Kasi Lemmons Photo Courtesy of Complex
The Metropolitan Opera has opened its season with Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, featuring a libretto by Professor Kasi Lemmons.
Lemmons adapted the story from the eponymous memoir by the Times columnist Charles M. Blow. The book is very much an interior narrative, with Blow recounting, in lyrically candid prose, his youthful struggles to define his masculinity and his sexuality.
As put by The New Yorker, “Such a story would be nothing too newsworthy in an Off Broadway theatre or in an indie movie house, but it’s a radical novelty for the mainstream opera world, which dwells largely in the European past. This is, in fact, the first time that a Black composer and a Black librettist have found their way to the Met.”
Read more at The New Yorker.