Sharmini Brookes: Deborah Colker directs this modern, surreal opera about Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera based on Mexico’s Day of the Dead festival.

To tell the story of Kahlo and Rivera from a different angle to all the previous biopics, and to focus on the vision of their art, Colker hones in on Rivera’s dying wish for his ashes to be united with Kahlo’s. This wish was denied by the family but has been made possible in this surrealistically re-imagined opera.

Rivera (Spanish Baritone Carlos Alvarez), physically ailing and alone, cries out for Frida as he wanders through the celebrations of The Day of The Dead.

Frida (mezzo soprano Isabel Leonard) languishing in the Underworld, hears it but refuses to go. She is persuaded by a drag queen, Leonardo (German countertenor Nils Wanderer) posing as Greta Garbo to go with him to the world of the living and experience it without the pain that wracked her injured body in real life.

Catrina (Soprano Gabriella Reyes) the trickster of the underworld makes it all happen, dressed spookily in a skeletally-printed outfit.

Colker’s set is wonderfully imagined in a blaze of Mexican inspired colours with a surreal brush.

Pulitzer prize-winner composer, Gabriela Lena Frank draws on her mixed heritage background to bring what librettist Nilo Cruz describes as an ancient sound to her composition using marimbas, the essential sound of Central America.

Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin describes two piccolos playing together sounding like breath.

It’s a short opera by usual standards – two acts in 2 hours and 48 mins with a 20 min interval and we found the vibrant colour, the popping dancing of the skeletons, the unusual but haunting modern music, the superb singing and the riotous blaze of colour quite enthralling.

El Ultimo Sueno de Frida y Diego is on at Ster-Kinekor Cinema Nouveau on 14 and 15 June 2026.

Sharmini Brookes
sharminibrookes@yahoo.co.uk
078 477 6938
Freelance

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