‘X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X’ Review: More Self-Empowering Than Radical

Anthony Davis’s opera about the iconic Black Power figure starts a nationwide series of engagements in Detroit. 

Davone Tines as Malcolm X (center)PHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

By Heidi Waleson

May 23, 2022 5:22 pm

Detroit

In 1986, when Anthony Davis’s opera “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X” had its world premiere at the New York City Opera, its title character was still considered a highly polarizing figure, remembered more than two decades after his 1965 assassination as a fiery speaker who talked about race war and white devils. The opera house, a traditionally white environment onstage and off, seemed like an uncomfortable venue for his story. “X” nonetheless sold out its four performances—and then basically disappeared. 

Times have changed. In the last decade, new works by black creators telling the stories of black characters slowly started to appear on opera stages, a trend that accelerated after George Floyd’s murder in 2020 and reached a broad public consciousness when Terence Blanchard’s “Fire Shut Up in My Bones” opened the Metropolitan Opera season last fall. Now “X” has been resurrected by a consortium of opera companies and given its first major, fully staged production since that premiere nearly four decades ago. Detroit Opera (formerly Michigan Opera Theatre), the leader of the consortium, opened the production on May 14; I saw the second performance on May 19, where it got a standing ovation from what appeared to be a substantially black audience. The show will be mounted at Lyric Opera of Chicago, the Metropolitan Opera, Opera Omaha and Seattle Opera over the next three years. “X” will also have a semi-staged performance by Odyssey Opera and the Boston Modern Opera Project on June 17. The opera will then be recorded, for release on BMOP/Sound.

“X” is a significant work, genre-exploding in its form and musical voice. Its subject matter now seems less revolutionary. We have grown accustomed to operas based on modern day public figures, ranging from J. Robert Oppenheimer, the architect of the atomic bomb, to Anna Nicole Smith, the gold-digging Playboy model. Malcolm X fits right in, and the opera concentrates more on his message of black self-empowerment than on his more incendiary rhetoric. 

Charles Dennis as Young Malcolm and Whitney Morrison as Louise, with dancers Christopher Jackson, Jay Staten, Eric Parra and Andre MalcolmPHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

Structured by story author Christopher Davis and librettist Thulani Davis, “X” follows the packed trajectory of Malcolm’s life. Act 1 depicts his Midwestern childhood, upended by his father’s violent death and the breakup of his family; his life as a young street hustler in Boston; and his conversion to Islam in prison. In Act 2, having shed his “slave name” of Little to become Malcolm X, a disciple of Elijah Muhammad of the Nation of Islam, he becomes a leader in the movement. In Act 3, he breaks with the NOI, makes a pilgrimage to Mecca, takes the name El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz, forms his own movement, and is assassinated at the Audubon Ballroom at the age of 39. 

However, the piece is more incantatory than narrative. In many of its scenes, only one named character speaks, backed up by the singers of the vocal ensemble, who echo key words and phrases, and repeat them over and over. In its best moments, the experience is like participating in a ceremony, a slowly unfolding realization of meaning and integration into a community. In the pit, where an improvising jazz ensemble of nine players, including trumpet, saxophones and vibraphone, is embedded into the orchestra, a complex, polyrhythmic pulse drives the evening. 

Mr. Davis’s powerful, hugely varied score cements each vignette in its mood and purpose. Malcolm’s mother, Louise, expresses her terror about the racist assaults the family has experienced in a winding, blues-tinged, chromatic aria; the hustler Street seduces Malcolm into a life of crime with a jaunty swing; the hallucinatory chorus of prisoners chanting “Allahu-Akbar” as Malcolm is drawn toward Islam nods to free jazz and Middle Eastern melisma. In one of the most powerful scenes, as Elijah Muhammad chastises Malcolm for disobedience and for being “too big for the Nation,” the choral repetition of “Betrayal is on his lips” acts like an orchestral bass line, driving the split between the two men. 

Ronnita Miller as Ella, Charles Dennis as Young Malcolm and Victor Ryan Robertson as Street PHOTO: MICAH SHUMAKE / DETROIT OPERA

Bass-baritone Davóne Tines was a gripping, theatrical Malcolm, making the most of the character’s monochromatic, declamatory vocal line and physically embodying his transformation from bitter hustler to magnetic, instinctive spokesman. (The adult Malcolm first appears an hour into the show; his vulnerable child self, predominantly a dance role, was ably performed by the pure-voiced Charles Dennis.) Tenor Victor Ryan Robertson got the best solo music and put it across: He was a sweet-toned seducer as both Street and Elijah Muhammad. Whitney Morrison’s metallic soprano turned shrieky in the higher ranges of Louise’s aria; she did better with the sympathetic loyalty of Betty, Malcolm’s wife. Ronnita Miller’s opulent mezzo made his sister Ella, who rescues him from foster care, a soothing presence. Joshua Conyers was stalwart as Malcolm’s brother Reginald, who introduces him to Islam. The hardworking 12-member chorus could have been sharper in the ensembles. Kazem Abdullah was the adept conductor. 

Theatrically, the opera has some longueurs, particularly when the choral repetitions go on too long. Director Robert O’Hara, best known for “Slave Play,” exacerbated those issues by stressing the opera’s mythic qualities and eliding its specificities of time and place. His interpretation made sense with the text’s rhetoric about Black self-determination; designer Clint Ramos’s Afrofuturist spaceship, suspended at the top of the set, signaled that hopeful future as well as providing a handy canvas for the mostly abstract video projections by Yee Eun Nam. Most of the performers took the curtain call wearing t-shirts with the “X” logo rather than their costumes, further shifting focus from the past to the present.

However, the playing area below the spaceship—an open space backed by a small, gold-framed proscenium stage—had to serve for every location, whether it was a dance hall, a prison or a street corner. As a result, some of the vignettes ran together, as in Act 2, when excerpts from five speeches by Malcolm, each with a slightly different message, seemed piled on top of each other. A riot scene heard in the orchestra, staged with four male dancers, was vague to the point of incomprehensibility; in other scenes, the dancers, choreographed by Rickey Tripp, added useful texture to the stage pictures. In the absence of set changes, Alex Jainchill’s lighting helped define context, as did Dede Ayite’s costumes, which limned Malcolm’s transformation from country bumpkin to hustler in a blue zoot suit to the elegantly tailored dark suit of the final scenes. Here Malcolm, declaring himself a man of peace, comes into his own; ironically, the opera ends abruptly with the gunshots that killed him. 

Ms. Waleson writes on opera for the Journal and is the author of “Mad Scenes and Exit Arias: The Death of the New York City Opera and the Future of Opera in America” (Metropolitan).