Will Liverman Archives - Chicago Reader

An ensemble of 11 Black performers are lined up onstage (kneeling and standing). The set captures a south-side barbershop, with Black Lives Matter posters, photos of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr., Michael Jordan, and other icons on the walls.

Soul opera

by Cristalle Bowen February 8, 2023February 8, 2023

It’s been said that the soul of opera is its music, so in the case of The Factotum—Will Liverman and DJ King Rico’s original piece that is a loose take on Gioachino Rossini’s The Barber of Seville—hip-hop is at its beautiful core. The MTV generation, or hip-hop fans of a certain age, can recall the […]

Three Black people onstage. A boy in a short-sleeved white shirt kneels left. A woman in an orange dress sits in a blue chair in the center. Behind her is a man wearing clothing similar to the boy.

On Culture

Coming of age in an ordinary and dangerous place

by Deanna Isaacs March 30, 2022March 30, 2022

Journalist Charles M. Blow once wrote in his New York Times column that he “likes to think of himself as a Southern writer.” His childhood in Gibsland, Louisiana, shaped his writing, and in the south, “you don’t so much say words as sing them.” Now, at Lyric Opera, his own story is literally being sung. […]

Music

Will Liverman and Paul Sánchez celebrate Black composers and writers on a collaborative album

by Hannah Edgar March 2, 2021August 18, 2021

While listening to Dreams of a New Day: Songs by Black Composers, the most recent release by operatic baritone Will Liverman with pianist and recital partner Paul Sánchez, I realized with a start that time had ground to a halt. But when? Had the clock stopped with H. Leslie Adams’s churning 1992 composition “Amazing Grace”? […]