_{The Metropolitan Opera Champion} “There wasn’t a weak performance onstage”

There’s a fistful of good reasons for seeing Champion. There’s the story, a real and strong one: the life of the sexually conflicted prizefighter Emile Griffith, haunted by his accidental killing of another boxer in the ring. There’s James Robinson’s direction, clear and cogent. There’s the design team: Allen Moyers’s sets and Greg Amitaz’s projections arrestingly envelop the Metropolitan Opera stage, Montana Levi Blanco’s costumes populate it with period color, and Donald Holder’s lighting effectively showcases them all. There’s Camille A. Brown’s energetic choreography, never intrusive. There’s Yannick Nézet-Séguin’s genre-hopping command of the brilliant Met Orchestra. And there’s the charismatic Ryan Speedo Green, at the head of a terrific cast that gives the show its expert all. 

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What’s missing from this impressive list of assets? Terence Blanchard is a crack, Grammy-winning jazzman and Oscar-nominated film-score composer, and both hats (hats, by the way, figure prominently in the plot) get donned effectively in Champion. What he isn’t, at least yet, is an opera pro. Champion was Blanchard’s first opera, written a few years before Fire Shut Up in My Bones, whose unexpected box-office success as the Met’s 2021–22 season opener got the earlier opera plugged into this season’s repertory. I wasn’t bowled over by Fire, but if my memory doesn’t err, it boasted a better, more varied score than Champion, which in most other respects I’d say was its easy superior: a more involving plot, a more relatable protagonist, less pretension—no characters named “Destiny” or “Loneliness.” Still, Michael Cristofer’s prolix text doesn’t much lend itself to musical setting; at least two thirds of its words were unintelligible, a statistic for which I don’t hold him fully to blame: Blanchard’s often uncongenial vocal lines and voice-covering scoring surely share in that—and it’s a telltale sign that a composer’s at a musical loss when he reverts to speech as often as Blanchard does. The score isn’t without highlights: Latonia Moore, as Griffith’s long-absent mother, enjoyed a couple of showy opportunities, and shared with fellow soprano Brittany Renee, as the boxer’s short-term wife, the opera’s loveliest few minutes; Stephanie Blythe, as a gay-bar proprietress, knew just how to sell her bluesy song; and in his solo lament—what for me was the opera’s most affecting number—young Ethan Joseph as Little Emile handled himself like a true professional, with the cast’s most exemplary diction. But Paul Groves’s second-act solo, as Emile’s mentor and boxing coach, was a long ten minutes of vocally ungrateful noodling; and Young Emile’s big solo, “What makes a man a man?,” which the program touts for its “Puccinian sweep,” is no more than a far-distant relation of “Vissi d’arte” or four dozen other prime Puccinian effusions. Near the opera’s end, there’s a big, Broadwayish ensemble that brings together the entire cast and chorus; in its placement and its sentiments (and its sentimentality), it strongly evokes “Make Our Garden Grow” from Bernstein’s Candide. The opera could—perhaps should—have ended there; but it didn’t, and the actual final scene registered as an anticlimactic pendant. The score, which Blanchard revised after its premiere in 2013, is still too long; and it still seems to follow the action rather than encourage it in any musically propulsive way.

There wasn’t a weak performance onstage. Eric Greene was flashily vibrant as the ill-fated, bigoted Kid Paret and gently conciliatory as his son; and Chauncey Packer, as Griffith’s adopted son and caretaker, offered stalwart support. Met veterans Blythe and Groves made their long experience count. Front and center, Eric Owens found his best Met role in years as the older, dementia-plagued Emile; and Moore, in rousing voice, found hers as the errant, extrovert mother. But it was Green, lithe and kinetic, who dominated the evening as Young Emile; a strong, handsome voice and compelling presence, he exuded the star power that last year’s Fire sorely lacked, and though I hadn’t planned to give that opera another hearing, I’ll likely check out next season’s revival, with Green newly in the central role. Nézet-Séguin—clad in a boxer’s warmup attire, surely a first for the Met orchestra pit—again made audible his firm commitment to new works. Champion is currently sharing the Met stage with La Bohème (127 years old), Aida (151), and L’elisit d’amore (190), all continuing to entertain and move twenty-first-century audiences. Will Blanchard’s opera survive into the twenty-second? Highly improbable, I’d say—but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check it out while it’s still around, and so well served.

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