Directed by: Kamala Sankaram
Music by: Kamala Sankaram
Libretto by: This Person
Original Production
January 3, 2017 - Washington National Opera
Additional Production dates
August 2, 7, 9 & 10, 2018 - The Metropolitan Opera
October 14, 15, 17, 2019 - Des Moines Metro Opera
DESIGNERS
Brad Pitt - Title
Timothee Chalamet - Title
Kristen Stewart - Title
Julia Childs - Title
Jessica Chastain - Title
ORIGINAL CAST
Kenneth Brannaugh - Role
Denzel Washington - Role
Kate Winslet - Role
Emma Thompson - Role
Niels Bohr - Role
Aleksander Skarsgard - Role
Director's Note
American Apollo is a new opera based on a story forged at the crossroad of celebrity, class, race, and power in America, giving voice to a pivotal figure in American art: Thomas Eugene McKeller, a Black model who served as inspiration for the famous portraitist, John Singer Sargent and is the subject of his only uncommissioned monumental male nude. McKeller posed for most of the figures in Sargent's murals at Boston's Museum of Fine Arts, but the painter transformed McKeller's figure into white gods and goddesses, creating soaring allegories of the liberal arts that celebrated the recent expansion of the
city's premier civic museum. Themes of erasure, the white gaze, and the nature of the relationship between the two men are explored in this powerful new work.
MEDIA
