A mesmerizing musical biography of civil rights leader Malcolm X that infuses history with Afrofuturism will open at New York’s Metropolitan Opera on Friday.
It’s a long time coming: “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” first premiered in the mid-1980s to favorable reviews, but went unrevived for decades, with just a few stagings over nearly 40 years.
Its Met debut features a revised, jazz-infused score from composer Anthony Davis, Thulani Davis’s libretto and direction from the Tony-nominated director Robert O’Hara, who worked on the acclaimed “Slave Play.”
The opera traces the life of one of the 20th century’s most influential civil rights orators, including his childhood — he was born Malcolm Little in 1925 — and the death of his father, his joining of the Black nationalist group Nation of Islam and adoption of the name Malcolm X, and his assassination in 1965.
This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, sees O’Hara put on an Afrofuturist legend of sorts, with an enormous spaceship swirling above the prestigious Met Opera stage, and a choir whose aesthetic marries pre-colonial traditions with high-fashion sci-fi.
The show’s title character is portrayed throughout his life but cuts across time and space, accompanied by a troupe of dancers whose bodies give shape to the score.
Composer Davis told AFP the operatic rendition is an effort to see the leader’s ideas “elevated into song.”
“Not to try to do a realistic portrayal of Malcolm, but to try in a way to bring in all the ideas and concepts that he was so committed to,” he said.
“Malcolm is a tragic hero.”
‘Challenge people’
The production stars baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” — the house’s first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its lengthy history.
For Davis, “the reawakening that happened after George Floyd” — the Black man whose 2020 murder by police sparked a popular uprising across the United States over racism and state violence — lent urgency in the classical music world to improve diversity and inclusion.
“There’s so many people and ideas and aesthetics that were excluded,” Davis said. “I think there’s more openness now… and reaching out to find these pieces like mine that really speak to the community.”
For Leah Hawkins — the soprano who stars as both Malcolm X’s mother, Louise Little, and his wife, Betty Shabazz — bringing the Black experience to the stage “is something that I want to be normal… I don’t want it to be a special event.”
“I want it to be something that people are used to seeing.”
She said that’s slowly happening in the classical world, including at the Met: the house has made a point of staging more contemporary and diverse productions in recent years, including 2021’s “Fire” and last year’s “Champion,” both composed by jazz artist Terence Blanchard.
Hawkins says progress can be slow because “people don’t like to be made uncomfortable.”
“They want art to just make them feel at ease and at peace, and that is the goal much of the time, but also we need to be speaking to people on a very real level,” the artist told AFP. “It sometimes needs to be thought-provoking, and it needs to challenge people.”
Opera, she said, “needs to do this.”
Part of staging “X,” both Davis and Hawkins said, is to teach.
“I know plenty of people who’ve never read ‘The Autobiography of Malcolm X,’ who don’t know his story,” said Hawkins. “So I think it’s important to bring a figure like this to the stage — to educate people, if nothing else.”
For Davis, that mission is particularly imperative in a country that’s seen an uptick in misinformation, book bannings and restrictive school curricula.
The story of Malcolm X, he said, is “a slice of American history that’s not told all the time.”
And these days “you have politicians who want to suppress history and silence history,” Davis continued.
“I think it’s important that people see that, and understand those stories… and also wrestle with America, and racism in America, and politics, and the importance of Malcolm X in challenging some of the basic ideas that are fundamental to white supremacy.”
