Davis, Anthony (1951- )

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    Anthony Davis Puts His Operatic Spin on Edith Wharton

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    Anthony Davis has written operas based on recent history. But now he is adapting, and dramatically changing, Wharton’s 1912 novel “The Reef.”The composer and pianist Anthony Davis is known for drawing inspiration from real-world figures in his operas.“X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” — recently mounted by the Metropolitan Opera — and “The Central Park Five,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2020, are both grave, ripped-from-the-headlines stories about well-known people.But Davis has also written rollicking adaptations of literary material. Less frequently produced but no less interesting are chamber operas like “Lilith” — a saucy and inventive take on the story of Adam’s first wife that features a divorce court in the Garden of Eden. Similarly, “Lear on the 2nd Floor” is a riff on Shakespeare that brings “King Lear” into contemporary discussions about medicine and Alzheimer’s disease.“The Reef,” Davis’s latest music drama to arrive onstage and his follow-up to “The Central Park Five,” seems more fitting in that literary cohort. That is, once it’s finished. Still in progress, the piece dipped its toes into the world by way of a recent workshop performance at Merkin Hall, presented by the Berkshire Opera Festival.Adapted from Edith Wharton’s 1912 novel of the same name, “The Reef,” with a libretto by Joan Ross Sorkin, has been in development, in fits and starts, since 2014. (Since then, Davis premiered “The Central Park Five” and revised the score of “X,” ahead of its traveling revival.)At the Merkin performance, the work departed significantly from Wharton’s text. For one thing, it’s set in Martinique rather than in Paris or the French countryside. The novel’s love-triangle treatment of romance, late Victorian propriety and social class has also been altered by a change of one character’s racial identity: The demimonde-adjacent Sophy is, in Davis and Sorkin’s version, the nursemaid Sonya, a biracial member of the sugar-cane estate’s domestic staff. A quartet of other Black workers on the estate, named the Invisibles, has also been added to the mix. The opera’s creators are toying with the idea of setting their story in 1928 to make more of the Jazz Age’s emergence.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      The Met Opera Puts On a Malcolm X Marathon

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      For 18 hours on a rainy Sunday this Halloween weekend, the Metropolitan Opera House was visited by the ghost of Malcolm X.Words made famous by the Black nationalist leader and civil rights figure in his classic autobiography, dictated to Alex Haley and posthumously published in 1965, could be heard echoing throughout the soaring lobby of the Lincoln Center theater. It was a welcomed haunting, conjured by the Met in conjunction with a new production of Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premieres on Friday.Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Malcolm X’s daughter.Text from “The Autobiography of Malcolm X.”From 6 a.m. until a little after midnight, a starry lineup of Malcolm surrogates — including his daughter Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Michael R. Jackson and the actor Leslie Odom Jr. — read from the autobiography continuously and in its roughly 500-page entirety.“I didn’t think that they would do it,” said the director and playwright Robert O’Hara, who staged “Slave Play” and is at the helm’s of the Met’s production. He proposed the reading to the company’s leadership as a way to build word of mouth for the opera. “It’s amazing just to have the words in this space, and for the Met to open its doors and let people come.”Top row, from left, Maurio Hines, Anthony Davis and Christopher Davis, April Matthis. Second row, from left, Courtney B. Vance, Robert O’Hara, Bill Haley Jr. Third row, from left, Leah Hawkins and Dr. Ilyasah Shabazz, Makeda Hampton, Liesl Tommy.The event was free to attend, and an estimated 680 people cumulatively made their way to the lobby’s Grand Tier balcony, up the undulating, red-carpeted steps and around the low-hanging starburst chandeliers. At 10 a.m., about 100 people sat or stood around a small stage with a black backdrop set up in front of the building’s floor-to-ceiling windows.Marcia Sells, the Met’s chief diversity officer, said that Sunday was the first time the space had been used for a free event.“To all these people who are coming in here, to the speakers, to even the Black staff members who have worked here for a long time,” Sells said, “this represents the Met saying, ‘Yes, you really are included.’”Thompson, who plays a young Malcolm X in the opera.Shabazz’s Kaaba pendant.Around 10:30, the actor Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” brought a resounding musicality to an early chapter in which Malcolm details his inauspicious early years as a small-time drug dealer and hustler in Harlem known as Detroit Red.The actor Courtney B. Vance, of “The People v. O.J. Simpson” and “The Preacher’s Wife,” followed, drawing big laughs with a rousing rendition of a scene in which Malcolm X escapes the World War II draft by feigning madness at the induction office.“The educated folks had Martin Luther King, but the folks on the street — Malcolm had them,” Vance said in an interview after his reading. “It’s a wonderful opportunity to talk about him and what he stood for and to maybe make people go, Hmm, I want to learn more.”The Met’s event was free to attend, and brought in an estimated 680 people throughout the day.Peterson Townsend, a performer in “X,” preparing for his reading on Sunday.More than 70 speakers appeared, including Bill Haley, Alex Haley’s grandson; David C. Banks, the chancellor of the New York City Department of Education; and Liesl Tommy, the director of the Aretha Franklin biopic “Respect.”Around 2:30 p.m., Shabazz movingly channeled her father, and received a standing ovation, for a section that recounted his intellectual awakening while confined at Norfolk Prison Colony in Massachusetts, spurred by a trove of history and philosophy texts.“It’s a great way to tell my father’s story and to reach different audiences,” she said in an interview. “It’s as relevant now as it was then. We’re still living with the same challenges.”Readers on deck: Sunday’s event included appearances by more than 70 participants.Christopher-Rashee Stevenson, a member of the theater company Elevator Repair Service, watching Shabazz speak.“X” premiered at New York City Opera in 1986. This revival, which first ran in Detroit in 2021, was conceived by O’Hara as an Afrofuturist fable in which the title character is an archetypical Everyman who transcends time and space. The Met’s production stars the baritone Will Liverman, who opened the Met’s 2021-22 season in “Fire Shut Up in My Bones,” the first presentation of a work by a Black composer in its history; Kazem Abdullah will conduct Davis’s score, which was revised for Detroit and changed further for the Met.Davis said that the aim, then and now, was to present a challenge to opera as an art form, in the spirit of Malcolm himself.“I wanted to help transform opera into a truly American form, one that reflects African American musical traditions,” he said. “Not only can opera play an important role in music today, it can make statements about who we are and what’s going on in the world.” More

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      North Carolina Radio Station Won’t Ban Met Opera Broadcasts After All

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      The station, which had called the Met’s newer operas unsuitable because of their “difficult music” and “adult themes and harsh language,” reversed course.The music director of a nonprofit North Carolina classical radio station said on Thursday that the station would reverse course and air several contemporary operas being performed by the Metropolitan Opera this season that the station had originally said were unsuitable for broadcast, citing their “adult themes and harsh language.”“It was a very hard decision,” Emily Moss, the music director of WCPE, a nonprofit station based in Wake Forest, said in an interview. “It’s been a hard day and a hard week.”The reversal came after the station faced widespread criticism.The Met, the nation’s leading opera company, has been staging more contemporary work in recent seasons as part of a push to attract new and more diverse audiences; the company has found that these newer works draw more first-time ticket buyers than the classics do.But Deborah S. Proctor, the general manager of WCPE, took issue with new works planned for the current season in a survey she sent to listeners on Aug. 31.“This coming season, the Metropolitan Opera has chosen several operas which are written in a nonclassical music style, have adult themes and language, and are in English,” she wrote. “I feel they aren’t suitable for broadcast on our station.”In the survey, Proctor cited her problems with several of the Met’s offerings this season.She described the violence in Jake Heggie’s “Dead Man Walking,” the death row opera that opened the season. She cited the “non-Biblical” sources of the libretto of John Adams’s “El Niño,” and the suicidal themes in Kevin Puts’s “The Hours,” which is based on the Michael Cunningham novel and the Oscar-winning film it inspired. She wrote that “Florencia en el Amazona,” by the Mexican composer Daniel Catán, was “simply outside of the bounds of our musical format guidelines.” And she said that both Anthony Davis’s “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” and Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” contain “offensive language plainly audible to everyone.”“We want parents to know that they can leave our station playing for their children because our broadcasts are without mature themes or foul language,” she wrote in the letter. “We must maintain the trust of listeners.”The station decided last season not to broadcast Blanchard’s “Champion.”The Met, which has said it follows Federal Communications Commission guidelines regarding profanity and language, said it was happy with the change of course. “We’re pleased that opera fans in North Carolina will be able to hear all 27 of our scheduled broadcasts this season,” the Met said in a statement.The station’s letter, and the survey attached to it, received scant attention before reaching social media last week. Rhiannon Giddens, a North Carolina native who shared the Pulitzer Prize this year with Michael Abels for their opera “Omar,” wrote an open letter voicing her displeasure over the station’s stance and noted that challenging adult themes are staples of many of the most popular operas of the past.“The Met broadcasts are the only way many people get to hear the productions, which are situated in New York and priced way out of many people’s budgets,” Giddens wrote. “Radio is supposed to be egalitarian and an equalizer, not used as a weapon, as you are doing.”The station reversed course after receiving feedback from the public and holding internal conversations.“We really value being safe for a general audience, especially children,” Moss said in the interview. “But one of our core values is that we are a refuge from the political and troubles of the world and we are returning to that value.” More

