In George Brant’s one-woman play, we meet Jess, an experienced F-16 fighter pilot. Now that’s she’s pregnant, she’s moved from the cockpit to the safety of the “chair force.” As such, she directs drone strikes from a trailer in Las Vegas. The world premiere of Jeanine Tesori’s opera stars the Canadian-Italian mezzo-soprano Emily D’Angelo, an incandescent interpreter particularly of the trouser roles of Handel and Mozart. “In a first for opera stages,” the Washington National Opera company Web site informs us, “massive LED-screen technology will immerse audiences in the psychological and social implications of virtual warfare, suggesting that ‘distance’ from war through technology is no distance at all.” Tesori is best known for variously bouncy musicals like Thoroughly Modern Millie; Caroline, Or Change; Shrek The Musical; Fun Home; and the current off-kilter masterpiece Kimberly Akimbo. But she’s no one-trick pony. Blue, written to Tazewell Thompson’s libretto about a Black police officer, his wife, and their son, who is shot by a cop at a protest, won the prize for Best New Opera of 2020 from the Music Critics Association of North America. —Matthew Gurewitsch