For weeks The Factotum has been sold out in Chicago at the Harris Theater. The opera is a historical first — a cast and creative team full of people of color and a DJ on stage with an 18-piece orchestra. The show’s Black creators, baritone Will Liverman and DJ King Rico, reimagined Rossini’s The Barber of Seville inside a Black barbershop on the South Side of Chicago. So as I walked through the lobby on opening night of the world premiere, ball gowns, excitement and lots of Black people filled the space.

Unfortunately, there was very little effort beyond costuming and the occasional reference to Chance the Rapper to make the opera culturally specific to Chicago. To start, the barbershop is generically located “on the South Side,” a part of the city with more than 30 distinct neighborhoods.

As someone from Beverly who currently lives in Hyde Park and regularly visits family in Roseland and Calumet Heights, I can tell you those neighborhoods can’t be collapsed into a singular experience. But the show’s lack of specificity, consistent references to crime and commentary about “making it out the hood” are a giveaway that the East Coast writers are using “the South Side” as shorthand for “Black and poor.” A dog whistle further exacerbated by the clunky dialogue, laden with exaggerated slang and lacking regional resonance. For these reasons, even innocent musical numbers like “The Baddest Shop in Town” where the cast sings about having the best barbershop in Chicago fell completely flat for me.

The Factotum is about the tension between two brothers, Mike and Garby (played respectively by creator Liverman and Norman Garrett), as they navigate keeping their barbershop and community afloat. As the story progresses, the use of certain plot devices, while generic, were still palatable — conversations about Black men’s and women’s hair, the bootleg man perpetually trying to sell something or the passionate barbershop conversations about who is the NBA’s “G.O.A.T.”

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But certain aspects pulled me out of the experience more than others, the most egregious being Garby’s relationship with the Chicago Police Department. At one point, Garby, who runs an illegal numbers hustle out the back of the barbershop and bribes cops to look the other way, is so confident that the police won’t hurt his niece Cece, played by Nissi Shalome, that he leaves her alone to handle an approaching raid. The resulting scene is the emotional climax of the show, which ends in Cece lying on her stomach, unmoving, after being repeatedly tasered by a group of police officers.

Leaning on Garby’s confidence and the audience’s assumed naivete that the police wouldn’t harm a child, that scene was designed to shock and horrify. But to someone who has witnessed real horrors — who has seen Laquan McDonald, Adam Toledo and Miracle Boyd be killed or brutalized — nothing about watching a young person be assaulted by CPD felt new or revelatory.

Liverman has said that he chose to place the opera in a barbershop because “people know the experiences in the barbershop and have lived that, and so we wanted to create something that was accessible in that way and was a story we had perspective on.” So I do wonder why Liverman didn’t place the barbershop in his own Virginian hometown.

According to Liverman, The Factotum was inspired by a documentary about Jonathan Larson and his musical Rent. So it’s worth noting that Larson was born in a suburb of New York City and spent the rest of his adult life (he died at the age of 35 in 1996) in Manhattan, where the musical is set. New York City, like Chicago, is more than just a locale. Both places, distinct and culturally vibrant, are characters.

The Factotum has some beauty. I loved the musical arrangements — which weaves in hip-hop, gospel and R&B — and the dancing. The set design was stunning. And Melody Betts, who plays a beautician working in the shop, steals every scene she’s in. (I later learned that Betts was the only main character who is a Chicago native.) And it’s important to note that the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s investment in presenting The Factotum is significant. In an opera world where the norm is for the cast (and audience) to be overwhelmingly white, the diversity seen on stage and in the crowd was groundbreaking.

To be clear, I do think it’s possible for outsiders to come in and create art about Chicago that feels believable (shoutout to the Black movie classic Barbershop). But outsiders have to understand that Chicago isn’t a city that can be treated like “everyman” — a stock location you arbitrarily pick and then treat as an afterthought. In theory, the genericness of The Factotum meant that it could have occurred anywhere in the U.S. That genericness is also why it was clear that The Factotum didn’t occur in Chicago.

Taylor Faye Nazon is an audience engagement manager for WBEZ.

CORRECTION: The story has been updated to correct a number of factual errors about the creation and storyline of the musical Rent. The Factotum is based on Rossini’s The Barber of Seville.