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      America Needs Its Own Comic Opera Company

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      There is no house in the United States dedicated to presenting works from a prominent corner of homegrown music theater repertory.Whenever I’m trying to sell a friend on a night at the opera, my memory calls up a scene from “Twin Peaks.”The local doctor, Will Hayward, sits down to dinner, clearly haggard, thanks to his work mopping up local catastrophes. Then someone asks him how it’s going.“I feel like I’ve sat through back-to-back operas,” he says with a sigh. Everyone at the table smirks. In this view, even one opera might prove a test of endurance. It’s a somewhat surprising joke at the music world’s expense, given that “Twin Peaks” often found pleasure in an eclectic array of sound worlds (spurred on by the inventive, varied work of the show’s composer, Angelo Badalamenti, who died this month at 85).But the gag also makes perfect sense. While “Twin Peaks” had art house trappings, it straddled the line between rarefied and popular: a feat that American opera hasn’t bothered with much since it stopped regularly letting its hair down on television in the 1950s.Long before grand Metropolitan Opera productions represented the first, last and final word about opera onscreen, thanks to its public-television broadcasts, audiences could find their way to sprightly, comedic musical spectacles. After a successful Broadway run in the 1940s, Kurt Weill’s “Lady in the Dark,” with a book by Moss Hart and lyrics by Ira Gershwin, was performed live on NBC in 1954. This night at the theater at home featured a plot driven by psychoanalysis and songs that unfurled within dreams. (“Twin Peaks,” eat your heart out.)It was a critical hit again, just as it had been live. Weill’s “One Touch of Venus,” with text by Ogden Nash and S.J. Perelman, followed on NBC in 1955. Around that time, audiences could also catch Oscar Straus’s “The Chocolate Soldier” and Victor Herbert’s “Naughty Marietta” on TV. Shows that would otherwise be found on the stages of comic opera houses — theaters that specialize in the genre of theatrical works with spoken dialogue and often humorous plots — were readily available in living rooms across America.Thankfully, all those telecasts have been preserved on DVD by the VAI imprint. And although the orchestrations in use weren’t those of the composers, at least the tunes are all there — which is more than you can say for the Hollywood adaptations of the same works. But why do we hardly see this kind of material today, on television or in theaters?Composers didn’t lose all purchase on humor around 1960. But since then, Broadway has become a less reliable steward of these kinds of scores. Pit orchestras have been reduced in size; amplification of voices has become more common. Sondheim’s catalog, with its complexity and wit, is the exception to these trends (and even his shows aren’t in consistent enough circulation today).Despite that reduced range of performance, American classical artists still demonstrate comic bents just waiting for an outlet. One example: Anthony Davis, a Pulitzer Prize winner, writes serious-minded grand stage works like “The Central Park Five” and “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which is headed to the Metropolitan Opera in 2023. But he also writes comic operas, and they have languished.Davis’s 1992 opera on the Patty Hearst saga, “Tania,” contains a satirical jewel titled “If I Were a Black Man,” with words by Michael John LaChiusa. It is sung by a white Symbionese Liberation Army terrorist, and lampoons the liberal fascination with what Tom Wolfe called radical chic. Anyone weary of cringe-y, performative displays of bien-pensant thinking might crack a smile — or let loose a belly laugh. (Davis, too, chuckled while singing a line to himself when I spoke with him this year.)But you really have to go searching for “Tania,” or this song. Rare is the algorithm that would promote it; and the CD version, from the Koch label, is catch as catch can on the secondhand marketplace.Davis’s fellow Pulitzer awardee William Bolcom is in similar straits. His verismo operatic adaptation of Arthur Miller’s “A View from the Bridge,” from 1999, was prominently documented on a New World Records album from Chicago’s Lyric Opera. Yet Bolcom’s comedic efforts, like the 1990 “Casino Paradise” — with its Trump-like land developer protagonist — aren’t as widely known.Some elements of “Paradise” are dated, but the verve of “A Great Man’s Child,” the show’s failson anthem, with a lyric by Arnold Weinstein, still plays well alongside contemporary talk about “nepotism babies.” Bolcom’s accolades have tended to be for concert works like his “Twelve New Etudes for Piano.” When I interviewed him this year, however, he made his underlying affections clear, saying, “Since the beginning, I’ve had love for the theater.”This strain of American cultural life clearly exists. But how could it be better represented? The answer is simple: It’s time for this country to create a comic opera company of its own.The comic opera tradition — which traditionally has included not only spoken dialogue, but also smaller voices relative to grander works in the repertory — has since cross-pollinated with neighboring forms like the musical. The Komische Oper in Berlin or the Opéra Comique in Paris might play “Kiss Me, Kate” one night, and an experimental opera with spoken bits — or comedic angles — the next.Critics trip over one another for assignments to these houses. (One of the performance highlights of my year was a new production, at the Komische Oper, of Jaromir Weinberger’s riotous “Schwanda the Bagpiper,” whose orchestral music delighted American audiences in the mid-20th century.) But New York has no such organization. And aside from small, specialized troupes — a local Gilbert & Sullivan society, or Ohio Light Opera — the United States doesn’t really have any comic opera companies.The American Musical Theater Festival in Philadelphia commissioned and premiered both “Tania” and “Casino Paradise” but was shuttered in 2014. You might occasionally find a great chorus like MasterVoices in New York partnering with an estimable local ensemble like the Orchestra of St. Luke’s to stage the original, comic opera version of Bizet’s “Carmen” — but generally for one night only. That same creative team brought “Lady in the Dark” back for a triumphant one-weekend run in 2019. (The short run was billed as a celebration of a previous New York revival, during the first season of Encores!, in 1994.)Together, MasterVoices and St. Luke’s could form the backbone of America’s first true comic opera company. What else would they play and sing? Perhaps those comedies from Davis and Bolcom, and more of Weill’s works. But also, surely, shows by Sondheim — and perhaps other musicals that wouldn’t be appropriate for commercial runs on Broadway today.That catalog could include, for example, the vaudeville music of the composer and lyricist team Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, whose 1921 show “Shuffle Along” was a landmark of Black Broadway. The show employed William Grant Still, who was eventually called “the dean of African American composers,” as an oboist in the pit. (Still was said to have improvised a motif in performances that George Gershwin supposedly heard and later used for “I Got Rhythm.”)The book of “Shuffle Along” is weighed down by racial stereotypes of the period — yet Blake and Sissle’s music deserves a new outing. In 2016, Broadway tried a story-behind-the-show approach, though it shuttered prematurely after its star, Audra McDonald, had to withdraw because of a pregnancy. A new adaptation of “Shuffle” would be fitting for an American opera company, and more viable outside the profit-driven confines of Broadway.Contemporary composers who would be a good fit for a comic opera company include Joseph White, whose outlandish “The Wagging Craze” — a self-described “radio opera” from late 2021 — dramatizes a ribald (and, of course, fictional) male-bonding fraternity that attracts Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. (J. Edgar Hoover, for his part, is appalled.)There’s also Kate Soper — the dramatist, soprano and librettist behind out-of-the-box theater pieces like “Here Be Sirens.” We would all benefit from her having the space, and budget, to produce new works. (Her long-delayed opera “The Romance of the Rose,” originally intended for spring 2020, will at last make its debut at Long Beach Opera in February.) Or maybe Soper could just pop into the theater to perform a black box-style show based on her most recent album, “The Understanding of All Things,” in which she winningly dissects a male suitor’s negging in the Yeats poem “For Anne Gregory.”It’s not likely that we’ll see a contemporary version of mid-20th century opera telecasts. Those old Weill productions would be too ambitious; Soper’s conceits, too experimental.A proper stage for these and other works wouldn’t merely help to reclaim comic opera’s past and present; it could also set priorities for the future. After all, what incentive is there for budding artists to write in the vein of Davis and Bolcom if their own works can’t be heard? It’s time to give our comic spirits the opportunity to punch up the script of American opera. More

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      Abdul Wadud, Cellist Who Crossed Musical Boundaries, Dies at 75

