The Cincinnati Opera has announced the final production of its upcoming three-part Black Opera Project. The Project, which is set to begin next month, will show two performances this summer, and then return in the summer of 2027.
The newest opera, titled “Good Bones,” is a product of Pulitzer Prize-winning composer/librettist duo Michael Abels and James Ijames.
Ables, who has been an Academy Awards shortlist honoree for Best Original Score, composed the music for the award winning works of director Jordan Peele, including “Get Out” and “Us.” He also composed music for the 2022 opera “Omar,” in conjunction with librettist Rhiannon Giddens. The opera is about the life of Omar ibn Said, a Fulani Muslim man who was sold into slavery in what is now Senegal, and in 1831 recorded his memoirs in Arabic while enslaved in North Carolina. “Omar” won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2023.
Ijames, who is an associate professor of theater at Columbia University, has written 14 plays during his career, including two National Arts Club Kesselring Prize-winners: 2018’s “The Most Spectacularly Lamentable Trial of Miz Martha Washington,” and 2019’s “Kill Move Paradise.” His 2021 play “Fat Ham,” a contemporary adaptation of “Hamlet” set during a summer cookout, won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2022 and was nominated for five Tony awards, including Best Play.
The two other productions appearing as part of The Black Opera Project are composer Kevin Day and librettist Tifara Brown’s afro-futuristic epic “Lalovavi,” and composer Maria Thompson Corely and librettist Diana Solomon-Glover’s biographical “John Lewis: Good Trouble.”
Performances of “Lalovavi” will be held on July 9 and 11, 2026, at 7:30 p.m. at Springer Auditorium in the Cincinnati Music Hall. Tickets are on sale now.
Performances of “John Lewis: Good Trouble” will take place in June of 2027. Further dates and times for it, as well as for “Good Bones,” have not yet been released.
