At a rehearsal last month for the opera The Central Park Five, singers wearing soft athletic pants and baseball caps warmed up by a piano. The opera is based on a real-life tragedy, about a group of Black and brown teenagers wrongly charged and imprisoned for the brutal attack on a female jogger in New York's Central Park in 1989.
The Central Park Five won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for composer Anthony Davis in 2020; it debuted the year before at the Long Beach Opera in California. The opera has also been staged at Oregon's Portland Opera. Now, the Detroit Opera is producing the work from May 10-18 in Michigan.
"I wanted the audience to empathize and to identify with the Five," Davis said of the young men, who were mostly only 14 and 15 years old at the time of their arrests. "I thought that the story was a story of perseverance."
Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam were all exonerated in 2002.
Another real-life character in the opera is now the President of the United States. Back in 1989, Donald J. Trump was best known as a Manhattan real-estate developer and nightlife fixture. When the Central Park Five went on trial, Trump took out full-page newspaper adsdemanding the death penalty "for roving bands of wild criminals."
"That was the beginning of Donald Trump's political career, was the Central Park Five," Davis said.
The Detroit Opera decided to program this work three years ago, he notes, long before the last presidential election. In the original production, Trump sings an aria while sitting on a golden toilet in his penthouse apartment.
"What kind of city is this?" he sings. "When decent people, decent people, cannot feel safe on the street! That ends right now! This ends right now! Support our police! Bring back the death penalty!"
The Detroit Opera is presenting the aria in a less incendiary manner.
"He's not on a golden toilet," Davis said. "We didn't have the golden toilet because frankly, the focus should be on the Five and not on him. He's a character within the story and a necessary character because he's a big part of the story. You know, he's never apologized. He never apologized for his actions and his rush to judgment." (The Central Park Five sued Trump for defamation for statements he made during a presidential debate last year; that lawsuit is ongoing.)
Nataki Garrett, director of the Detroit Opera's production, dismissed a suggestion that there might be pressure, self-imposed or otherwise, to tone the staging down.
"Not for me," she said. "It was not me thinking I should tone it down. It was me making a decision that the central story is about these boys. Why center that, when you can actually speak to the lives of these young men who are now grown men, who have lives themselves and who have taken their journey through this trauma to really impact their communities in the most positive ways. That story is so much richer to me."
"This opera is a real reckoning," added Anthony Parnther. The conductor of this production of The Central Park Five is having a moment; he also conducted the score for the acclaimed movie Sinners, in theaters now. He noted that both scores draw from a wide range of American musical idioms.
"Jazz, blues, bebop, R&B, soul, you know. But, [Anthony Davis'] music oftentimes is sort of like high modernist meets really complex jazz," he said.
"I can't think of an opera that is more technically daunting than this one because it really requires such an ear from every single singer," Panther continued. "They basically have to physically memorize all of these very complex rhythms and these very difficult-to-predict pitches. But everything that he's written is utterly compelling, and in his own unique harmonic vocabulary that I've not seen replicated anywhere else."
Garrett, the director, acknowledged that the opera is being produced in Detroit at a moment when stories that tell uncomfortable truths, especially about power and race, are being politicized, and sometimes even silenced. (NPR broke the story of how Garrett received threats of racial violence and death while she was directing the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2022.)
"You know, the stories that we tell as artists are not our own," she said. "They belong to humanity. We are the reflectors. That's what we do. And so why do we know about most of the terrible things that have happened in history? Because somebody reflected it. And so that is our job. Exposing the truth helps us connect to our deeper humanity, helps us connect to our empathy, which is what the world needs more of, especially right now."
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