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      He performed with classical ensembles, but he was best known for his work with cutting-edge composers and improvisers like Anthony Davis and Julius Hemphill.Abdul Wadud, a distinctive cellist who crossed genres and was a key collaborator with the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis, died on Aug. 10 in Cleveland. He was 75.His son, the R&B singer Raheem DeVaughn, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of multiple recent illnesses.Mr. Wadud converted to Islam while in college but continued to use his given name, Ronald DeVaughn, when playing with classical ensembles, as he did with the New Jersey Symphony in the 1970s.He also performed in Broadway pit bands and with Stevie Wonder. But he is best known for his work with Mr. Davis, the saxophonist and composer Julius Hemphill, and others who were central to the development of American composition and improvisation in the late 20th century.Skilled at eliciting variations of instrumental color with a bow, Mr. Wadud pioneered a pizzicato language on the cello that was sometimes subtle, sometimes booming.For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently out of print.)Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is also out of print.“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”Similarly, the clarinetist J.D. Parran noted that “you could run into Abdul Wadud anywhere.” He remembered with particular pleasure seeing “this gigantic smile” on Mr. Wadud’s face during their tour with Stevie Wonder, in support of the album “Journey Through the Secret Life of Plants.” (Mr. Parran added that Mr. Wadud was the contractor for the ambitious, larger than usual outfit Mr. Wonder used on that tour.)Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, recalled his father offering his ear when Mr. DeVaughn was recording his album “The Love Reunion.” “He went with me to a couple studio sessions,” the son said. “And he would make some cool suggestions.”Mr. Wadud in concert at Washington Square Church in Manhattan in 1990.Jack Vartoogian/FrontRowPhotos/Getty ImagesRonald Earsall DeVaughn was born on April 30, 1947, in Cleveland, the youngest of 12 children of Alberta Miller and Edward DeVaughn. He studied at Youngstown State University and Oberlin College in Ohio and, though accepted to Yale for graduate work in performance, chose to attend Stony Brook University, on Long Island, for his master’s degree, so that he could study cello with Bernard Greenhouse of the Beaux Arts Trio.In 2014, in one of his last interviews, Mr. Wadud said of Mr. Greenhouse: “He had the ensemble background. At that time, I was thinking if I wanted to do something in classical, it would be in an ensemble, an arranged quartet, piano trio, or something of that nature.”Mr. Wadud clinched some of these chamber music ambitions in the 1980s as part of a stellar trio with Mr. Davis and the flutist and composer James Newton.“A lot of people have spoken about his pizzicato playing, but I was also excited by his arco tone,” Mr. Davis said in an interview, referring to Mr. Wadud’s use of the bow. “He had a unique sound, a beautiful sound. I think James and I were both so excited; it opened up so many avenues in terms of our composition, to create pieces for him.”When the trio performed with the New York Philharmonic, as soloists in an orchestral performance of Mr. Davis’s “Still Waters,” there came a distinct moment of respect for Mr. Wadud’s musicianship, Mr. Newton recalled.“The principal cellist in the orchestra at that time said, ‘Mr. Wadud, what is the fingering that you’re using for this phrase?’” Mr. Newton recalled saying to himself, knowing the Philharmonic’s reputation for icy welcomes, “We got ’em.’”At the same time, Mr. Davis had unwittingly spoiled Mr. Wadud’s strategic use of his dual musical identities, in which he went by his original name, Ronald DeVaughn, for classical gigs while saving the name Abdul Wadud for improvisational work. “He was laughing,” Mr. Davis remembered, “Because, he said, now I had busted him: People in the classical world knew he was Abdul Wadud.”In addition to his son, Mr. Wadud is survived by a daughter, Aisha DeVaughn; a brother, Marvin DeVaughn; a sister, Floretta Perry; and five grandchildren. He was married and divorced twice.Shortly after recording the album “Oakland Duets” with Mr. Hemphill in 1992, Mr. Wadud retired from playing. Mr. Newton said of that decision: “I think when people believe that you’ve changed an instrument, as he did, the level of what they’re looking to hear every night is not always easy.” Citing Mr. Wadud’s ability to operate in so many worlds, he said, “You add all of that together, and the pressures are not minimal.”Ms. Reid said she had tried to coax Mr. Wadud back into playing. He was the guest of honor at the 2016 edition of her Chicago Jazz String Summit. And she repeatedly told him how influential he was.But a revival did not occur. “He was just so humble,” Ms. Reid said. “And I think he was happy that I even reached out to him.” She added that many record companies have since approached her, wondering if Mr. Wadud would be interested in reissuing “By Myself.”Mr. DeVaughn, Mr. Wadud’s son, said that just such a release remains in the cards. “I plan to definitely keep the torch burning,” he said, “and having that stuff put on vinyl.” More

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      Review: After 36 Years, a Malcolm X Opera Sings to the Future

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      Anthony Davis’s “X” has stretches of incantation that, in person, turn it into something like a sacred rite.DETROIT — “When a man is lost,” sings Betty Shabazz, Malcolm X’s wife, “does the sky bleed for him, or does the sunset ignore his tears?”The start of a smoldering aria, these words may be the most poetic and poignant in Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X.” Especially poignant because, for several decades, “X,” too, has been ignored.The work, with a libretto by Thulani Davis, the composer’s cousin, from a story by his brother, Christopher Davis, premiered in the mid-1980s, first in Philadelphia and, officially, at New York City Opera. And then … largely silence.For the past 36 years, it has been more talked about than heard. (An excellent studio recording from 1992 is now out of print.) And it was obvious, at the opening of a new production on Saturday at the Detroit Opera House, what “X” gains from being taken in live: Its stretches of incantation turn into something like a sacred rite.In these passages, over carpets of complex, repeating rhythms in the orchestra, the ensemble chants short lines — “Africa for Africans,” “Betrayal is on his lips,” “Freedom, justice, equality” — again and again, building and overlapping. The opera is at its best in these long swaths of music poised between churning intensity and stillness. Without copying the prayer practices of Malcolm’s Muslim faith, the work evokes them.Bringing “X” back to the stage is a coup for Detroit Opera, which has recently rebranded itself after 50 years as Michigan Opera Theater, inaugurating a new era under the artistic leadership of Yuval Sharon.Sharon came to prominence as the founder of the experimental Los Angeles company the Industry, and he is swiftly bringing ambitious, inventive programming to Detroit, like a “Götterdämmerung” in a parking garage and a “La Bohème” whose four acts are played in reverse. The field is noticing what he’s up to: As part of a widespread effort to belatedly present more works by Black composers and librettists, this “X” will travel to the Metropolitan Opera (in fall 2023), Lyric Opera of Chicago, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera.In biopic style, the libretto sketches an outline of a short but eventful life: the murder of Malcolm’s father when Malcolm is a boy in Lansing, Mich.; his mother’s mental breakdown; his move to live with his half sister in Boston, where he falls in with a fast crowd and ends up in prison; his jailhouse conversion to the teachings of Elijah Muhammad and the Nation of Islam; the success of his Black nationalist ministry; his rift with Muhammad over tactics; his pilgrimage to Mecca; and the glimmers of a more universalist ideology of peace and racial unity, which he barely gets a chance to expound before his assassination in 1965, at just 39.Clint Ramos’s set for Robert O’Hara’s production evokes the Audubon Ballroom in New York, where Malcolm was killed, while introducing an element of sci-fi Afrofuturism.Micah ShumakeAll this is conveyed in the heightened register of opera. Even the dialogue is pithy and exalted: “I come from a desert of pain and remorse.” The music is varied and resourceful; Davis won a Pulitzer Prize in 2020 for his most recent opera, “The Central Park Five,” but “X” is a deeper score.It begins in a mournful, noirish mood, the moments of anxiety flirting with blues and subtle swing. Guided sensitively by the conductor Kazem Abdullah, the music goes on to swerve from punchy modernism to lyrical lushness, from peaceful worship to nervous energy and stentorian forcefulness.An essay in the program describes how Davis’s original contract specified that “the word ‘jazz’ should not be used in any connection with this piece,” though an innovation here was to embed an improvising ensemble within a traditional orchestra. This works smoothly, as when a saxophone aptly depicts Malcolm’s new life in big-city Boston, or when a wailing, longing trumpet accompanies prayer in Mecca. The prisoners’ choral dirge is heated by squeals of brass, smoking underneath; along with Betty’s enigmatically tender aria, this is the most intriguing music of the opera.The new production, directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”), has a unit set, by Clint Ramos, that evokes the partly ruined Audubon Ballroom in Harlem, where Malcolm was killed. (The mountain pass mural painted on the back wall of the ballroom’s stage depicts an idyll that seems like it’s almost taunting the opera’s characters.)Above hover some big, swooping curves, used as a projection screen for textures, animated designs and a scrolling list of names of victims of white violence, before and after Malcolm. The staging is inspired by Afrofuturism, the attempt to conceive new — often fanciful, sometimes celestial — circumstances for a people suffering under crushing oppression.“Imagine a world where Marcus Garvey’s Black Star Line is a spaceship,” O’Hara writes in a program note, referring to the “Back to Africa” movement in which Malcolm’s parents participated. But it is when the curves take on the literal flashing lights of such a ship that things turn a bit risible, conjuring the vessel in “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial” more than noble dreams of escape and revision.More effective is the introduction of four male dancers — their sinuous choreography is by Rickey Tripp — who snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), sometimes as squiggly punctuation to scenes. The spare flexibility that O’Hara introduces mostly works, even if the libretto’s specificity of place and situation gets sacrificed in this more abstract vision. Malcolm’s basic progress is still clear — less so the particulars of where he is and to whom, exactly, he’s speaking. The result, not unpleasantly, is more dream ballet than CNN.In the production, four dancers — their sinuous choreography by Rickey Tripp — snake through the production, sometimes as guardian angels looking over Young Malcolm (Charles Dennis), here with his mother (Whitney Morrison).Micah ShumakeMalcolm, though, still wears his distinctive browline glasses. He is played here with superb control by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, steady, calm and committed in both his physical presence and grounded voice, with a fiery core that seethes in his main aria, “I would not tell you what I know,” at the end of Act I.As Malcolm’s mother and his wife, the soprano Whitney Morrison sings with mellow strength. Charming as Street, who spiffs up Malcolm in Boston, the tenor Victor Ryan Robertson largely handles Elijah Muhammad’s muscular high lines but strains to convey his magnetism.“X” sometimes hypnotizes but sometimes sags. Like Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” about Gandhi’s early years in South Africa, the opera is conceived as a steadily progressing account of a historical figure’s ideological evolution, dispensing with traditional dramatic tension. The main human conflict, between Malcolm and Elijah, is only lightly touched on; it’s not the plot.“Satyagraha,” though, fully gives itself over to stylization, its Sanskrit text detached from the action, its scenes pageantlike. The music and libretto of “X,” by contrast, keep promising crackling drama without quite delivering; there can be a sense of falling between the stools of trance-like repetition and standard storytelling.Scattered throughout are interludes that musically feel like vamping and that offer little obvious pretext for action. After so many years, the creators seem to have perceived the need to do something with these expanses — “We have added a few lines of singing in places that were musical interludes,” Thulani Davis writes in the program — but they remain, and sap the energy.Still “X,” for all its obvious admiration for its subject, is admirably resistant to mawkishness or melodrama, particularly in avoiding an operatic death scene: At the end, Malcolm takes the podium in the Audubon Ballroom and briefly greets his audience in Arabic. Then there’s a blackout as gunfire rings out.For all the talk of spaceships and a better tomorrow, it is an inescapably stark conclusion. There will always be gifted, visionary boys and men, the work seems to say in this new staging, but their futures are hardly assured.X: The Life and Times of Malcolm XThrough May 22 at the Detroit Opera House; detroitopera.org. More

