While themes of racial discrimination, injustice and racially motivated violence have simmered under the surface of the American musical theatre tradition for decades, rarely have they been presented in such a direct and unflinching manner as in Jeanine Tesori’s recent opera Blue. Premiered in July 2019, less than a year prior to the murder of George Floyd, librettist Tazewell Thompson’s stirring storyline recounts the fate of a family of black Americans who live in present-day Harlem.

In Act 1, a young mother-to-be excitedly informs her female friends that she is married and will soon be giving birth to a boy. Her friends are alarmed to find out that her husband is a police officer, but she declares her undying love for him. They also express fears about her baby boy, warning her: ‘Thou shalt bring forth no Black boys into this world!’ When the husband shares the same news with his police colleagues down at the local sports club, they respond far more positively.

The general atmosphere during these opening exchanges is light-hearted, carefree and jovial, supported by what Naomi André describes in her booklet notes as Tesori’s ‘polyphonic voice’, where the sounds and gestures of musical theatre are combined with vocal expression and projection that is more operatic. This is aided by Kenneth Kellogg and Briana Hunter’s strong characterisations of the roles of the father and the mother.

By the end of Act 1, however, the mood has changed as the story moves forwards several years. The father’s teenage son (sung by Aaron Crouch) is now a political activist who takes part in protests demanding racial equality. The son despises the fact that his father is a policeman and refuses to bring his friends around (‘Nobody wants to come over with a cop on the premises’).

Then, at the beginning of Act 2, we learn the son has been shot in a street protest. The father swears to seek revenge on the policeman who committed the crime. A local reverend fails in his attempts to reason with him, while the grief-stricken mother is consoled by her friends as she prepares for her son’s funeral.

The final scenes of the opera thus resemble an oratorio in its use of prayer, congregational singing and music’s power to comfort and heal. All 10 soloists are brought together in a series of increasingly passionate a cappella statements that draw melodic inspiration from both spiritual songs and Bach-like harmonic progressions. An extended Epilogue provides one final twist, where father, mother and son are reunited in a foreboding bittersweet moment, where the son reassures his parents that nothing bad will happen to him.

Blue succeeds in articulating the complex nature of race and identity in American society in a manner that is direct and immediate, and whose impact may only be fully understood in years to come.