Sergio Mims: WashingtonPost.com: Russell Thomas is much more than a black tenor.

Russell Thomas

Sergio A. Mims writes:

Anne Midgette of The Washington Post was written a fascinating profile of the internationally acclaimed opera tenor Russell Thomas and his upcoming role in Verdi's Otello.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/entertainment/music/russell-thomas-is-much-more-than-a-black-tenor-now-hes-tackling-otello-and-the-fields-stereotypes/2019/10/16/0fc2b45c-eeac-11e9-8693-f487e46784aa_story.html?fbclid=IwAR14SN98GLrksUWE5m4fnoU_2yVsTKnOXDjGkENEEesNlVMbgIb2xuwjR8s

The Washington Post

Anne Midgette

October 17, 2019

Russell Thomas is a single dad to a 5-year-old son. He’s an opera singer who was bitten by the opera bug when he was 8 and wanted to be a singer ever since — “even before I knew I could sing,” he says. He has performed in the world’s major opera houses, gradually working his way from Mozart roles, which tend to be on the lighter end of the repertory, to the vocally heavier operas of Verdi. Now, Thomas, 42, is taking on Verdi’s “Otello,” one of the most punishing roles in the repertoire, which he will perform to open Washington National Opera’s season Oct. 26. And suddenly, it seems that Otello is all anybody wants to hear from him.

Thomas is black and Otello — or Othello, the title role of the Shakespeare play on which the opera is based — is black, or at least a Moor. You can debate how dark a Moor is supposed to be in Shakespeare’s vision, or in Verdi’s, but as the predominantly white world of the performing arts gradually opens its eyes to the world around it, it seems increasingly problematic to cast white people in roles written for and about people of color.

The problem with Otello, however, is that there are very few tenors, white or black, who are able to sing the role. Thomas, now, is one of them, and the opera world is eager to seize on him, not only as an Otello but also as a representative of the diversity that the field claims to be desperately seeking.

Yet in forcing Thomas and other black artists to be spokespeople for diversity, the field is essentially overlooking just what it is that makes them such notable artists in the first place. It’s a sign of how opera, as well as other areas of the classical performing arts, continues to stubbornly otherize people who don’t conform to the white template that has been the norm for so long — and hasn’t, in fact, come very far at all.

“I am not an Otello,” Thomas says over a recent brunch at a restaurant near Chinatown. It’s a weekend morning that happens to be free of rehearsals, and Thomas is taking a break to discuss life with his son, Austin (who stays in Atlanta with his grandmother now that he’s started school); his dream roles (he’d like to sing more bel canto, the lighter melodious operas of Bellini and Donizetti); and, of course, diversity in opera, the topic he can’t avoid. There needs, he says, to be more black administrators — an avenue he’s starting to explore himself. “If you’re not going to change the structure of the institutions,” Thomas says, “what’s really going to happen?”

As to his not being a true Otello, Thomas has some people fooled: The WNO production is his third outing this calendar year. (He has also sung the role two times in concert.)