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      What to See and Experience Live in New York This Spring

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      ‘Funny Girl’ and ‘A Strangle Loop’ on Broadway, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s dances, Olivia Rodrigo’s pop takeover: what our critics and writers are looking forward to this season.Broadway‘TAKE ME OUT’ Peanuts and crackerjacks may not be available at Second Stage’s Hayes Theater, but anyone who thinks that live theater is the ultimate spectator sport should root for the Broadway revival of Richard Greenberg’s comedy. Set in the locker room of a professional baseball team, the play stars Jesse Williams (“Grey’s Anatomy”) as a big-shot player who wants to come out as gay. Openly queer athletes are somewhat more common than when Greenberg wrote the play, which debuted at the Public Theater in 2002 and later won three Tony Awards. But they remain a rarity in team sports. So the play’s conversations around excellence, sexuality and the boundaries between public and private lives, should still make it around the bases. Scott Ellis directs, and Jesse Tyler Ferguson (“Modern Family”) and Patrick Adams (“Suits”) co-star. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin March 10; opens April 4 at the Hayes Theater, Manhattan.‘FUNNY GIRL’ It’s hard to think of another Golden Age megahit that hasn’t had a Broadway revival. Surely it’s not the fault of the terrific songs, by Jule Styne and Bob Merrill, including “Don’t Rain on My Parade” and “People.” And though the original book isn’t top-notch, it gets the job done, telling the story of the comedian Fanny Brice from teenage years to stardom by way of romantic catastrophe. No, the reason is simple: Barbra Streisand. Nearly 60 years after creating the role, she essentially still owns it. So let’s just say for now that the delightful Beanie Feldstein, who heads this revival, is borrowing it. Whether she can make the production, directed by Michael Mayer and with a revised book by Harvey Fierstein, as memorable as the first — well, check back in 60 years. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 26; opens April 24 at the August Wilson Theater, Manhattan.Daniel Craig will star as Macbeth in Sam Gold’s production at the Longacre Theater.Devin Oktar Yalkin for The New York TimesRuth Negga will be his Lady Macbeth. Previews begin March 29.Chantal Anderson for The New York Times‘MACBETH’ Is it ever not “Macbeth” time? “The Scottish Play,” as superstitious theater folk call it, has had nearly 50 Broadway productions since 1768, each age no doubt finding in it an echo of its own. In ours, the toxic brew of ambition and credulousness seems to resound most clearly. Will the director Sam Gold, whose takes on “King Lear” and “The Glass Menagerie” were so divisive, draw the modern parallels? All I can say for sure is that with Daniel Craig (a memorably blasé Iago in Gold’s downtown “Othello” in 2016) and Ruth Negga (a riveting Hamlet in 2020) as the suggestible Macbeth and his suggestive Lady, this revival should be a deep dive into cold water. JESSE GREENPreviews begin March 29; opens April 28 at the Longacre Theater, Manhattan.‘FOR COLORED GIRLS WHO HAVE CONSIDERED SUICIDE/WHEN THE RAINBOW IS ENUF’ The year before her death in 2018, the playwright Ntozake Shange went to the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington to see a program by the choreographer Camille A. Brown. It was the first time they met, but they soon saw each other again — and Brown found herself in the startling position of hearing Shange, the revered author of the landmark choreopoem “For Colored Girls,” ask to interview her about her work, because she so enjoyed Brown’s movement language. Dance is elemental to “For Colored Girls,” which first opened on Broadway in 1976 and ran for nearly two years, with Shange herself as the Lady in Orange, one of the rainbow of women of color who tell their stories in the play. Revived at the Public Theater in 2019 with Brown (“Once on This Island”) as choreographer, it comes to Broadway this spring with Brown both directing and choreographing. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin April 1; opens April 20 at the Booth Theater, Manhattan.From left, Jeff Still as Mr. Assalone, Tracy Letts as Mayor Superba and Cliff Chamberlain as Mr. Breeding in the play “The Minutes” at the Cort Theater.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘THE MINUTES’ Tracy Letts kills with laughs. In his 2007 breakthrough, “August: Osage County,” the victim was the American family. In “Linda Vista,” which hit Broadway in 2019, men took the blade of his scythe. In those plays, and in many others, he gets you rooting for the worst people until you realize you are then complicit in their destructiveness. “The Minutes,” directed by Letts’s frequent collaborator Anna D. Shapiro, is a 90-minute comedy satirizing the workings of a self-satisfied bureaucracy in a fictional Midwestern city called Big Cherry. It features a cast of Letts experts, including Ian Barford, Blair Brown, K. Todd Freeman, Sally Murphy and, as Mayor Superba, Letts himself. But if it looks like he’s wielding his usual weapons, the target is even bigger than before: America’s idea of its own goodness. JESSE GREENPreviews begin April 2; opens April 17 at Studio 54, Manhattan.‘A STRANGE LOOP’ Since it premiered at Playwrights Horizons in 2019, Michael R. Jackson’s searingly funny and heartbreakingly frank musical “A Strange Loop,” in which he reflected on his experience as a young, queer Black man, has gone on to earn critical raves and a slew of awards, including the Pulitzer Prize in 2020. Now, Page 73, Playwrights Horizons and Woolly Mammoth are bringing the acclaimed production to Broadway, with Jaquel Spivey in the central role of a musical theater writer working as an usher at “The Lion King” and whose thoughts come to blistering life as a sort of Greek chorus. Jackson dismantles orthodoxies with verve and bite, and reserves some of his most pointed barbs for such institutions as church and Tyler Perry. You may never think of that Atlanta mogul the same way again. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 6; opens April 26 at the Lyceum Theater, Manhattan.Martin McDonagh’s play “Hangmen” will return to the Golden Theater after being canceled at the start of the pandemic. Performances begin April 8.Sara Krulwich/The New York Times‘HANGMEN’ After Martin McDonagh’s slow-burn thriller was forced to close with the rest of Broadway in March 2020, its producers declared that it couldn’t come back. But McDonagh (“The Pillowman,” “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”) has a way with a plot twist. So here is one more: This 1960s-set work of psychological suspense will return to the same theater, with a somewhat altered cast. Gone is Dan Stevens (“Downton Abbey”) as a magnetic London lowlife; in his place is Alfie Allen (“Game of Thrones”). Mark Addy, who played an executioner turned pub owner in the North of England, has also been replaced, by David Threlfall. What remains in this production, which originated at the Royal Court in London, are McDonagh’s shocking gifts: for taut plotting, sharp dialogue and a theatrical style that balances each play on a knife’s edge of comedy and terror. Matthew Dunster directs. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 8; opens April 21 at the Golden Theater, Manhattan.Off Broadway‘CONFEDERATES’ Dominique Morisseau, one of the most exciting playwrights working today, is best known for her Detroit cycle, which feels like the magnificent progeny of August Wilson’s American Century Cycle. She makes magic with language: Her characters are real, her metaphors are sharp, and her dialogue reads like poetry. Morisseau’s work was on Broadway earlier this season with “Skeleton Crew,” and she follows that with the New York premiere of “Confederates,” which tackles institutional racism as it’s experienced by two Black women who live over a century apart. Stori Ayers directs. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin March 8; opens March 27 at the Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘SUFFS’ There’s a scene in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s film adaptation of the Jonathan Larson musical “Tick, Tick … Boom!” in which the camera pans a silent assembly of musical theater writers: essential composers and lyricists of the 21st-century New York stage. Blink and you miss her, but Shaina Taub is in there. So don’t blink, and definitely don’t miss her work. The subject of her latest musical, “Suffs,” is the fight, just over a century ago, for American women’s right to vote. The topic might sound potentially dry as dust, or doctrinaire to a fatal degree. But Taub, a musical magpie with a wholly distinctive voice, has a genius for storytelling that’s smart and political but also playful and funny; for proof, see her tuneful adaptations of “Twelfth Night” and “As You Like It.” And while she’s lately teamed up with Elton John to write the Broadway-bound musical “The Devil Wears Prada,” “Suffs” is all hers. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESPreviews begin March 10; opens April 6 at the Public Theater, Manhattan.Puppetry is featured in Huang Ruo and Basil Twist’s “Book of Mountains & Seas,” a choral theater piece based on Chinese myths. It will have a short run in March at St. Ann’s Warehouse.Olafur Gestsson‘BOOK OF MOUNTAINS & SEAS’ The composer-librettist Huang Ruo and the director-designer Basil Twist are calling their new work choral theater, but it’s also puppetry on an operatic scale — bold, elegant, monumental. Adapted from Chinese myths and delayed from its American premiere when the Omicron variant shut down the Prototype Festival in January, “Book of Mountains & Seas” arrives for its brief run at St. Ann’s Warehouse with 12 singers from the Choir of Trinity Wall Street, two percussionists and a half dozen nimble puppeteers. First performed last year in Copenhagen, it’s a sensory immersion of sound, light and movement that feels sometimes as if elements of Twist’s most famous puppet piece, “Symphonie Fantastique,” had escaped the water tank to soar majestically in the open air. LAURA COLLINS-HUGHESMarch 15-20 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.‘HARMONY’ Back in 2019, The New York Times trumpeted that after taking off at the La Jolla Playhouse in 1997 and spending more than two decades circling the runway, Barry Manilow and Bruce Sussman’s labor-of-love musical “Harmony” — about the German vocal sextet the Comedian Harmonists, which was immensely popular between the two world wars — was going to have its Off Broadway premiere. In the spring of 2020. Now, the show is finally arriving, with the choreographer-director Warren Carlyle overseeing a cast led by Chip Zien and Sierra Boggess. If nothing else, this is another sign that after its Yiddish version of “Fiddler on the Roof” and its recent collaboration with New York City Opera on “The Garden of the Finzi-Continis,” the producing National Yiddish Theater Folksbiene has become a force on the New York musical landscape. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin March 23; opens April 13 at the Museum of Jewish Heritage, Manhattan.‘CYRANO DE BERGERAC’ There is no shortage of variations on Edmond Rostand’s 19th-century play “Cyrano de Bergerac,” in which the brilliant but big-nosed Cyrano writes beautiful love poems that his handsome but — let’s say, less brilliant — comrade Christian passes off for his own to impress Roxane, a woman whom Cyrano himself loves. Next up is the Jamie Lloyd Company’s “Cyrano de Bergerac,” adapted by Martin Crimp and directed by Lloyd, which will come to Brooklyn from a critically acclaimed run in London. It’s a slick, modern version, with Cyrano using rap and spoken word as his means of seduction. Starring as Cyrano is James McAvoy, who often seems to alter his very foundations — his voice and mannerisms, his energy, his whole physical presence — for a role. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 5; opens April 14 at the Harvey Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music.‘A CASE FOR THE EXISTENCE OF GOD’ Samuel D. Hunter has built a rich oeuvre from fertile ground: the Idaho landscapes of his youth. His deceptively quiet plays (“Lewiston/ Clarkston,” “A Bright New Boise,” “Greater Clements”) explore faith, desire, sex and loss, in dialogue attuned to the rhythms of ordinary speech. The MacArthur Foundation acknowledged his ability to create “dramas that explore the human capacity for empathy and confront the socially isolating aspects of contemporary life across the American landscape.” This new play, directed by David Cromer, is again set in Idaho — and is perhaps the most intimate he has written. It has just two characters, men working to understand what the world does and doesn’t owe them. Though Hunter often prefers characters on what he calls “the losing end of American life,” he has promised that this new play is hopeful. ALEXIS SOLOSKIPreviews begin April 12; opens May 2 at Signature Theater, Manhattan.‘WISH YOU WERE HERE’ The vagaries of postponements and rescheduling now give us two nearly simultaneous opportunities to discover the world of Sanaz Toossi, a young first-generation Iranian American playwright from Orange County, Calif. Hot on the heels of “English” (at the Atlantic Theater Company), which looks at a small group of Iranians preparing for the Test of English as a Foreign Language, “Wish You Were Here” follows five young women in Karaj, a suburb of Tehran. (The actress Marjan Neshat appears in both shows.) They are about 20 when the play begins, in 1978, and we stay with them until 1991 as they navigate not only their friendship, but also their sense of home and belonging. A revolution is unfolding, followed by war with Iraq; life-changing decisions must be made. Toossi reunites with Gaye Taylor Upchurch, who directed last year’s audio version from the Williamsburg Theater Festival and Audible. