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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tThe evening opens as villagers in Mexico City hold vigils for their dearly departed. \u201cThey are coming back \/ as if they were angels \/ angels escaped from heaven \/ They are faithful to the call \/ Let the dead awaken!\u201d sings the chorus. Shrines to lost souls are aglow with candles and fringed with marigolds. Lines draped with multicolored garments stretch overhead. Most striking of all: a mirrored panel the width of the stage hovers at the top of Jon Bausor\u2019s handsome set, reflecting the movement of people below. It evokes the mirror mounted above Frida\u2019s bed during her long convalescences, which she consulted for some of her most beloved paintings.<\/p>\n
\n\tNot long after Diego entreats the dead Frida to come back to him, the set shifts to the underworld, which is presided over by the mocking, imperious Catrina (Gabriella Reyes), dressed in a regal black dress. Catrina asks the deity Mictlan to resurrect Frida, and the painter is duly summoned from a crack in the floor that recalls the jagged chasms in Kahlo\u2019s Tree of Hope, Remain Strong (1946). Skeletal figures ascend from underground alongside Frida, her face framed by pale blossoms. (Wilberth Gonzalez designed the gala-worthy costumes.) At the center of the stage stands a crimson tree whose leafless limbs resemble circulatory systems.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tFrida, played by mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, remembers too vividly the agonies of earthly existence\u2014the shattered spine, the amputated leg, the matrimonial strife. While Rivera wants the dead to rise again, Frida hesitates at the threshold, suspicious of the prospect of reuniting with a man who was a \u201cdemon\u201d in her life.<\/p>\n
\n\tAmid this tension, Deborah Colker\u2019s kinetic choreography introduces a pleasant note of whimsy. The skeletal creatures populating the underworld pop their joints, do backflips, and move in synchronized motion. The opera grants Kahlo forms of physical freedom denied to her after a trolly accident left her disabled at age 18. Onstage, she twists, lunges, and undulates with fluidity. The production doesn\u2019t ignore her pain\u2014agony is a key theme even for the antipodean Frida\u2014but it does suggest her disability fueled her creative process.<\/p>\n
\n\tRivera, played by Carlos \u00c1lvarez, cuts a more muted figure, both vocally and dramatically. Although the opera hinges on his yearning to see Frida once more, he often feels curiously sidelined throughout the 2.5-hour performance. His role, as written by Nilo Cruz, is too frequently padded out with wisecracks about his potbelly and physical bulk. Instead, the show\u2019s gravitational pull belongs to Frida and the bustling, carnivalesque inhabitants of the underworld.<\/p>\n
\n\tBut if Act I draws cues from Frida\u2019s paintings, Act II shifts visually into Rivera\u2019s world. Wooden beams and scaffolding take the place of the imposing red tree, and blue walls rotate into place around Frida once she re-enters Casa Azul. Her blue bed rises from an opening in the floor.<\/p>\n
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<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\tThe opera\u2019s central prohibition\u2014the dead may revisit the living world but cannot touch people there\u2014should imbue the reunion scenes with frisson that it is largely lacking. Emotionally, they\u2019re ships passing each other in the night; it\u2019s hard to imagine that they were ever passionately in love. Frida sums up her attitude early on: \u201cWhen in life I had two major accidents: the impact of a trolley, and the blow of meeting Diego Rivera.\u201d El \u00daltimo Sue\u00f1o underlines their severed connection: a hand hovers near a shoulder before falling away; bodies angle toward embrace only to recompose themselves into parallel lines. When she finally embraces Diego, physical pain floods back into her body almost instantly. Agony returns \u201carmed with knives\u201d and Diego is drawn irrevocably into the realm of the dead.<\/p>\n
\n\tThe opera itself often feels curated like an exhibition in motion\u2014tableaux assembling and dissolving and assembling themselves again. Indeed, Bausor\u2019s designs resonate with the concurrent Museum of Modern Art exhibition, \u201cFrida and Diego: The Last Dream,\u201d which he also co-curated. The show includes Rivera\u2019s set sketches for the 1932 ballet H.P. (Horsepower) alongside paintings by both artists. The display, meanwhile, extends many of the opera\u2019s visual motifs into gallery space: fissures, scaffolding, mirrors, arterial reds, claustrophobic corridors opening suddenly into expansiveness.<\/p>\n
\n\tDespite its emotional unevenness, El \u00daltimo Sue\u00f1o de Frida y Diego<\/em> is worth seeing for its tactile richness and its sparks of sensuality, best embodied by a minor character, Leonardo (Nils Wanderer), a dead actor who impersonates Greta Garbo and whom Frida chances upon in the underworld. Leonardo\u2019s countertenor achieves a clarity and emotional openness that Diego\u2019s baritone never does, especially in scenes where Leonardo persuades Frida to return not merely to Rivera, but to art itself. Frank\u2019s score, too, often finds a supple momentum that keeps the opera from sinking under the weight of its own symbolism. If the central relationship never fully ignites, the surrounding world crackles with invention.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n [analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/aia-reviews\/met-frida-kahlo-diego-rivera-opera-1234785903\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" [analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/El-Ultimo-Sueno-de-Frida-y-Diego_0308s.jpg?w=1024″] She is the subject of a current exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art and an upcoming one at the Tate Modern. Netflix is planning an adaptation of her life. Her unibrowed face stares out from tote bags, murals, notebooks, enamel pins, refrigerator magnets, and dorm-room posters across the globe. A recent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1942206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1942206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1942206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1942206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1942206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1942206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}