Will Liverman
Will Liverman set his opera 'The Factotum' in a South Side Chicago barbershop. Here Liverman is pictured at Sweeney Taud's Barbershop in Chicago's South Loop. Anjali Pinto for WBEZ

This 34-year-old wrote an opera that channels Aaliyah and ‘Gatorade’ gospel

The Factotum, the debut from Chicago baritone Will Liverman, is not your grandparents’ opera.

Will Liverman set his opera 'The Factotum' in a South Side Chicago barbershop. Here Liverman is pictured at Sweeney Taud's Barbershop in Chicago's South Loop. Anjali Pinto for WBEZ
Will Liverman
Will Liverman set his opera 'The Factotum' in a South Side Chicago barbershop. Here Liverman is pictured at Sweeney Taud's Barbershop in Chicago's South Loop. Anjali Pinto for WBEZ

This 34-year-old wrote an opera that channels Aaliyah and ‘Gatorade’ gospel

The Factotum, the debut from Chicago baritone Will Liverman, is not your grandparents’ opera.

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Will Liverman easily recalls the moment when his musical universe burst wide open.

It was just past 1 a.m., and the 8-year-old’s parents were already in bed. Sitting with his Toys R Us boombox in front of him, the curious boy stealthily turned the dial to a local Virginia R&B radio station, one forbidden by his religious parents.

Hunched over the toy, Liverman heard the punctuated bassline and cycling synth loops that open Aaliyah’s 2001 megahit “Try Again.” “I was just blown away,” recalled Liverman, now 34 and based in Chicago. “It was the first non-gospel piece that I’d ever heard. It made me want to know what else was out there.”

That moment, like so many from Liverman’s musical timeline, now lives inside the score of his debut opera The Factotum, which will premiere with the Lyric Opera at the Harris Theater on Feb. 3. With a score that draws from early aughts hip hop to 1970s funk and the gospel music of the creator’s youth, the opera attempts to capture the arc of the Black musical experience, a reality not often shown on operatic stages.

And, says Liverman, it does so with a dose of joy, starting with its setting: a barbershop on Chicago’s South Side.

The Factotum
Liverman co-wrote the Factotum alongside his longtime friend D.J. King Rico, pictured here at a 2020 workshop staging at the Lyric Opera Chicago. Photo by Andrew Cioffi / Courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago

“There is so much Black pain that we see on screens and those things are important,” said Liverman, “but we wanted to create something where Black people are seen as complete humans. There’s pain, but it’s balanced out by joy. There’s a lot of joy in the Black barbershop.”

While the story focuses on life inside a fictional barber shop, the music, which Liverman wrote along with his longtime friend DJ King Rico, comes directly from the singer’s own journey through song. Even the title is an ode to The Barber of Seville aria “Largo al Factotum,” a piece Liverman has sung countless times throughout his career.

But Liverman did not set out in his career to create an opera.

Growing up, Liverman lived in a house imbued with music. His father played piano and jazz trumpet while his mother was one of the lead singers at their Pentecostal church. “I remember my mom singing ‘Jesus Can Work it Out,’ ” said Liverman. “We’d call it a Gatorade song because by the end, everyone was sweating and clapping. The intensity was so powerful. It was all just feeling.”

Will Liverman the Factotum
Will Liverman speaks with Lyric Opera President and CEO Anthony Freud behind the scenes of a workshop performance in 2021. Photo by Andrew Cioffi / Courtesy of the Lyric Opera of Chicago

Liverman, now a world renowned baritone, started singing in his church choir where he learned to pick up music by ear. “We didn’t use music,” recalls the baritone. “Some of the best cats that play in the church don’t read music at all. They’d just get up, find the key and go with it. You get used to that free flow of music.”

After years steeped in the gospel tradition, Liverman pivoted to a more formal education when he decided to audition for the Governor School, a prestigious high school music academy in Richmond, Va.

Liverman’s voice had dropped significantly around age 13, and he was accepted into the voice program after auditioning with “The Star Spangled Banner.” “I didn’t know anything about anything when I started,” says Liverman. “Coming from the church, you’d just open your mouth up and sing. I didn’t realize that there were all these things you had to think about to produce a healthy sound.”

In addition to technique, school introduced Liverman to new forms such as Jonathan Larson’s Rent, a modern adaptation of Puccini’s La Boheme. (“I listened to Rent a lot,” recalled Liverman.) And opera. “I remember going to the Metropolitan Opera for the first time and sitting up in the nosebleeds,” said Liverman. “I was so impressed with how the performers carried their voices. Looking at the big sets and listening to the orchestra, I thought, ‘There is no other art form like this.’ ”

Will Liverman
‘So much happens in the barbershop,’ says Liverman. ‘It’s more than just a haircut; it feels like a release for so many Black men. It’s always a safe space.’ Anjali Pinto for WBEZ
After graduating, Liverman moved to suburban Chicago to enroll at the Wheaton College Conservatory of Music where he focused on opera. During his junior year, Liverman’s rich baritone voice landed him a gig singing in the Lyric chorus for its celebrated and long overdue 2008 production of Porgy and Bess. Later, he returned to the Chicago company as a fellow at the prestigious training ground the Ryan Opera Center.

Over the next decade, Liverman’s singing career took off. He toured the country performing in Mozart’s The Magic Flute and La Boheme. During that time, Liverman found himself playing one role over and over again: Figaro, the lead in Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.

Whenever Liverman landed in a new city for a new production of Rossini’s comedy, he made sure to visit a Black barbershop. “So much happens in the barbershop,” says Liverman. “It’s more than just a haircut; it feels like a release for so many Black men. It’s always a safe space.”

That experience — in concert with his long-standing love for Rent — got Liverman thinking. “I thought someone should update The Barber of Seville and make it relevant to today’s world.”

Liverman did not see himself as that person. “I thought it would be a great project for someone else,” he says — until he reconnected with producer DJ King Rico, an old friend from the Governor’s school. The two decided to tackle the piece together.

Several years and many drafts later — including a staged workshop at the Lyric Opera in 2020 — the results are a loose adaptation of the 19th-century Italian opera, one that tells a contemporary Black story through a pastiche of musical genres. It debuts just two years after Liverman played a starring role in Fire Shut Up in my Bones, the first opera written by a Black composer to premiere at the esteemed Metropolitan Opera in New York.

The Factotum, said Lyric Opera President Anthony Freud, is “a wonderfully complex tapestry of musical styles. But they have written specifically for classically trained voices, so in a very real sense, it is an opera, but one that expands the art form.”

While many opera houses have been slow to embrace Black composers, supporting works such as The Factotum, said Freud, is one way Lyric Opera hopes to connect with new audiences. “We have a commitment to diversifying the range of stories we tell and diversifying the range of storytellers. The Factotum is a story that is of our moment and of our city.”

The production is also, said Liverman, the totality of his sound world both on stage and off. “Everything that I’ve done I’ve poured it all into this one thing,” reflected the singer. Late nights with Aaliyah included.

Elly Fishman is a freelance writer and the author of “Refugee High: Coming of Age in America.” Follow her @elly33.