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 13; opens May 2 at Playwrights Horizons, Manhattan.‘WEDDING BAND’ Alice Childress was a force to be reckoned with in the theater, even if she didn’t always get her due. After all, she would have been the first Black female playwright on Broadway if she hadn’t refused to compromise on her work. That would-be first was her play “Trouble in Mind,” which finally premiered on Broadway last fall. How fortunate we are to get her follow-up to “Trouble,” “Wedding Band,” a rarely produced play about an illicit interracial relationship in the South during World War I. Awoye Timpo directs this, only the second New York production, with modern race politics — including the Black Lives Matter movement — as the trouble in mind. MAYA PHILLIPSPreviews begin April 23; opens May 1 at Polonsky Shakespeare Center, Theater for a New Audience, Brooklyn.‘THE BEDWETTER’ Sorry, “Urinetown,” you’re not the only musical about a certain bodily function anymore. Subtitled “Stories of Redemption, Courage, and Pee” Sarah Silverman’s 2010 memoir is frank, vulnerable and, of course, brutally funny. Chances are good these qualities will be present in this musical adaptation, since Silverman herself wrote the book with the playwright Joshua Harmon (“Prayer for the French Republic”), as well as the lyrics, with the composer Adam Schlesinger. The show is bound to be bittersweet: Schlesinger, who is best known for his scores for Broadway’s “Cry-Baby” and the TV series “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of coronavirus complications in April 2020, around the time “The Bedwetter” was originally scheduled to premiere. ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin April 30; opens May 23 at the Linda Gross Theater, Atlantic Theater Company.Édouard Louis in “Who Killed My Father,” which will arrive at St. Ann’s Warehouse in May.Jean-Louis Fernandez‘WHO KILLED MY FATHER’ At the intersection of memoir, sociological study and call to arms, the French writer Édouard Louis’s books, which often dissect his working-class upbringing, have become an unlikely inspiration for successful plays. Two of them, “The End of Eddy” and “History of Violence,” even opened in New York the same week in 2019. Now, Louis is even more directly involved in the theatricalization of his own life: He is starring in a stage version of “Who Killed My Father,” in which he intermingled a look at the destructive impact of physical work on his father’s body with a takedown of France’s class structure. The production reunites Louis with the brilliant German director Thomas Ostermeier, who also staged “History of Violence.” ELISABETH VINCENTELLIPreviews begin May 18; opens May 22 at St. Ann’s Warehouse, Brooklyn.PopBURNA BOY Nigerian Afrobeats has gathered a worldwide audience through sleek understatement: an insinuating basic beat that’s equal parts syncopation and silence, productions that conjure bassy depths and open spaces, singers who offer calm confidence rather than histrionics. The pandemic derailed international touring for Afrobeats stars, postponing their chances to claim their ever-expanding American audience. It’s fitting that Burna Boy, the songwriter who won the 2021 Grammy Award for best global music album with “Twice as Tall,” will be the first Nigerian musician to headline Madison Square Garden, with a show billed as “One Night in Space.” With his amiable, husky baritone and the assistance of some of Africa’s most innovative producers, Burna Boy has delivered a steady flow of international hits like “Question,” “Kilometre” and “Want It All” from 2021, and his catalog features cultural messages along with party tunes. He has already headlined arenas in Africa, Europe and England; the United States can soon catch up. JON PARELESApril 28 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan.Burna Boy performs at the Outside Lands Music Festival at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco in October 2021.Amy Harris/Invision, via Associated PressALABASTER DEPLUME Performing as Alabaster dePlume, the U.K.-based saxophonist, vocalist and activist Gus Fairbairn draws equally, and a bit cautiously, upon Indian raga, western New Age music, Hailu Mergia’s late-70s recordings with the Dahlak Band and the psych-folk appropriations of the Incredible String Band. He knows that most of the ideas in his music — musically, lyrically, critically — originated somewhere else; they’re a historical inheritance, and they’re here through colonial encounter.But just knowing doesn’t count for much, and dePlume’s real appeal (as an auteur, a philosopher, a saxophonist) comes from listening to him push through the anxieties of influence into sincerity. More and more, the music wears humane intentions on its sleeve: On “Don’t Forget You’re Precious,” from his latest album, “Gold,” due April 1, he admonishes a listener in a purring first-person: “​​I remember my pin number/I remember my ex’s email address/But I forget I’m precious.”Those intentions come through strongly in performance, where dePlume encourages his side musicians to “bring your whole self,” as he said in an interview with The Quietus. He avoids playing consistently with the same group so that every show is guided by intuition. When he arrives in Brooklyn, he’ll be joined by the violist Marta Sofia Honer and the electronic musician Jeremiah Chiu, in a band he pulled together with help from Jaimie Branch, a trumpeter and his International Anthem label mate. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOMarch 19 at Public Records in Brooklyn.DUA LIPA Released in the surreal and cursed March 2020, Dua Lipa’s nimble, disco-sleek second record, “Future Nostalgia,” was one of the first blockbuster pop albums put out during the Covid-19 pandemic. That it has taken her nearly two years to tour it, though, does not mean its sound has become a distant, early lockdown memory: “Future Nostalgia” has had such a long tail in the usually mercurial pop world that you’d still be hard pressed to scan the radio dial and not come across one of its many smash hits. (Its fifth single, “Levitating,” has been on the Billboard Hot 100 for 66 weeks and counting.)This also means that Lipa’s star wattage has increased considerably since she last toured the United States, for her 2017 self-titled debut album. Consider that the last venue she headlined in New York was the 2,500-seat Hammerstein Ballroom; the Future Nostalgia Tour will come to two local arenas. If her effervescent, impressively calisthenic performance at last year’s Grammys was any indication, Lipa will have no trouble commanding such a huge stage. And given the fact that Lipa’s buoyant tunes were the soundtrack of so many people dancing on their own during those long, lonely months of lockdown, the prospect of grooving to them in a communal setting promises to be extra cathartic. LINDSAY ZOLADZMarch 1 at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan; March 4 at Prudential Center in Newark, N.J.Dua Lipa earlier this month at FTX Arena.Jason Koerner/Getty Images for Permanent Press MediaOLIVIA RODRIGO Most musicians — even the ones who appear to be overnight sensations — have to pay their dues on small stages first. Olivia Rodrigo’s breakout year happened while the pandemic paused live music, so while she’s a front-runner for a best new artist Grammy, she’s still barely played in front of live audiences at all, save for a few performances on late night TV and at award shows. And so the sold-out Sour Tour will be a proving ground for Rodrigo, whose alternately punky and wrenching debut album, “Sour,” was one of the best and most talked about of last year. Rodrigo’s recent eight-song appearance at “Austin City Limits,” taped for a crowd of giddy fans, was a better showcase for the quieter, more introspective side of her songwriting, like the world-stopping ballad “Drivers License” or the scorched post-breakup note “Traitor.” But her tour will likely provide an opportunity for pop-punk anthems like “Good 4 U” and “Brutal” to connect with a more kinetic audience — plenty of people have been waiting far too long to scream along with Rodrigo’s every word. ZOLADZApril 26-27 at Radio City Music Hall in Manhattan.Olivia Rodrigo performing at the American Music Awards last fall in Los Angeles.Chris Pizzello/Invision, via Associated PressWILCO Vindication doesn’t get much purer, or better deserved, than the fate of Wilco’s 2002 album, “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.” After making three albums of rootsy indie-rock, full of 1960s and 1970s echoes, Jeff Tweedy steered Wilco toward studio experimentation, incorporating unexpected instruments, random noises and surreal mixes. Its opening song, “I Am Trying to Break Your Heart,” was a frontal assault on naturalism, savoring loops, glitches and distortion. Wilco’s label, Reprise, told Tweedy the album was horrible and “career-ending,” refused to release it and dropped the band. But Wilco then streamed the songs online to a hugely enthusiastic response. Nonesuch (part of the Warner Music Group along with Reprise) picked up “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot”; it reached the Top 20 and sold more than half a million copies. Wilco has endured as a shape-shifting band, with songs that can be transformed onstage. It will mark the 20th anniversary of “Yankee Hotel Foxtrot” by performing the whole album for five nights in New York City and three in Chicago. The sonic palette may seem slightly less radical two decades later, but the songs remain sturdy, full of private yearnings and insights about America. PARELESApril 15-17 and April 19-20 at the United Palace Theater in Manhattan; April 22-24 at the Auditorium Theater in Chicago.Classical‘LUCIA DI LAMMERMOOR’ There have been all kinds of updatings at the Metropolitan Opera in recent years. “Rigoletto,” set in the Renaissance, has been moved to Rat Pack-era Las Vegas, then Weimar Germany. “Carmen,” which the libretto places in the early 19th century, was pulled forward to the time of the Spanish Civil War.But rarer — particularly in a core repertory still dominated by Italian-language classics — are Met productions set in a realistic present day. That can be a step too far for conservative opera aficionados who have grudgingly dealt with (and sometimes booed) the company’s mildly modernized takes on some of their favorites.The Met’s new staging of Donizetti’s “Lucia di Lammermoor” is therefore a likely flash point. The Australian director Simon Stone (“Yerma” at the Park Avenue Armory and “Medea” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music) is setting the work not in its original 18th-century Scottish Highlands, but in a struggling Rust Belt town today.For Stone, both of those milieus are ones in which society’s denial of the power and prosperity that men had assumed was theirs translates to the abuse of women. Living in what he calls a “wasteland of free-market capitalism,” pockmarked by pawn shops, liquor stores and boarded-up houses, Stone’s title character — forced, with tragic results, into marrying against her will — is an opioid addict who meets her secret lover at a motel.The 2007 Mary Zimmerman staging being replaced by this one was also updated, to the Victorian era, but retained a sumptuousness that satisfied traditionalists. Abandoning that, Stone is under pressure to render his fresh vision through his cast, led by Nadine Sierra as Lucia, Javier Camarena as her beloved Edgardo, and Artur Rucinski as her cruel brother. Riccardo Frizza conducts what promises to be a very interesting premiere. Opens April 23. ZACHARY WOOLFEThe Metropolitan Opera is transposing “Lucia Lammermoor” from its original 19th-century Scottish setting to a 21st-century American Rust Belt town.Met OperaJOHNNY GANDELSMAN The violinist Johnny Gandelsman doesn’t take on projects lightly. In addition to his work with the quartet Brooklyn Rider, and with the Silkroad Ensemble, he maintains a robust solo career that has unfolded with one ambitious undertaking after another.With feather-light and fiddling bow strokes, he recorded a novel account of Bach’s six sonatas and partitas for solo violin, which he programmed as a breathless marathon instead of the usual assortment of selections. Then he transcribed Bach’s six cello suites for his instrument, again presenting them all together, and justified what might have seemed like a gimmick with an illuminating re-evaluation of music that could hardly be better known.His latest project, “This Is America,” is a swerve from the Baroque, but no less daunting and even more enterprising.In the spirit of another restless violinist, Jennifer Koh, Gandelsman has gone on a commissioning spree, ordering more than 20 new pieces from a group of composers who collectively demonstrate the possibilities of truly diverse programming. What emerges, he hopes, is an argument for the impossibility of capturing the United States in any straightforward or reductive way, as well as for the benefit in aspiring instead to a prismatic portrait of place.He has started rolling out the premieres in a tour whose stops include two evenings at Baryshnikov Arts Center. Both programs open with Bach cello suite transcriptions, but spread between them are also 10 “This Is America” works. On the roster are excellent known quantities, such