Gabriela Lena Frank’s work about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera is full of luxuriant color—visual and musical—in the company’s new production.
By
Heidi Waleson
Updated May 18, 2026 at 4:46 pm ET
Isabel Leonard and Carlos Álvarez MARTY SOHL / MET OPERA
New York
The lavish new Metropolitan Opera production of Gabriela Lena Frank’smagical “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (2022), which opened on Thursday, demonstrates this opera’s richness and potential for interpretation. The original San Diego staging, which stressed Mexican folklore, was charming but static. In New York, director/choreographer Deborah Colker, who made her house debut with a flamenco-infused “Ainadamar” in 2024, vividly uses dance and scenic effects to conjure the porousness of the border between the worlds of the living and the dead.
Nilo Cruz’s eloquent Spanish-language libretto imagines a moment in the tumultuous romance of the Mexican painters Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera: In 1957, on the Day of the Dead, when the departed can rejoin their loved ones for 24 hours, Diego tries to summon the deceased Frida. She resists, preferring to forget the intense physical and emotional pain of her life, but is lured by her longing to paint again. Ms. Frank’s unconventional, imaginatively orchestrated score maps their dreamlike journey as they ricochet through different planes of existence, and find resolution together in their love and their art.
The opera opens in the real world, as drably attired villagers assemble marigold- and candle-festooned Day of the Dead altars. Dancers strip an old flower seller of her cloak, revealing Catrina, the Keeper of the Dead. Adam Silverman’s lighting turns red; cracks appear in the floor of Jon Bausor’s set as Catrina pounds on it with her parasol to summon Frida; and dancers dressed as skeletons emerge from the crevices.
From then on, the realms of the living and the passed-on blur together. A blood-red tree descends, its skeletal branches and ropy roots suggesting veins and arteries. When Diego and Frida walk through a street market, the sellers are wearing carnival masks; in Frida’s house, a skeleton dances atop her canopy bed as she lies on it remembering her life, an image inspired by her painting “The Dream.” A murmuring, echoing chorus of the dead surrounds the central platform; they wear brilliantly colored, Mexican-inspired costumes designed by Mr. Bausor and Wilberth Gonzalez. Ms. Colker choreographs the singers as well as the dancers, creating a visual movement that matches the flow of Ms. Frank’s music, just as the set and costume colors echo its luxuriant hues.
Mr. Álvarez and Ms. Leonard MARTY SOHL / MET OPERA
A strikingly potent Frida, Isabel Leonard used her velvety mezzo to find the drama of the artist’s remembered torment as well as the undulating sensuality of her love for painting and colors. Baritone Carlos Álvarez was convincing as the troubled Diego, trying hard to keep up a macho veneer. One felt the underlying bond that transcended their conflicts. Soprano Gabriella Reyes brought both menace and comedy to Catrina, tossing off her coloratura laughter and rocking her costume of silvery bones painted on black and swathed in tulle. In his house debut as Leonardo, the dead actor who dresses as Greta Garbo and persuades Frida to find her art again among the living, Nils Wanderer displayed a robust countertenor, which was edgy at the top of his range.
The orchestra, adroitly conducted by Yannick Nézet-Séguin, reveled in the otherworldly environment of the score. There are brief Mexican accents, such as the mariachi-style trumpets that precede the market scene. More often, Ms. Frank deploys an unusual combination of instruments, such as piccolos and celesta, or a motif—like the short, repeated pulse that sounds like a cry—to create a dreamscape that is all her own. The excellent Met chorus, a crucial and almost omnipresent element in the musical fabric, acted like another instrument in this brilliantly textured tapestry.
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