“Lincoln in the Bardo” Gets an Opera at the Met
Abraham Lincoln never had much luck in theatres. But, this month, the number of big shows in the city which feature the sixteenth President will increase from one (“Oh, Mary!,” currently starring Bowen Yang, continues on Broadway) to two: an operatic adaptation of George Saunders’s 2017 novel, also titled “Lincoln in the Bardo,” premières at the Metropolitan Opera on Oct. 19.
With music by Missy Mazzoli, “Lincoln in the Bardo” will be the first world première by a female composer at the Met since it was founded, in 1883. The story takes place during the course of one evening, in a hazy spiritual plane where anguished souls are caught between life and the hereafter. Lincoln’s son Willie, who died of typhoid fever at just eleven years old, is one of those stuck in stasis. The set depicts the wooded Oak Hill Cemetery, where Willie was temporarily interred after his death—and to which Mazzoli has an honorary key—but the stage is fragmented into a layered arrangement, segments contoured with neon lighting. “People are moving between a real landscape and void space,” the director, Lileana Blain-Cruz, said. “We wanted to keep the lines blurry.”
As Willie wanders the cemetery, he encounters others similarly unable to move forward. “There are a hundred and sixty-six attributions in the novel,” the librettist, Royce Vavrek, said. “The other ghosts, I wish I could have included all of them.” But a number of them still appear in the background, wearing costumes that reflect how they died—carriage tracks across the torso, garments singed from a fire. Some souls are trapped by the Bardo’s “tendrils,” which are brought to life with a little help from James Ortiz, the puppet designer who created Rocky, the alien, for “Project Hail Mary.” Those who have been fully overtaken by the Bardo, with no hope of escape, are entrapped in giant puppet suits.
The adaptation, despite its sober subject, includes some dazzling pyrotechnics—specifically, at the moment when Willie’s soul crosses into the beyond. This transfiguration, which Saunders called the matterlightblooming phenomenon, is described in the book as a “blinding flash of light” with a “firesound.” “We went through moments of, like, Is it a smoke thing? No, that’s boring,” Blain-Cruz said. “Is it a projection thing? No, we can see that. Is it a confetti thing? No, because then you’re leaving the remains behind. A spirit leaves nothing.” The resulting spectacle includes a thirty-foot firework. “We’ve gone through many safety talks,” she said.
There are few things more American than fireworks; the opera is, after all, part of the Met’s celebration of the country’s two-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday (with select performances through Nov. 14). Set amid the devastations of slavery and war, though, “Lincoln in the Bardo” is not exactly patriotic. But, Blain-Cruz said, “My hope is that, in this portrait of a particularly fraught American moment, with particularly fraught human beings, we can be reminded that everyone deserves love and dignity.”—Jane Bua
About Town
Until the dawn of the talkies, a movie without live music was rare. The streets of “Metropolis” thrummed with orchestral flourishes; countless pianists found their own special sounds for Charlie Chaplin’s walk. Now it’s once again fashionable to screen silent films with live accompaniment. “Instruments of Desire,” a new film series with chamber music, at the Roxy Cinema (through at least November), asks, What if music were the amuse-bouche to a movie? The curators, Kamron Saniee and Emilie Meyer, pair films about music with musicians: “The Draughtsman’s Contract,” from 1982, by Peter Greenaway, is preceded with a performance by the New York Recorder Guild (Nov. 5); Todd Field’s 2022 thriller, “Tár,” will have a performance by the Candide Quartet (Nov. 19).—Madeleine Wulfahrt
Last year, the Baltimore experimental-pop band Animal Collective celebrated the twentieth anniversary of its psychedelic masterpiece “Feels,” from 2005. The four multi-instrumentalists, all of whom use aliases—Avey Tare, Panda Bear, Geologist, and Deakin—had not performed together in a few years. Now they’re playing a proper reunion for four nights only, in New York, Los Angeles, and Pomona. With a special guest each night, the freak-folk opera of strange tunings, blooming drones, sputtery percussion, and ecstatic hooks will feature favorites like “Flesh Canoe,” “Bees,” and the eight-and-a-half-minute “Banshee Beat.” It’s almost impossible to fathom the sounds’ live reconstitution, so catch the spectacle while you can.—Holden Seidlitz (Knockdown Center; Oct. 21-22.)