as Tyshawn Sorey (“For Courtney Bryan”), Rhiannon Giddens (“New to the Session”) and Angélica Negrón (“A través del manto Luminoso”); as well as Olivia Davis, Nick Dunston, Christina Courtin, Marika Hughes, Adele Faizullina, and Rhea Fowler and Micaela Tobin. March 16 and 17. JOSHUA BARONEThe violinist Johnny Gandelsman performing last spring at Barge Music in Brooklyn.Mary Inhea Kang for The New York TimesCARNEGIE HALL Scan the schedule at Carnegie Hall, and it’s painfully apparent that it’s still impossible for major overseas orchestras to appear on these shores as they once could — at least unless they are led by the conductor Valery Gergiev, who brings his Mariinsky Orchestra to town (May 3, May 4) after an initial visit with the Vienna Philharmonic at the end of February.One of the few to cross the ocean is the Mahler Chamber Orchestra, whose concert with the immaculate pianist Mitsuko Uchida (March 25) would be a highlight of any season, let alone this necessarily sparse one. Together, they will play two Mozart concertos, the repertoire in which Uchida has for so long excelled: the genial, graceful No. 23 in A, and the No. 24 in C minor, one of the composer’s darkest pieces.But if the Mahler ensemble’s appearance is the exception that proves the rule, Uchida’s is something like the opposite: Pianists dominate at Carnegie this spring. Uchida herself will preface her Mozart by appearing with the tenor Mark Padmore, an ideally penetrating pairing for Schubert’s troubled “Schwanengesang” (March 13).Daniil Trifonov (March 3), Beatrice Rana (March 9), Gabriela Montero (March 18) and Andras Schiff (March 31) all arrive in March, with Montero offering an intriguing Carnegie debut putting Schumann, Shostakovich and Chick Corea suggestively together with her own pieces and improvisations. Yuja Wang (April 12), Emanuel Ax (April 28) and Evgeny Kissin (May 20) take their place on the piano bench later; if their programs look a little same-old, Yefim Bronfman (April 18) adds to his repertory with a sonata by the uncompromising Galina Ustvolskaya. And if that’s not enough, Igor Levit returns after his January recital to perform Brahms with the New York Philharmonic (May 6). DAVID ALLENANTHONY DAVIS The composer and pianist Anthony Davis’s operas have been absurdly difficult to seek out this century. But that’s about to change.Portland Opera will present “The Central Park Five” — which earned Davis the 2020 Pulitzer Prize — in March. And Michigan Opera Theater in Detroit will bring Davis’s first operatic triumph, “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from 1986, to its stage in May, in a new production by the Tony Award nominee Robert O’Hara.New Yorkers may want to keep an eye on this “X,” which is bound for the Metropolitan Opera in the fall of 2023. A concert presentation will also be on offer from the Boston Modern Orchestra Project in June. In both Boston and Detroit, the title role will be sung by the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, whose fleet, complex characterizations have proved dazzling in New York — including his lead appearance in Hans Werner Henze’s “El Cimarrón.” (The baritone Will Liverman is scheduled to take the part at the Met.)Even if the production weren’t headed to New York, Davis’s score would make “X” a destination opera. Just as in his orchestral music and compositions for smaller jazz ensembles, his approach in this opera merges modernism with a wide-angle appreciation of swing and the blues. Although “X” made a strong impression on a 1992 recording, now out of print, Davis is taking this opportunity to revise the score. This spring will be our first opportunity to hear his latest vision of it. SETH COLTER WALLSDanceMOVEMENT RESEARCH AT JUDSON CHURCH This weekly series, which dates to 1991, is an ever-shifting bill of experimental dance. Each program, free on Monday nights, is a stand-alone adventure — the chance to see an imagination blossom on a bare-bones stage. Where is dance going? How is the art form developing in a new generation, and how have choreographers continued to work through the pandemic? Now, more than ever, Judson is critical to the ecosystem of downtown dance.When Movement Research, dedicated to the investigation of dance and movement-based forms, resumed its Judson performances last fall, the idea was to celebrate the series’ 30th anniversary, but cancellations were unavoidable; the same thing happened in early winter as yet another wave of the pandemic hit. When, finally, the show did go on one night in February, it felt like a beam of light.This spring, Judson gets another shot at celebrating its anniversary beginning with Lai Yi Ohlsen and Brendan Drake on March 21 and continuing with Benjamin Akio Kimitch and the mesmerizing duo of Molly Lieber and Eleanor Smith the following week.The season wrap-up is organized by Maria Hupfield, through Movement Research’s Artists of Color Council, a group addressing issues of equity and cultural diversity. The lineup features Indigenous Kinship Collective NYC (KIN), Emily Johnson and Rosy Simas, dance artists very much in tune with the urgency of our time. Dance may have been put on hold, but it has a future. Movement Research proves it. GIA KOURLASThrough May 23 at Judson Church, Manhattan.SARA MEARNS The ballet dancer is just one part of the dancer that is Sara Mearns. In this Joyce Theater production, she explores other sides of her artistry in a collection of collaborations, including a crucial one with the choreographer and dance artist Jodi Melnick. It is through Melnick that Mearns, a principal dancer at New York City Ballet, delved into a new way of moving, a new way of thinking about dance and about the intricacies of the body.Together, their contrasts and similarities create, strange as it may sound, a minimalism of excess rooted in delicate, powerfully subtle, liquid dancing. They have spent hours in the studio together; it shows. A highlight will be Melnick’s “Opulence,” a duet that was originally part of a program at Jacob’s Pillow in 2019.The program also includes a short film — shot in Long Island City in March 2020, just before the pandemic shutdown — directed and choreographed by Austin Goodwin for Mearns and Paul Zivkovich, as well as new duets by Vinson Fraley, a member of the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Company and Guillaume Côté, of National Ballet of Canada.In other words, this isn’t another ballerina-in-the-spotlight kind of situation. Not only will Mearns debut a solo by the esteemed choreographer Beth Gill — so curious to see this! — but she has also programmed a Cunningham MinEvent, staged by Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener, featuring live music by John King. Cunningham isn’t new to Mearns; she performed in “Night of 100 Solos: A Centennial Event,” which celebrated that choreographer’s legacy in 2019. She’s assembled a stellar cast: She will be joined by Taylor Stanley, Jacquelin Harris, Chalvar Monteiro, Burr Johnson and Melnick. It’s star power done right. KOURLASMarch 8-13 at the Joyce Theater, Manhattan.STORYBOARD P Storyboard P is an incredible dancer in the most literal sense, the kind who makes it hard to believe your eyes. His name alludes to film, and many people (including him) have likened his style to stop-motion animation and special effects. Gliding and floating in liquid relation to music or flickering to register noise in the signal, he’s a master of illusion whose sophistication and subtlety reward the closest attention. But even more astonishing than his skill is the freedom of his improvisatory imagination. It follows unpredictable twists into deep and strange channels, the territory of dreams.In the Crown Heights neighborhood where he grew up and in the community that developed the street dance known as flex, he was recognized as exceptional at least by the mid-2000s, when he started winning competition after competition, even if he never quite fit in. Around 10 years ago, news began to spread more widely. Appearing in his own clips, in short films by Khalil Joseph and Arthur Jafa and in music videos for the likes of Jay-Z, he became a YouTube star. In profiles — in The New Yorker, The Guardian and The Wire — he talked about forging a new kind of career for a dancer, as “a visual recording artist.”Instead, apart from a cameo in another Jay-Z video (the Arthur Jafa-directed “4:44”), he largely disappeared from the public eye. But he’s resurfacing at Performance Space New York for two freestyle performances called “No Diving 2.” Who knows what might happen. BRIAN SEIBERTApril 7-8 at Performance Space New York, Manhattan.Kouadio Davis, left, and Alexandra Hutchinson of Dance Theater of Harlem in Robert Garland’s “Higher Ground.”Theik SmithROBERT GARLAND AT DANCE THEATER OF HARLEM Dance Theater of Harlem was founded in 1969 with two braided missions: to create a place for Black dancers in ballet and to extend the tradition of George Balanchine and New York City Ballet, where Arthur Mitchell, Dance Theater’s mastermind, got his start. These missions have been carried into the present in the work of the company’s resident choreographer, Robert Garland.In “Return” (1999), set to recordings by James Brown and Aretha Franklin, and “New Bach” (2002), Garland found a way to combine neoclassical ballet with Black vernacular dance and what he has called “Harlem swag.” His “Gloria” (2013), set to Poulenc and incorporating students, movingly encapsuled the troupe’s phoenixlike rebirth after a nine-year hiatus. In their excellence, these pieces to old music showed how values from the past still had relevance.In 2020, when the pandemic shut down theaters, Garland was about to debut “Higher Ground,” set to some of the more politically sharp tracks from Stevie Wonder’s genius streak of the 1970s. The work finally gets its New York premiere in April, as part of the City Center Dance Festival. The music comes from Garland’s youth but is freshly topical in the age of Black Lives Matter. Even more significant, the dance is an intensely affecting response to that music that could be done only by a ballet company — this ballet company. It feels like the kind of work that Dance Theater of Harlem was made to do. SEIBERT.April 5, 8-10, at New York City Center, Manhattan.Ashwini Ramaswamy in her “Let the Crows Come.”Jake ArmourASHWINI RAMASWAMY Two years after its originally scheduled New York premiere, Ashwini Ramaswamy’s “Let the Crows Come” finally lands at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. Ramaswamy, who lives in Minneapolis, grew up steeped in the tradition of the South Indian classical dance form Bharatanatyam, and her work often explores the in-betweenness of her cultural identity, the experience of being from both India and the United States.In “Let the Crows Come,” she is joined by two other Minneapolis dancers with different areas of expertise: Alanna Morris, who has a background in contemporary and Afro-Caribbean forms, and Berit Ahlgren, a practitioner and teacher of Gaga, the movement language developed by the Israeli choreographer Ohad Naharin. Each dancer offers an interpretation of the same Bharatanatyam solo, refracting its rhythmic footwork, sculptural postures and intricate gestures through her own lens. Ramaswamy likens the structure to “a memory that’s experienced differently from person to person.” In the live music, along similar lines, the composers Jace Clayton (also known as DJ Rupture) and Brent Arnold take inspiration from an original Carnatic score by Prema Ramamurthy.New York audiences might know Ramaswamy, a dancer of vibrant clarity and warmth, from the Ragamala Dance Company, the Bharatanatyam troupe led by her mother and sister, with whom she still trains and performs. In a phone interview, she said her work remains intimately tied to theirs.“I wouldn’t say I’m branching out on my own,” she said, “but figuring out my method and my voice within that aesthetic and that lineage.”The title “Let the Crows Come” alludes to a flow between past and present, referring to a Hindu ritual of honoring ancestors through offerings of rice. When crows come to eat the rice, Ramaswamy said, “it means your ancestors are telling you, ‘I’m OK. Keep living your life, but I’m always there with you.’” SIOBHAN BURKEApril 13-15 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Manhattan.OKINAWAN DANCE AND MUSIC It’s not often that dance from Okinawa makes its way to New York; when it does, you want to clear your calendar. That’s one lesson I learned from the Japan Society’s exquisite presentation, back in 2015, of Okinawan dance and music. As part of a five-city American tour, a new program, “Waves Across Time: Traditional Dance and Music of Okinawa,” comes to the Japan Society in March. The tour — also stopping at Furman University in Greenville, S.C.; the Kennedy Center in Washington; Lafayette College in Easton, Pa.; and the University of Chicago — marks the 50th anniversary of the return of Okinawa to Japan, following the American occupation of the islands after World War II.Assembled by Michihiko Kakazu, the artistic director of the National Theater Okinawa, the two-part evening includes court dances from the classical repertory of kumiodori, a kind of Noh-inspired theater, dating to Okinawa’s era as an independent kingdom, Ryukyu, from the 15th to 19th centuries. Stately, slow and lavishly costumed, these contrast with the program’s other half: more recent, upbeat popular and folk dances, zo-odori. A lecture on the histories of these forms precedes each performance, and interactive workshops invite a closer look at their rhythmic and physical structures. BURKEMarch 18-20 at the Japan Society, Manhattan. More

