Boston Lyric Opera stages André Previn’s A Streetcar Named Desire, the opera version of the play that premiered down the street 79 years ago.

Blanche DuBois is no stranger to Tremont Street. She arrived there 79 years ago this week, when the pre-Broadway tryout of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire opened at the Wilbur Theatre. Playing Blanche opposite Marlon Brando’s legendary Stanley was Jessica Tandy. Renowned Boston critic Elliot Norton wrote that for the play to work, Tandy needed to break your heart, and by his account she managed it only in the final scene. By the time the play reached New York, she was breaking hearts. Brooks Atkinson in The New York Times said she gave “a superb performance as a rueful heroine whose misery Mr. Williams is tenderly recording.” She went on to share the Tony Award for best actress that season.

Blanche returns this week a few doors down from the Wilbur, in a much grander venue: the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, where Boston Lyric Opera presents the Boston premiere of André Previn’s 1998 operatic adaptation. (It is a co-production with Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, where the production played in June.) This time around she is played by Brittany Renee, making her BLO debut in a production directed by Patricia Racette with Daniela Candillari conducting. Joining Renee are David Adam Moore as Stanley, Angela Yam as Stella, and Brenton Ryan as Mitch.

A lot has changed in the 79 years since Blanche appeared at the Wilbur, especially in how the institution of opera has dealt with race. Back then, Renee would not have had the opportunity even to audition for Blanche, never mind being cast. Institutional racism ruled in 1947, and it prevented Black singers from appearing in featured roles with major companies. The exception was New York City Opera, which in 1945 cast Todd Duncan in Pagliacci and the following year soprano Camilla Williams in Madama Butterfly. Otherwise Black singers had to look to Broadway, where a number of shows requiring operatic voices were popular, including revivals of Show Boat and Porgy and Bess and newer works such as Carmen Jones and, in 1949, Lost in the Stars. The Metropolitan Opera finally broke the color line in 1955.

A Seat in Blanche’s Mind

Racette comes to directing from the other side of the footlights. A Manchester, N.H., native, she built her career as a soprano, singing at the Metropolitan Opera from 1995 and becoming best known for Puccini and Janáček. She began directing in 2018 with La traviata at Opera Theatre of Saint Louis, and she became that company’s artistic director last year. “I’ve been on both sides of the curtain,” she has said. Boston heard her early. She sang four roles in BLO’s 1992 The Tales of Hoffmann in this same theater, when Richard Dyer wrote that she “flooded the Emerson Majestic with gloriously full lyric-soprano tone.”

Her Streetcar has already been road-tested, and the St. Louis notices were strong. James Sohre of Opera Today called her direction “nothing short of miraculous.” CB Adams of Pop Life STL wrote, “Some productions try to improve the classics. This one trusts one.”

Racette’s concept is plainly stated. “I want the audience to have a seat in Blanche’s mind,” she says in BLO’s announcement, “to feel the heat, the claustrophobia, and the emotional intensity with which the story unfolds.” In St. Louis, that meant Andrew Boyce’s towering walls of weathered white shutters, part New Orleans, part cell. Across those walls Kylee Loera projected a black-and-white streetcar bearing down on the audience, and later the portrait of Blanche’s young husband, looming over the stage as he looms over her life.

“I don’t like polite opera,” Racette told St. Louis Public Radio, adding that she thinks “a woman’s sensibility” matters in understanding Stanley’s domineering streak. Yet Adams praised the restraint of her handling of the assault, which conveys its ugliness without sensationalism. That scene has a Boston history. In 1947, the city’s censors wanted it gone, and the Massachusetts Civil Liberties Union and Bernard DeVoto helped keep it in, though toned down. BLO now has an intimacy director and a content advisory.

The musical demands are formidable. Racette, whose own repertoire ran from Tosca to Jenůfa, calls this one of the most difficult scores she has confronted. Candillari, who conducted the St. Louis run, says it “doesn’t let up” from first measure to last, and that Previn rarely settles for a plain major or minor chord. Moore is the one principal carried over from St. Louis. He replaces the previously announced Thomas Glass, has been singing Stanley since at least 2013, and co-directed and co-designed BLO’s William Tell only weeks ago. Renee, by contrast, is new to the staging, and as far as her published credits show, she is singing Blanche for the first time. Angela Yam, a former BLO Emerging Artist, returns to the company as Stella.

The Impresario’s Dream

The opera began as an impresario’s obsession. San Francisco Opera’s general director, Lotfi Mansouri, called it “a dream of mine for nearly twenty years.” Leonard Bernstein was reportedly approached and showed no interest. Previn, offered a Greek or Roman subject, balked, then jumped at Williams. Why write a first full-length opera after a career that had taken in four Oscars, the London Symphony and the theme from Valley of the Dolls? “Someone asked me to,” he told the Chicago Sun-Times. “It was that simple.” He also had a theory: “I think ‘Streetcar’ is an opera already, except that it doesn’t have music.”