The South African-born, Melbourne-raised musician Ecca Vandal sprang up in the mid-twenty-tens welding together punk rock and hip-hop, using her voice as a soldering iron. Her style was multifaceted and gloriously chaotic, but bystanders to the havoc wreaked by the sound wanted her to narrow her focus in a specific direction. Amid all the noise surrounding her process, she unplugged for several years to reconnect with her inner voice. Her 2026 album, “Looking for People to Unfollow,” which arrived nearly a decade after her self-titled début, is an epic reaffirmation of purpose. More distinctive and dynamic, the LP is searing even in its quieter moments, documenting an artist relentlessly moving forward.—Sheldon Pearce (Bowery Ballroom; Oct. 17.)
The new show by Malcolm Peacock is a site at which to practice a certain reverence: laid flat on the gallery floor are two portraits asking us to kneel, to grow humble enough to be with them. Two Black men are rendered in graphite, eyes closed, mouths open with yearning, disclosing sighs of ecstasy or prayer. Nearby is a semicircular sculpture, a reliquary-like architecture containing two more portraits—four more closed, withholding eyes. The exterior of the sculpture is adorned with synthetic braids, a fundamental material with Peacock, for whom braiding is a metaphor for relation, an embrace, irreducible intimacy. Braids are referred to as a protective style, and indeed the portraits inside the sculpture partake in a sense of safety: the structure is somewhere between a cradle and a chapel—one anointed with the unction of Black adornment.—Zoë Hopkins (Sikkema Malloy Jenkins; through Oct. 24.)
It’s a bountiful week for Indian classical dance. For decades, the Nrityagram Dance Ensemble—hailing from its own dance village, outside of Bengaluru—has been New York’s favorite provider of Odissi, a form of sinuous shapes and vivid storytelling. The troupe’s last visit to the Joyce Theatre, in 2023, lacked the dancing of its brilliant choreographer, Surupa Sen, but this time (Oct. 13-18) she’s dancing again. Over at Danspace Project (Oct. 15), the Kerala-born Sreelakshmy Govardhanan presents a solo concert in the South Indian form Kuchipudi. What’s Kuchipudi? Govardhanan explains via interspersed commentary, and in a post-show conversation with the New Yorker contributor Marina Harss.—Brian Seibert
A crucial oral history merges with a joyful party in “Once Upon a Time in Harlem,” a project of epochal scope, from 1972, which is nonetheless a new movie. That year, the Harlem-born filmmaker William Greaves gathered, in a town house belonging to Duke Ellington, a wide array of luminaries who’d been part of the Harlem Renaissance half a century earlier, including Eubie Blake, James Van Der Zee, Regina Andrews, and Arna Bontemps. Greaves assembled a team of cinematographers (including his son, David) to film the reunion, and the resulting torrent of reminiscences, tussle between varying perspectives, and wealth of spontaneous musical interludes revitalize the era’s artistic and political passions with a startling, thrilling immediacy. The film was left incomplete when William Greaves died, in 2014; David directed the completion, which is among the greatest of documentaries.—Richard Brody (Opening Oct. 16 at Film Forum.)
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Bar Tab
Taran Dugal cheers on the New York Liberty in Williamsburg.
New York hoops fans, rejoice: your year of playoffs hysteria isn’t over yet. Sure, it was a Knicks summer, but orange leaves are falling now, and with autumn comes a new home-town underdog to rally for: the W.N.B.A.’s New York Liberty. On a recent Sunday, two friends inaugurated the team’s postseason playoffs run at Blazers, a bar in Williamsburg dedicated to women’s sports. They made their way to the back room, where the floor had been painted with orange court markings, and settled at a table in two-point territory. The décor surpassed that of a typical sports bar, dingy novelty signs replaced by a mural of Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, Serena Williams, and Allyson Felix. Above a gargantuan television hung on the rear wall, a disco ball levitated inside a regulation-size hoop. Boos sounded as the opposition, the Minnesota Lynx, took the court. At tipoff, the guests’ beers arrived: frosty Guinness, refreshing Talea Al Dente; Lynx’s ball. The duo finger-licked their way through a bucket of Buffalo wings as the Liberty had an early hot streak; they devoured a burger during the second quarter, its gooey pepper jack a small consolation amid a brutal Minnesota run. At halftime, they wandered into the Trailblazer Room, a closetlike space painted with dozens of portraits of female athletes, and snapped a selfie in the mirror as Gabby Douglas smiled behind them. Perhaps it was the clipped pace of the game, or maybe the Ellie’s Purse Handler—a scrumptious cocktail of gin, elderflower, lemon, and cava—that made the second half fly by. As the clock wound down on a Liberty blowout, “Let’s Groove,” by Earth, Wind & Fire, started up. “That’s the secret,” one man said to his girlfriend, who was dancing a celebratory twist by the foul line. “It’s all in the knees!”
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