At what point does history become hagiography?

Composer Jasmine Barnes and librettist Deborah D.E.E.P. Mouton tackle that question in “She Who Dared,” Chicago Opera Theater’s world-premiere retelling of the 1950s Montgomery bus boycotts—the real story, that is. It also may be making history itself: COT has advertised “She Who Dared” as the first professionally staged opera written by two Black women.

As we’re reminded — or taught — more or less immediately in the opera, 15-year-old Claudette Colvin (soprano Jasmine Habersham), brainy and brash in equal measure, was actually the first arrested for refusing to give up her seat to white bus riders, in 1955. But local activists decided she was too risky to prop up as a martyr. Colvin (by then also pregnant) was too young, too untested, t

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