Overview

Anthony Davis’s groundbreaking opera The Life and Times of Malcolm X, which premiered in 1986, arrives at the Met at long last, on November 18. In this new production, Robert O’Hara (nominated for a Tony Award in 2020 for his direction of Slave Play) imagines Malcolm as an everyday man whose story transcends time and space. This operatic retelling of Malcolm X’s life features a brilliant cast of lyrical singers. Baritone Will Liverman, who caused a sensation in Terence Blanchard’s Fire Shut Up in My Bones, sings Malcolm. Soprano Leah Hawkins plays his mother, Louise. Mezzo-soprano Reahann Bryce-Davis is his sister Ella, bass-baritone Michael Samuel his brother Reginald, and tenor Victor Ryan Robertson is Elijah Muhammad, leader of the Nation of Islam. Kazem Abdullah conducts the newly revised score, which provides a multi-layered jazz-inflected setting for Tulani Davis’s libretto.

In English with Greek subtitles