Champ
Earlier this month, I was invited to write a blurb for Scott Alexander Hess’s “Hot Lit” newsletter:
“I’ve been excited to review the Met Opera’s production of Terence Blanchard’s Champion ever since it announced its 2022-2023 season more than a year ago
In the wake of the pandemic, I had reviewed Fire Shut Up in My Bones, another opera by Blanchard, for the Provincetown Independent. It was, shockingly, the Met’s first production by a Black composer.
I noticed, however, that Fire, though engaging heartily with issues of race, somewhat glossed over Charles M. Blow’s bisexuality (an important part of the memoir upon which it’s based).
Champion, written several years before Fire, is based on the life of closeted boxer Emile Griffith — sung by Eric Owens and Ryan Speedo Greene — who accidentally kills his homophobic opponent in the ring. It’s notable that Blanchard is a straight composer writing about LGBTQ themes.
One thing I’ll be looking for — when I review Champion for my substack, Poison Put to Sound, after opening night on Monday, April 10 — is how the Met’s production portrays Griffith’s queerness.
Will it be glossed over, yet again, or will it be championed?”
To answer the question I posited: Though impressed by the Met’s production, I wondered why the word “bisexual” was noticeably missing from the program. It seems to me that Champion’s boldness was not reflected in its promotion.
On opening night, I noticed a lot of similarities between Fire and Champion. Both operas are about Black bisexual men, sung by bass-baritones. (Owens and Greene as old and young Emile, respectively, in Champion; Will Liverman as Charles in Fire.)
And both feature the protagonists as children. (Ethan Joseph is “little Emile” in Champion; Walter Russell III as “Char’es Baby” in Fire)
Fire Shut Up in My Bones, which is being revived for the Met’s 2023-2034 season, has been hugely influential on Black opera. In February, I wrote about Lyric Opera of Chicago’s The Factotum, which Liverman co-wrote with DJ King Rico. Though The Factotum isn’t about queerness, it is about masculinity.
Champion opens with Owens’s aria: “This is my shoe. My shoe goes where?” Suffering from dementia, the old Emile is haunted by his past. The shoe’s symbolism, however, is unclear: Is it about identity? Sexuality? Life paths?
To me, Michael Cristofer’s rhyming libretto felt repetitive. Perhaps meant to show Emile’s senility, it just made me impatient.
The opera really gets started with a colorful “St. Thomas” flashback, featuring Caribbean percussion, dancers on stilts, and Nick Cave-esque costumes.
Emile comes to America to find success as, believe it or not, a hatmaker and singer. As the hatstore-owner-turned-boxing-manager Howie Albert, tenor Paul Groves singes: “You’re telling me a boy with a body built like a brick shithouse wants to fiddle with fake flowers?”
Lee Wilkof, as the ring announcer, expresses what everyone’s thinking: “What is it with all this hat business?”
Emile’s neglectful “Mommie,” Emelda, is sung by soprano Latonia Moore, who was Charles’s mother in Fire. To me, her voice sounded a bit frigid, but that may have been purposeful. (She is more humanized in an aria with jazz bass in Act II.)
The production makes adventurous choices, such as scenes of dancing boxers doing calisthenics, showing the sport’s homoeroticism. Who says opera singers can’t be buff?
It was with the gay nightclub scene, however, that I thought to myself, “This feels like home.” The place is described as having a “door with no sign, street with no name, room with no light.”
I was totally won-over by bar-owner Kathy Hagen, sung by mezzo Stephanie Blythe, who exclaims, “Well, fuck me sideways.” The scene has everything: drag queens, dancers grinding on each other, and a same-sex kiss between Greene and baritone Edward Nelson
In a flashback, it’s revealed that, as a child, Emile was punished by his cousin, Blanche, forced to hold cinder blocks above his head. “She says I have the devil inside me,” he sings, asking for “evil strength” to get him through the night. It’s an almost Faustian concept.
In the fateful locker room scene, the boxer Benny Paret, sung by baritone Eric Greene, taunts, “Maybe he wants to kiss me… sissy” and “Bend over, Maracón”
When Emile tries to explain to his manager why the words hurt so much, Howie responds: “There are things I just don’t want to know.” It’s a phrase familiar to those who have tried to come out to someone undeserving.
In the ring with Paret, Greene, as Emile, sings, “There is no sound… the place is empty.” It would have been logical, in this scene, for Blanchard to harness silence.
But, instead, an uncanny chorus sweetly sings, “Maracón.” The bell rings, and lights out.
While Act I was almost two hours; Act II was only one hour. Yannick Nézet-Séguin — wearing something in between a track suit and tuxedo — did a funny boxing bit as he re-entered the conductor’s podium.
In Act II, the ghost of Paret haunts Emile’s tiny apartment, like in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. In a flashback, Emile falls instantly in love (or lust?) with his future wife, Sadie, for her “hot ass.”
But he’s also troubled by same-sex desire. One cruising scene has particularly strong language: “Can you fuck that hard?” sings Greene. “Rip me open.”
Outside the gay bar, six thugs with bats, calling Emile the f-word, beat him up, exacerbating his pre-existing head injuries.
In the present, Owens, as the old Emile, sings the poignant line: “I killed a man, and the world forgave me. Yet I loved a man, and the world wants to kill me.” This was, as far as I could tell, the only quote from Griffith’s autobiography.
I also wondered if, in the opera, this was a kind of coming out to Luis, his beloved caregiver.
Emile meets with Benny, Jr., also sung by Eric Greene, on a park bench. When Emile tries to atone for killing his father, Greene sings “It’s not for me to say ‘forgive.’”
In the end, Emile forgives his younger selves, embodied onstage — but for what exactly? For accidental murder? For being queer?
The latter isn’t something you need to “forgive.” In that way, the opera’s conclusion feels, to me, unsatisfying.
Of course, the real-life Griffith never got to be fully out. And so, any kind of “redemption arc” has to be incomplete.