Stage Director

At the MacGregor Plantation the Old South is alive and well. The heat in the air, the cotton fields and the power of the whip. Yet nothing is quite as it appears... or maybe it is.

Slave Play

Noël Coward Theatre

Activist. Orator. Husband. Leader. One of the most misunderstood figures in US history, Malcolm X was an icon of the civil rights movement. Get to know the man through a series of biographical vignettes that follow Malcolm X from his interrupted childhood in Lansing, Michigan to his tragic murder in Harlem. With a score by Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Anthony Davis (Central Park Five) that fuses elements of modernism, minimalism, and jazz, X produces a sound world that is unmistakably individual.

EPSG:4326

X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X

Seattle Center

This vivid, impressionistic portrait of legendary jazz pianist Jelly Roll Morton features Tony, Emmy, and Grammy winner Billy Porter (Pose) as the Chimney Man and Tony Award winner Joaquina Kalukango (Paradise Square) as Anita in a cast led by visionary director Robert O’Hara (A Raisin in the Sun). Written by George C. Wolfe (Shuffle Along) and set to Morton’s iconic music, Jelly’s Last Jam tells a fable of American history, legacy, and truth. In this production, original Broadway cast members Mamie Duncan-Gibbs, Stephanie Pope Lofgren, and Allison M. Williams, reprise their roles as the Hunnies.

Jelly's Last Jam

New York City Center

Anthony Davis’s groundbreaking and influential opera, which premiered in 1986, arrives at the Met at long last. Theater luminary and Tony-nominated director of Slave Play Robert O’Hara oversees a potent new staging that imagines Malcolm as an Everyman whose story transcends time and space. An exceptional cast of breakout artists and young Met stars enliven the operatic retelling of the civil rights leader’s life. Baritone Will Liverman, who triumphed in the Met premiere of Fire Shut Up in My Bones, sings Malcolm X, alongside soprano Leah Hawkins as his mother, Louise; mezzo-soprano Raehann Bryce-Davis as his sister Ella; bass-baritone Michael Sumuel as his brother Reginald; and tenor Victor Ryan Robertson as Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad. Kazem Abdullah conducts the newly revised score, which provides a layered, jazz-inflected setting for the esteemed writer Thulani Davis’s libretto.

X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X

Lincoln Center

Musical theater legend Sutton Foster (The Music Man) returns to the City Center stage as Princess Winnifred the Woebegone alongside Michael Urie (Ugly Betty) as Prince Dauntless in this beloved musical fairytale. Led by Tony-nominated director and Encores! Artistic Director Lear deBessonet (Into the Woods, Lionel Bart’s Oliver!) and with a new concert adaptation by Amy Sherman-Palladino (The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel), Once Upon a Mattress sets an unapologetic free spirit loose in a repressed kingdom, reveling in Winnifred’s ability to charm and transform with willpower, honesty, and a little bit of help from her friends.

Robert O’Hara

Stage Director

Events

Past events

Aug 14 - Sep 21, 2024

Slave Play · Noël Coward Theatre

Feb 24 - Mar 9, 2024

X: The Life & Times of Malcolm X · Seattle Opera

About

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