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      Review: At the Philharmonic, Contemporary Is King for a Week

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      Music by Missy Mazzoli, Anthony Davis and John Adams was conducted by Dalia Stasevska, in her debut with the orchestra.You could hear a tantalizing possible future for the New York Philharmonic on Wednesday evening at Alice Tully Hall — as well as some of the orchestra’s present difficulties. The program at Tully, one of the Philharmonic’s bases as David Geffen Hall is renovated this season, featured three contemporary works. One was by the safely canonized John Adams, the other two by names newer to Philharmonic audiences: Missy Mazzoli and Anthony Davis.Not that either of the two is really unknown. Both have been tapped for premieres at the Metropolitan Opera in the coming years — for Davis, the belated Met debut of his “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” from the 1980s, and for Mazzoli, a new adaptation of George Saunders’s novel “Lincoln in the Bardo.” But until this week, neither had been played on a Philharmonic subscription program.Their works landed with persuasive panache on Wednesday, aided by powerful but never overly brash conducting by Dalia Stasevska, also making her Philharmonic debut. But there were some problems with the overall sound. The sonic glare of Tully, generally a home for chamber music rather than larger-scale contemporary symphonic repertory, sometimes worked against the haunted sensuality of Mazzoli’s “Sinfonia (for Orbiting Spheres),” written in 2013 and revised three years later.Stasevska fostered warmth whenever possible, shaping the 12-minute piece’s transfers of elegantly gloomy melodic ornaments from section to section of the ensemble with care and relish. And when a small army of harmonicas gently peeked out from behind the work’s often mournful textures, they glimmered delicately. Stasevska also found moments to collaborate with the bright harshness of Tully’s acoustic, allowing herself a leap and a stomp on the podium during one transition between a string glissando and a full-orchestra blast. Call it fighting the hall to a draw.Davis’s 25-minute, four-movement clarinet concerto “You Have the Right to Remain Silent,” written in 2006 and revised in 2011, fared more unevenly. The superbly varied work was inspired by a time that Davis, who is Black, was pulled over by the police while driving in Boston in the 1970s. Amid the dense music, he sometimes asks the players to recite portions of the Miranda warning. (On a recording by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, this is done in a deadened Sprechstimme.)On Wednesday, the Philharmonic did well by the concerto’s debt to Charles Mingus in passages of gravelly extended technique and others of deceptively breezy swing — and, as with Mingus, at the intersection of the two.But the initial vocalization of the Miranda text wasn’t quite crisp enough, slightly deflating the dramatic stakes. And the frenetic cello figures that followed lacked the tight ensemble necessary to suggest the first movement’s title: “Interrogation.”Yet the soloist, the Philharmonic’s principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, excelled in the grave material for contra-alto clarinet in the second movement, “Loss,” while his sound turned more arid amid more assaultive music in the third movement, “Incarceration.” The sly final movement, “The Dance of the Other,” felt the most inspired. There’s a satirical edge to this music, but in lingering, affecting phrases McGill also evoked a fully sincere yearning to travel from the grimness of interrogation, loss and incarceration.With its febrile mixture of influences from Minimalism, Hindemith’s pellucid peculiarity and classic cartoons, Adams’s 22-minute Chamber Symphony for 15 musicians, from 1992 — which the Philharmonic has played just once before, in 2000 — needs subtlety as well as brio. On Wednesday the middle movement, “Aria With Walking Bass,” was more plodding than witty. But an energetic “Roadrunner” finale was a saving grace. (And McGill deserves plaudits for playing the fiendish piece right after the Davis concerto, and without any intermission.)Philharmonic audiences will get more Adams soon, and in more welcoming acoustics, when the orchestra plays his Saxophone Concerto at Carnegie Hall in January. But here’s hoping we also hear more of Davis’s music; how about his piano concerto “Wayang V,” with its composer as soloist? And more Mazzoli, too. Hopefully both will be frequent presences once the Philharmonic returns to Geffen Hall next season. Refreshed acoustics do only so much; Davis and Mazzoli can be part of a refreshed repertoire.New York PhilharmonicThis program continues through Saturday at Alice Tully Hall, Manhattan; nyphil.org. More

