Dua Lipa, Callum Turner, Amy Poehler, Bowen Yang and Matt Rogers were among the starry attendees at the Met Opera Tuesday night, as the famed opera house ushered in the world premiere of Lincoln in the Bardo.
Adapted from George Saunders 2017 Booker Prize-winning novel, the opera follows the death of President Abraham Lincoln’s young son, Willie, and the President’s grief after his tragic passing. His visits to his son’s tomb are accompanied by ghosts stuck in the bardo, or purgatory, who tell their own life stories and encourage both Willie and the President to move on.
On stage, the story opens in a massive smoky graveyard packed to the brim with ghosts in various distressed garbs of their eras under towering mossy trees, and amid creeping vines, embodied by human actors, that move and threaten to take down the characters over the course of the story. In addition to the spooky scenery, which sets the backdrop for the piece’s larger meditation on grief and acceptance of self, the opera also plays to many of the comedic elements of the book, including a moment where a chorus of ghosts sign into kazoos, and another, where a character walks around with a rather noticeable, six-foot, engorged body part.
The opera came about after The Met commissioned composer Missy Mazzoli in 2018 to write an opera on any subject of her choosing. Mazzoli, who fronts an electro-acoustic band in addition to her operatic career, selected the Saunders novel, turning the book into a close to three hour opera, with her longtime lyricist Royce Vavrek. Tony-nominated Lileana Blain-Cruz directed the piece.
Tuesday’s premiere was the first world premiere opera the Met has presented written by a woman, amid the Met’s larger push to broaden its programming and bring in a wider audience.
Ahead of the performance, the Met hosted a gala dinner with Saunders seated at the center next to Lipa and Turner, with tablemates Poehler, Yang and Rogers.
Lipa, who founded her own book club, Service95, had selected Saunders’ novel as one of the books of the month in 2024 and interviewed the author on the site, citing the book and the author as one of her favorite reads.
“There is no one writing today who can match George Saunders for compassion and empathy. The very last page still replays in my mind. The voices of these spirits — the wretched and the brave, and the dead boy Willie Lincoln — will stay with me forever,” she wrote at the time.
Other starry attendees at the world premiere included Julio Torres, Kate Walsh, Gina Gershon and Michael R. Jackson, as guests filed into the jeweled theater in bedecked in a mix of clothing styles, including top hats and coattails, sequins, taffeta and cowboy hats as well as t-shirts and jeans.
