Issue with alpha in nested Sprites (or Groups)

[FlashyGoblin]

I'm trying to set the alpha on a sprite that has nested black&white images within. The images overlap. When I set the sprite's alpha to 0.5, I see all of the nested images within in. In the Flash days, we would set the sprite's blendmode to "LAYER", which would precompose the sprite before setting it's alpha. 

Flash Reference: BlendMode.LAYER ("layer"): Used to force the creation of a temporary buffer for precomposition for a particular display object.

Is there something similar that we can do in Phaser?