While opera can’t compete with the screen for verisimilitude, it can provide “the opportunity to explore the emotional impact beyond the mere facts,” as Andreas Mitisek, the artistic and general director of Long Beach Opera, wrote in a news release for “The Central Park Five .” The art form can be particularly arresting when it teases out those subtleties in stories we’ve known primarily as black-and-white reportage — when it imagines Malcolm X or Richard Nixon’s private musings and sets them to music.

This is what Mr. Davis, among others, have shown that opera can do. But “The Central Park Five” doesn’t, or doesn’t always. Forthright and impassioned, it makes clear the crushing injustice of the situation, but provides little emotional nuance beyond that.

Part of the problem is its treatment of the title group: The opera has a Greek chorus as an unwieldy main character. Singing largely in unison or in counterpoint ensemble, the five (played by Derrell Acon, Cedric Berry, Orson Van Gay, Nathan Granner and Bernard Holcomb) never have the chance to come to life as individuals, either in music or words.

And the evocation of their life together as friends in Harlem is too weak to make us really miss it after all goes wrong. Mr. Mitisek’s simple, bland production — movable door frames and projected tabloid headlines — doesn’t help.

Opening with a saturated, scratchy chord that fractures into jitters, the score, conducted by Leslie Dunner, is most interesting in brief instrumental interludes. The scenes are generally painted with urbane, rhythmically punchy big-band-style jazz, beefed up with strings, under declamatory vocal lines. (Unlike in some contemporary operas, the text is delivered with consistent clarity.) But in the instrumental passages between those scenes, the musical flesh melts away to reveal scattered flecks of instrumentation and an electronic haze — a scraping, buzzing sonic landscape that swiftly evokes the ominousness of the story.