The premiere, on Sept. 19, 1998, was an event, and audiences were excited. Anthony Tommasini later called the critical response “decidedly mixed,” which was diplomatic; Stacey Kors reported in Salon that most critics reviled it. The sharpest complaint concerned fidelity. Philip Littell’s libretto follows the play closely, reportedly because the Williams estate required it, and much of the evening unfolds as sung conversation over an orchestral current. Kors argued that the trouble wasn’t that the play should never have become an opera: “it fails because it wasn’t turned into one.”

The case for the defense is that Previn knew what he had. Williams’s language survives, and the orchestra roams from Straussian sweep to Berg-style expressionism to New Orleans blues, with a wailing tenor saxophone standing in for Stanley’s sexual pull. Stanley’s “Stella!” went unsung at the premiere, shouted from the bottom of the stairs, as if no pitch could improve on it. And where Williams closes on the indifferent resumption of a poker game, the opera lets its last moments belong to Blanche. A diva’s exit replaces a playwright’s shrug.

What Littell left intact is the wound at the center. Blanche’s young husband, exposed by her disgust and dead by his own hand, was a daring thing to put on a stage in 1947, when one Philadelphia critic could only call him “a perverted poet.” This most celebrated of American heroines came from a gay writer who knew a good deal about performance, desire and the terror of a bare bulb. Gay audiences have never needed that subtext explained.

Whatever the notices said, the opera lasted, which is more than most premieres manage. The Sun-Times counted more than two dozen remountings by 2013, and it has traveled from New Orleans and Miami to Strasbourg, Vienna and Sydney. A South Florida reviewer may have found the settlement in 2022: not a great American opera, but a compelling evening of theater with music.

Nobody’s Understudy

It has endured on the strength of a role sopranos want, which raises the question that has trailed the piece for 28 years: Is Renée Fleming the standard by which every Blanche is measured?

She has the strongest claim. The opera wasn’t written around her, but the role was. By early 1998, NPR was reporting that Previn had composed it with her in mind, and she came to the collaboration with requests. She wanted solos she could take into the concert hall and got two, “I Want Magic!” and “I Can Smell the Sea Air.” “I gave him license to write a lot more challenging things into the part,” she told The Hollywood Reporter, specifying sustained high notes and pianissimos. The only significant change Previn made after finishing the score came at her request: a second intermission, because the evening was too draining for its soprano without one. The result is a Strauss specialist’s Blanche, tailored with couture care to a woman whose entire tragedy is that the seams are giving way. A Deutsche Grammophon recording and a PBS broadcast fixed it in place, and she remained the opera’s chief advocate, finally bringing it to New York in 2013.

But the title was never undisputed. Reviewing the premiere in The New York Times, Bernard Holland wrote that she did everything an opera singer could do and still “she leaves a hole in the opera that nothing around it can fill.” After Carnegie Hall, a BroadwayWorld reviewer was blunter: “STREETCAR is Blanche. Too bad that Fleming isn’t.” Meanwhile the role moved on. Janice Watson sang it in Vienna and Yvonne Kenny in Sydney. Beverly O’Regan Thiele graduated from covering Fleming to singing it in multiple productions. In June, in this staging, Sara Gartland drew raves in St. Louis, where Sohre called the part “a Big Sing” and found nothing in it that eluded her.

Nothing in BLO’s announcement invites the comparison, and Renee comes at the role from another direction. She shares in the Grammy for the Met’s Porgy and Bess recording, in which she sang Annie, and last season she returned to the Met as Bess. She says she chooses roles by connecting first with the narrative: “If I don’t believe in the story, I can’t bring it truthfully to life.” She also knows her conductor; Candillari led her in Fire Shut Up in My Bones at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2022. Her mentor Gerald Martin Moore has described a voice that has handled the Queen of the Night and Lakmé alongside fuller lyric roles. That suggests a different color and flexibility from Fleming’s famous cream, which is the point of a new Blanche. The demands are the same. “You have to be able to do everything in the role of Blanche,” Racette said, citing angular lines, soft singing and fortissimos alike. BLO lists a running time of 2 hours, 50 minutes with a single intermission, so Fleming’s second break isn’t on the schedule.

Fleming set the template, then, but not the test. That was set at the Wilbur in 1947, when Norton asked one thing of Tandy. Every actress and soprano since has faced it, Fleming included. On Thursday, steps from where it was first posed, Blanche depends on strangers again. This time they get to hear her sing.

A Streetcar Named Desire runs Nov. 5 and 6 at 7:30 p.m. and Nov. 8 at 3 p.m. at the Emerson Cutler Majestic Theatre, 219 Tremont St., Boston. Tickets start at $40; For more information, visit the Boston Lyric Opera website.

This feature was developed with AI assistance.