white colleagues. That is, a fellow cop. What may sound like a spoiler is actually the looming aura of inevitability that gives ‘Blue’ its mythic force.… ‘I want to be sitting in the audience … with a group of people … and hear these 10 people in this opera sing to the heavens,’ says Thompson. ‘Yell, scream, shout out, proclaim: Here we are! Pay attention! And that’s what opera does.’ ”
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