At the Beinecke Library at Yale, I looked at the originals of several of the letters that Omar wrote. His calligraphy is luscious, and I realized that the production had made the superb decision to simply transfer Omar’s actual handwriting onto the costumes and sets, until the written texts spread like an imprint over nearly everything onstage.
Omar is in some ways a throwback to nineteenth-century “grand opera,” works by composers such as Verdi and Giacomo Meyerbeer that take a tragic tale from history as their subject, use a big chorus, and include a major dance sequence—all conventions followed by Omar. It is opera as history, which remains a strong audience magnet. Think of Hamilton. Enslavement is a large part of world history, but opera has spent little time with enslaved people until Omar. The nearly three-hour spectacle ends that neglect. Since the premiere at the Spoleto Festival it has been performed by the Los Angeles Opera, Carolina Performing Arts, and the Boston Lyric Opera, with performances planned by the San Francisco Opera and the Lyric Opera of Chicago.
It’s fitting and ironic that Omar debuted in Charleston. The city is both the birthplace and the setting of Porgy and Bess (1936), the single “Black opera” in the canon. But Porgy and Bess is full of Jim Crow imagery and lyrics that show African Americans as ignorant, promiscuous, childlike, and criminal. The white jazz-classicist George Gershwin developed Porgy and Bess from source material in the novel Porgy (1925), by the white Charleston writer DuBose Heyward. It tells a story about Black folks, including a disabled beggar, Porgy, and his girlfriend, Bess, who share messy lives and crushing poverty in a tenement called Catfish Row.
If Omar enters the repertoire as another Black opera from the Carolinas, it’s likely to help sever the rope of white supremacy that runs through it. Omar is a pained blast of beauty, a story about an enslaved man, with an orchestra that plays on conservatory instruments the music of people at the bottom of the social pyramid, songs once sung in cabins and played on rickety instruments. With its nearly all-Black company and mostly Black contributors—the costumes, sets, lighting, and direction of the Spoleto production were in the hands of people of color—Omar disrupts the most exclusive, self-serious, and expensive of the performing arts.
And it contains a roll call about its own role. At the end of the opera, the chorus walks offstage, down the aisles, and throughout the theater, singing:
Tell your story, Omar, you must
Or they will never know
And we will fade into dust.