Terence Blanchard’s Champion Finds a Home at New Orleans Opera

NEW ORLEANS -- Since its June 2013 premiere at Opera Theater of Saint Louis, Terence Blanchard’s jazz-infused Champion has been staged in San Francisco and Washington, D.C. – not a bad track record for a contemporary work that manages to embrace themes of racial and sexual identity, violence, and onerous guilt within the span of approximately two hours.

On March 9, the New Orleans Opera Association offered the first of two performances of Champion as part of its subscription season at the Mahalia Jackson Theater for the Performing Arts. This large, multipurpose space proved a hospitable environment for a piece that, while not explicitly grand in its exterior proportions, possesses formidable emotional scope. It is far from perfect, at times compromised by an episodic narrative that uncomfortably pushes and pulls elements of time and space. Nonetheless, there is enough substance to mark Champion as a significant contribution to the contemporary operatic canon.

Much of the original Saint Louis cast participated in this production. Chief among the principal singers was Arthur Woodley, who essays an elderly, physiologically and psychologically compromised Griffith passing his days in a drab assisted living facility. Grappling with the debilitating effects of multiple concussions, barely able to tie his own shoes, he is a figure confined within his own broken memories. Told as a series of flashbacks, Champion recounts a career defined as much by “what ifs” as by actual achievements.

Blanchard subtitles Champion as An Opera in Jazz, and this is a vitally important notion to keep in mind when considering what the work is about. It’s not simply a musical allusion—Champion employs a jazz quartet alongside a traditional orchestra—but a narrative one. The work curves inside and out in a sequence of riffs, transporting us to a raucous bar in one scene, to a stylized boxing ring in another, where the young Griffith (the vigorous bass-baritone Aubrey Allicock) pummels Benny “The Kid” Paret (Anthony P. McGlaun) into a coma from which he never recovers.

Librettist Michael Cristofer, best known for his play The Shadow Box (which captured the 1977 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and Tony Award for Best Play), devotes a great deal of time within Champion deconstructing Griffith’s anguish over Paret’s death, which ultimately is as much a part of the narrative as Griffith’s inability to come to terms with his own homosexuality: No matter how vehemently he tries to suppress it—enduring the denials by his well-intentioned manager (a marvelously cantankerous Robert Orth) or even by taking a wife (Cherita Monché Covington)—he is seldom more than a few millimeters away from unraveling. It is this desperate, ultimately un-suppressible truth that makes Champion transcend the boundaries of routine biography.

There was a natural connection to mounting Champion in New Orleans, the jazz-infused metropolis where Blanchard was born and which seethes with a unique blended energy of soulfulness and dysfunction. Guided shrewdly by stage director James Robinson (OTSL’s Artistic Director) and conductor George Manahan (leading members of the Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra and the New Orleans Opera Chorus), the overall effort reflected deep, collective comfort with the idiom at hand.

As you’d expect from a staging with numerous veterans of previous productions, the merits of the piece emerged without undue distraction. By far the most persuasive singing came courtesy of soprano Karen Slack, who embraced the arduous assignment of Emile’s mother Emelda –  a personality by turns repulsive, pathetic, and finally capable of surprising sympathy – with exceptional interpretive instincts and superb vocal technique.

The production’s restless, swirling energy in several sequences was a prime asset, typified by a soaring and collapsing dramatic arc as dancers from the Marigny Opera Ballet deposit trophy after trophy symbolizing Griffith’s glory years, only to snatch them away as his boxing skills deteriorate. This creates a kind of wicked, tragically modulated momentum that strips a so-called hero of everything we might regard as heroic. What is left, as the aging Griffith contemplates the wreckage of his career next to the ministrations of his adopted son Luis (a gently sympathetic Brian Arreola), is a coming to terms with self, choices, and ultimate fate.

A broader question, not immediately answerable by a single evening, is how Champion is likely to fare in the context of contemporary repertoire. There is very little in Blanchard’s score that poses an obstacle to even the least experienced opera-goer. We have seen success when the original cast members are available. For “Champion” to thrive further, it will be necessary to appeal to an expanded constituency on stage and off.

Pictured:  Terrence Blanchard