‘Fire Shut Up in My Bones’

Met season to open with first-ever opera by Black composer

NEW YORK – Charles Blow recalls being in the audience at the premiere of the opera based on his memoir, “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” and watching the scene that depicts his sexual abuse as a child by an older cousin. h “To be honest,” he said, “it was more uncomfortable watching everybody watching me. Because they were so unnerved by it they worried about my reaction.” h They needn’t have been concerned, Blow said in an interview. “When I wrote the book I’d already dealt with all that,” he said. “I don’t have the residual trauma that a lot of people expect me to have.”

KEN HOWARD/MET OPERA Latonia Moore, center, as Billie, and the cast during a rehearsal for Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” opening the Metropolitan Opera season on Sept. 27 in New York.