DIE UPON A KISS

Freeman of color Benjamin January, a Paris-educated surgeon now making a living as a musician in his native New Orleans, is waylaid in an alley behind the American Theater along with his employer, visiting opera impresario Lorenzo Belaggio, who’s been invited to mount a production of his new Othello during Carnival, 1835. Soon other members of Belaggio’s troupe are attacked, including Madame Scie, the ballet mistress, who falls into a coma; Belaggio’s mistress, La d’Isola, a pretty but untalented soprano who is sickened by poison; and the castrato Incantobelli, who is murdered. Have southern sensibilities been so offended by the notion of Othello’s interracial love story that bigots will go to any length to shut the production down? Abishag Shaw, of the City Guards, arrests rival theater producer John Davis, but January, believing his good friend innocent, finds evidence of international intrigue, from alliances forged in France and Austria to a brisk slave trade emanating from Cuba. As his pregnant sister wrestles with the impending marriage of her white protector, jealousies among the cast heat up; arson guts the opera house; and January uncovers ties to his own years on the continent as well as a murder in a plantation owner’s past—and a long-awaited revenge.

Hambly (Sold Down the River, 2000, etc.) may finally have found in grand opera the perfect milieu for her outsize, teeming, ornately melodramatic storytelling. And if her resolution doesn’t exactly elicit bravos, her depiction of mid–19th-century social, moral, and racial divides will.