Four hours of opera about Malcolm X that'll rearrange your soul — and your evening plans.
Anthony Davis’s groundbreaking and influential opera, which premiered in 1986, arrives at the Met at long last. Theater luminary and Tony-nominated director of Slave Play Robert O’Hara oversees a potent new staging that imagines Malcolm as an everyman whose story transcends time and space. An exceptional cast of breakout artists and young Met stars enliven the operatic retelling of the civil rights leader’s life. Baritone Will Liverman, who triumphed in the Met premiere of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, is Malcolm, alongside soprano Leah Hawkins as his mother, Louise; mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis as his sister Ella; bass-baritone Michael Sumuel as his brother Reginald; and tenor Victor Ryan Robertson as Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Kazem Abdullah conducts the newly revised score, which provides a layered, jazz-inflected setting for the esteemed writer Thulani Davis’s libretto.
Score
Davis's jazz-orchestra fusion — 1986 radicalism still sounding future-forward.
Direction
O'Hara's 'everyman Malcolm' staging breaks opera's stuffy conventions wide open.
Acting
Will Liverman's Met return — from Bones to X, a star in full command.
Director
Robert O'Hara
Trivia, insights & behind the scenes
This 2023 Met production finally arrives 37 years after its 1986 premiere — Anthony Davis had to wait longer for this staging than Malcolm lived.
Robert O'Hara's 'everyman' framing deliberately echoes the 1992 film's humanization, but his nonlinear structure — Malcolm meeting his own killer — pushes past biopic into ritual.
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