by Daniel Johnson
May 12, 2025
‘The Central Park Five,’ an opera telling the story of what happened to five Black and Latinx teenagers after they were falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1989.
“The Central Park Five,” an opera telling the story of what happened to five Black and Latinx teenagers after they were falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1989, first premiered in 2019 and won composer Anthony Davis the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year, but since that time, the play has undergone a shift in how the story is told.
According to NPR, the show, which will run from May 10 to May 18 in Michigan, produced by the Detroit Opera, has undergone a shift in how it tells the stories of Raymond Santana, Kevin Richardson, Antron McCray, Korey Wise, and Yusef Salaam, collectively referred to as the Exonerated Five, removing an aria featuring the character of Donald Trump singing while sitting on a golden toilet in his penthouse apartment.
“He’s not on a golden toilet,” Davis told NPR. “We didn’t have the golden toilet because frankly, the focus should be on the Five and not on him. He’s a character within the story and a necessary character because he’s a big part of the story. You know, he’s never apologized. He never apologized for his actions and his rush to judgment.”
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Nataki Garrett, the director of the Detroit Opera’s production, indicated to the outlet that removing the golden toilet is not her toning down any of the staging for the opera because, like Davis, she believes that the then-teenaged boys are the heart of the story.
“It was not me thinking I should tone it down. It was me making a decision that the central story is about these boys. Why center that, when you can actually speak to the lives of these young men who are now grown men, who have lives themselves and who have taken their journey through this trauma to really impact their communities in the most positive ways. That story is so much richer to me,” Garrett said.
Anthony Parmer, who also conducted Ludwig Göransson’s score for “Sinners,” the blockbuster Ryan Coogler film, notes that both scores pull from a wide range of Black musical styles and that the opera, like the film itself, is technically demanding, but rewards its performers for pulling together the disparate parts of its musical lexicon to create a strong tapestry for the audience to enjoy.
“This opera is a real reckoning,” Parmer said. “Jazz, blues, bebop, R&B, soul, you know. But, (Anthony Davis’) music oftentimes is sort of like high modernist meets really complex jazz. I can’t think of an opera that is more technically daunting than this one because it really requires such an ear from every single singer. They basically have to physically memorize all of these very complex rhythms and these very difficult-to-predict pitches. But everything that he’s written is utterly compelling, and in his own unique harmonic vocabulary that I’ve not seen replicated anywhere else.”
Garrett, who formerly received death threats when she directed the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 2022, told the outlet that it is important to remember that theatre performances like The Central Park Five keep the stories of humanity alive.
Garrett also intimated to NPR that these stories are more important than ever in a political climate invested in squashing dissent and protest.
“You know, the stories that we tell as artists are not our own,” Garrett said. “They belong to humanity. We are the reflectors. That’s what we do. And so why do we know about most of the terrible things that have happened in history? Because somebody reflected it. And so that is our job. Exposing the truth helps us connect to our deeper humanity, helps us connect to our empathy, which is what the world needs more of, especially right now.”
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