When Opera Theatre of St. Louis brings its annual Our Songs concert back to Third Baptist Church on Wednesday, May 27, the evening will carry a weight that wasn’t present in years past. For the first time, the program is being curated entirely by alumni of OTSL’s New Works Collective — Black Coffee creators Concert Black and Alicia Revé Like, and Madison Lodge creator Tre’von Griffith. The trio has shaped the night around the storm that changed St. Louis forever.
They didn’t have to search for a theme. It was already sitting on their hearts, lingering in the air the way the tornado’s path still lingers across the city’s landscape. Even now, as the one-year anniversary approaches, the curators say the emotional and actual residue of that day is impossible to ignore.
“The tornado — it’s been a year, and there are people displaced, homes still waiting to be repaired, and money sitting in places where it hasn’t moved,” said curator Alicia Revé Like. “You would have thought by now something would have been handled. So much has not changed.”
Like said the three of them sat in a room tossing around ideas, but the conversation kept circling back to the same truth.
“We’re grieving our city,” she said. “The skyline is different. The beauty of St. Louis has shifted. We wanted to highlight that — because that’s what’s on our hearts.”
The curators built the concert as a four-part emotional arc — The Storm, Lament, The Gathering, and Rebuild — a structure Griffith first sketched out and the group refined together. Each movement reflects a phase of what St. Louisans have lived through since May 16, 2025. The music, poetry, and performances are meant to give people a place to feel what they may not have had time or space to process. The curators say they wanted to create a musical moment where people could breathe — and maybe even exhale for the first time in months.
“If you haven’t grieved yet, you can grieve,” Like said. “If you’re ready to rebuild, we’ve got music for that. Let’s come together as a city and highlight that we do love our city. Two things can be true at the same time — this is terrible, and we’re still working toward something better.”
OTSL’s mainstage artists will perform alongside Chamber Project St. Louis, local poets, and other St. Louis creatives. The curators intentionally reached beyond the opera world to reflect the full artistic ecosystem of the city — the same one that showed up for neighbors when institutions moved slowly.
“Because St. Louis is so resilient, it’s like, ‘Well, they’ll be fine,’” Like said. “We don’t want to just be fine, right? We want to be better than fine.”
They wanted the program to feel like St. Louis in all its textures: classical, contemporary, spiritual, spoken and with movement.
Their intention is to be the musical equivalent to The People’s Response.
“Let’s come together and say, ‘How can we help each other,” Like said. “How can we encourage each other? And what do we feel? Because I think that’s where we shine. When we come together, we realize we are actually unstoppable — like we are as powerful as we think we are.”
Like hopes the concert reaches those who feel forgotten a year later — and those who never saw the devastation up close.
“In these situations, you very much feel forgotten about,” she said. “I hope people walk away feeling seen.”
She also hopes it nudges others to understand the scale of what happened — and what still hasn’t been repaired.
“For some the severity isn’t real because they can just scroll past it,” she said. “But if you go see it with your own eyes, you understand. This is your hometown.”
For Like, the concert is part of a long lineage of creative response — from the Harlem Renaissance to Nina Simone to the artistic fire that followed the Ferguson Uprising.
“I am a product of creative response,” she said. “When something hits you in the heart, that’s what drives you to make. There has to be some kind of artistic response — just like there has to be a people’s response.”
And for her, Black and Griffith, Our Songs is exactly that.
“This is our homegoing celebration for St. Louis,” Like said. “Let us show the world how we love her, how we knew her, but also how we will revive her.”
Our Songs will take place at 7:30 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27 at Third Baptist Church, 620 N. Grand. The show is free and open to the public, but reserving a space online is strongly encouraged. For more information, visit experienceopera.org.
Living It content is produced with funding by the ARPA for the Arts grants program in partnership with the Regional Arts Commission of St. Louis and the Community Development Administration.
