Washington Post
Photo by Fay Fox
Russell Thomas is much more than a black tenor. Now, he’s tackling ‘Otello’ and the field’s stereotypes.
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.