Lyric Opera 2021-2022 Issue 7 Fire Shut Up My Bones

Lyric Opera of Chicago | 12 Indeed the dynamic between character and living man led to some uncanny moments. Liverman and Blow met at a photo shoot to promote the opera, giving Liverman the rare opportunity to interact with and examine the inspiration for his character. He observed him to be a careful observer, appropriately enough. Then the personas switched. “We did a talkback where I actually had to sing in front of him—Charles’s aria— which is so surreal to live in a character, and there is the person, right there,” Liverman says. “After the opening, one of his kids came up to me and said, ‘You did a great job portraying my father.’ When do we hear that after a show?” In another opportunity available when a piece’s creator is still alive, Fire composer Terence Blanchard made changes to the score after the show’s premiere in St. Louis to adapt it to the new casts and larger houses it would see at Lyric and the Met. The work can still live and breathe with the principals available to adapt it, expanding or contracting according to the needs of the performers and the venues. Liverman,an alumnus of Lyric’s Patrick G. and Shirley W. Ryan Opera Center, brings more new work to Lyric in the 2022/23 Season, as co-creator of The Factotum , a “soul opera” set in a South Side barbershop, based loosely on opera’s most famous barber, Figaro from The Barber of Seville . The DJ and producer King Rico is collaborating with Liverman to develop an upbeat show embracing wide-ranging musical styles, from R&B, rap, and gospel to traditional barbershop. The approaching 2022/23 mainstage season also features a ground-breaking, tripartite project titled Proximity , putting on display some of the most important artists of our time: composer Daniel Bernard Roumain working with acclaimed playwright and actress Anna Deavere Smith as librettist, for Git Here ; Caroline Shaw, as composer and co-librettist with Jocelyn Clarke for Four Portraits ; and John Luther Adams, setting a text by the late poet John Haines for Night . Yuval Sharon oversees the project as director, his first with Lyric since the Götterdämmerung -in-a-parking-garage pandemic fantasy Twilight: Gods . Renée Fleming, Lyric’s Special Projects Advisor and a prime force behind the Bel Canto premiere, curated Proximity . Charles M. Blow with Will Liverman Photo: Malike Sidibe for The New Yorker The Factotum Photo: Lyric Opera of Chicago