Detroit Opera’s new production of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis’s X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X, directed by Robert O’Hara and conducted by Kazem Abdullah, will premiere at the Detroit Opera House on May 14, 2022 with additional performances on May 19 and 22.
Described by The New York Times as “a riveting and uncompromising work,” X pairs Anthony Davis’s distinctly American score with a libretto by Thulani Davis and story by Christopher Davis, casting an unflinching look at one of the most influential men in American history in all of his complexity. Detroit Opera’s current Artist-inResidence, Davóne Tines, appears as Malcolm X, marking the culmination of Tines’s residency in Detroit and his debut on the Detroit Opera House stage. Tines will be joined by Whitney Morrison, who takes on the role of educator and activist Betty Shabazz and Malcolm’s mother Louise Little, and by Victor Robertson as the characters Street and Elijah
Mohammed.
Ronnita Miller returns to Detroit Opera in the role of Ella following her debut as Mama Lucia in Cavalleria rusticana earlier this season. Making his production debut in the role of Young Malcolm is metro Detroiter Charles Dennis. Initiated by Detroit Opera under President & CEO Wayne S. Brown and Gary L. Wasserman Artistic Director Yuval Sharon, X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X is co-produced with Lyric Opera of Chicago; the Metropolitan Opera, where it will premiere in Fall 2023; Opera Omaha, where it will premiere November 4–6, 2022; and Seattle Opera, where it will premiere in 2024.
X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X details the life, transformation, and ultimate assassination of Malcolm X in a series of fast-moving vignettes, spanning his boyhood in Lansing, Michigan; his early brushes with the law; his conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; his own ministry and his breach with Elijah; his
pilgrimage to Mecca, and his assassination.
Through the libretto’s emulation of contemporaneous literary and oratory styles, X brings the world and words of Malcolm X to contemporary audiences.
“As the creators of an opera that was ground-breaking nearly forty years ago, we are having the chance to see the work realized in a newly dynamic way with its strengths weighed before a new generation,” says librettist Thulani Davis. “We are thrilled also to build this production in Michigan, a place central to Malcolm X, his family, and the communities in which he came into manhood and later honed his skills as an organizer.”
The opera’s score exhibits a poly-tonal palette and complex, shifting rhythmic patterns, and is influenced by classical, popular, and non-Western sources. Examples of historical AfricanAmerican music, including swing, scat, and modal jazz, help recreate the sound of Malcolm X’s era, while passages of improvisation punctuate an otherwise conventionally notated score.
“It has been thirty-six years since the premiere of X, and I am eager to work with the extraordinary director Robert O’Hara on this new production that will feature a new generation of artists,” said Anthony Davis. “Malcolm X (El Hajj Malik el Shabazz) is an even more relevant figure today. His vision is as prescient today as it was in 1986. He is an
inspiration for Black Lives Matter and the movement for social justice. As a composer, I am
thrilled to help create X as an opera for today that speaks to the future as well as the past.”
The American Music Theater Festival developed The Life and Times of Malcolm X
and had its first full-length production with orchestra at Philadelphia’s Walnut Street Theater
on October 9, 1985, with Avery Brooks—best known for his work in film and television including Roots: The Gift, American History X, and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine—in the title role.
“Anthony Davis’s X has drawn attention from far beyond the constituencies of either the
composer or the genre,” wrote The Village Voice of the 1986 premiere. “Not since Einstein on
the Beach has an opera by a composer new to the form been such an event….Without
acquiescing in any great measure to melodrama or entertainment value, Davis’s complicated,
sometimes dry and knotty, sometimes raucous and vibrant opera insists on its place as
serious, new, Black music.”
X and the Detroit Community Detroit and Michigan figure largely in Malcolm X’s life. Malcolm X (then Malcolm Little) lived in Lansing/East Lansing, Michigan during his early childhood years, from circa 1929 to 1941.
After the loss of his parents, he went to live with his older sister in Boston, where he obtained the name “Detroit Red,” derived from his red hair and his years lived in the greater Detroit area. While living with his brother Wilfred in Inkster, Michigan in 1952, Malcolm became deeply involved in the Nation of Islam, a religious organization founded in 1930 in
Detroit by Wallace Fard Muhammad. In 1953, he served as the assistant minister of Temple No.1 in Detroit. In 1958, Malcolm X proposed to his future wife, native Detroiter Betty Dean Sanders, from a phone booth in Detroit. Three of his well-known speeches were recorded in Detroit: “Messages to the Grassroots” on November 10, 1963; “The Ballot or the Bullet” on April 12, 1964; and his final speech, “The Last Message” on February 14, 1965, which took
place one week before his tragic assassination in Harlem.