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      A Malcolm X Opera Will Get a Rare Revival in Detroit

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      Michigan Opera Theater announced the return of indoor performances and named an associate artistic director: the star soprano Christine Goerke.When Anthony Davis’s sprawling, genre-blending biographical opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” premiered in 1986 at New York City Opera, it drew a notably diverse audience and was considered a commercial success. Yet it has rarely been revived.A new production is coming, though, as part of Michigan Opera Theater’s 2021-22 season — the first under its new artistic director, Yuval Sharon. Opening in May 2022, “X” will be directed by Robert O’Hara (“Slave Play”) and star the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, who will also be the season’s artist in residence.“My first interview for this job was shortly after the murder of George Floyd,” Sharon, who is also an innovative stage director, said in an interview. “I thought: This is a moment for change. Casting singers of color is really easy, but my focus has been on composers, librettists, conductors. I’m thinking about this season as a statement of principles, and that’s what I hope for going forward.”As part of the season announcement, on Tuesday, Michigan Opera Theater also said that Christine Goerke, a reigning Wagnerian soprano who sang the role of Brünnhilde last fall in “Twilight: Gods” — Sharon’s drive-through abridgment of “Götterdämmerung” in a Detroit parking garage — would join next season as associate artistic director.In an interview, Goerke said that her family would be moving from New Jersey to Detroit, where she has relatives. But, aware that the news of her appointment might surprise fans of her performances, she clarified that she didn’t plan to reduce her performance schedule any time soon.“I’m not stepping away from singing,” she said. “I’m stepping toward what’s going to come eventually.”“I’ve been doing this for 27 years,” she added. “We’re always thinking about what’s next. And I want to be on the other side of the desk. My relationship to opera is not going to end when I’m done singing.”The soprano Christine Goerke as Brünnhilde in “Twilight: Gods” last fall at Michigan Opera Theater, which has named her its associate artistic director.Brittany Greeson for The New York TimesAll of the productions next season come with backup plans, as the course of the coronavirus pandemic appears hopeful yet is still uncertain. But what Michigan Opera Theater unveiled on Tuesday puts off a return to live indoor performances at the Detroit Opera House until at least April 2022.Until then, productions will be staged outdoors, or at unconventional venues. The season will open on May 15 with a concert performance of Mascagni’s “Cavalleria Rusticana,” with Goerke making her role debut as Santuzza. It will be presented at the Meadow Brook Amphitheater in Rochester Hills, Mich., and conducted by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra music director Jader Bignamini.In September, Jeanine Tesori and Tazewell Thompson’s opera “Blue,” about a family in Harlem navigating the American Black experience, will receive a new production, by Kaneza Schaal, following its premiere at the Glimmerglass Festival in 2019; Daniela Candillari will conduct. The location and timing have not yet been determined, but the following production, staged by Sharon, will be “Bliss,” Ragnar Kjartansson’s marathon performance piece that loops the same three minutes from Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” for 12 hours.Michigan Opera Theater will return indoors on Feb. 26 for Robert Xavier Rodríguez and Migdalia Cruz’s “Frida,” conducted by Suzanne Mallare Acton, the company’s assistant music director. It will be a revival of Jose Maria Condemi’s 2015 staging, performed at Music Hall in downtown Detroit.Then the company will return to its theater, the Detroit Opera House, on April 2, for Sharon’s production of “La Bohème,” conducted by Vimbayi Kaziboni. The concept is something Sharon has discussed in interviews before: He will present the four acts of Puccini’s opera in reverse.“The reverse order means that we’re starting with death, and ending with love and hope,” he said. “We’ll all be coming from a place of death — at least I hope that this will be post-Covid. And I love that this thing everyone is hearing, the first thing in the theater in two years, is something they’ve never heard.”“X,” in a newly revised score by Davis, will bring the season to a close in May, conducted by Kazem Abdullah. Writing for The New Yorker after Davis won the Pulitzer Prize for Music last year, the musicologist Ryan Ebright noted that the opera had received only one full revival, at Oakland Opera Theater, in 2006. San Francisco Opera once suggested that “X” be staged as part of its inner-city parks performances, and Davis countered by asking whether they would put on Philip Glass’s “Einstein on the Beach” in a park.“I tried to make them realize,” Davis told Ebright, “that it’s about time that America got over thinking of Black art as being what’s done in the playground, or what’s basically the social-service part of culture.” More