Lincoln Center Theater’s present to us all, this fall, has been artistic director Lear DeBessonet’s bountiful and gripping production of Ragtime at the Vivian Beaumont. They have now almost surreptitiously snuck a candy-box sized bundle of holiday spirit into the Newhouse downstairs, Gian Carlo Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors.
Presented in association with the next door neighbors at the Metropolitan Opera, and drawing on the combined LCT and Met audiences, this holiday engagement will hopefully fill the intimate house for the three scheduled weeks. I imagine that patrons willing to give it a try will come away enchanted, maybe even surprised by how gripped they were by this devout mini-opera.
The subject matter is what I suppose you could call universal, at least for a large part of the universe. The action takes place on a star-filled night at the very beginning of the first year A.D., near Bethlehem. (That said, the Playbill at the Newhouse specifies that the Time and Place are “The Present.”) Three kings follow a bright large star with a tail streaming across the sky (i.e. the Eastern Star), bearing coffers of gold, incense, and myrrh for a newborn child. They know not who, or why; only that “his hands are those of a King, as King He was born.” They stop to rest in the shack of an impoverished Mother (Joyce DiDonato) and her child Amahl (Albert Rhodes, Jr.), a shepherd boy who—in the terminology of the time—is crippled.
[Read Michael Sommers’ ★★★☆☆ review here.]
The three kings rest, they are fed and entertained by neighboring shepherds, and they proceed on their journey. In the course of which, they are changed by young Amahl while Amahl is changed by them, capped by one of those gulp-inducing moments which even in these modernistic 21st century days managed to draw audible gasps across the house.
The opera is staged theatrically as opposed to operatically (if you will). Director Kenny Leon is undaunted by all that music and singing; he allows the text to perform its work unimpeded, and takes full advantage of the Newhouse’s unconventional semi-circular layout. Other directors have used the auditorium’s stairway aisles for entrances and exits, sure; but Leon reserves them for prime moments, most notably the entrance of the kings. This serves to draw the audience fully into the proceedings. While Leon has at times—when directing revivals in the past—strained to provide an overlay of modern-day relevance, he leaves Amahl to Menotti, with excellent results.
The cast is drawn from opera and theater. Mezzo-soprano DiDonato hails from the former, and is firmly in control as Amahl’s Mother. Young Rhodes, meanwhile, is excellent as the boy. He sings well, as in this case he must; but he also combines strong intensity with immense likability and stage presence. (It turns out that he is a former Young Simba from Lion King land.) Singing honors go to those three kings: Todd Thomas as Melchior, Bernard Holcomb as Kaspar, and Philip Boykin—memorable as Crown to Audra MacDonald’s Bess in the 2012 revival of Porgy and Bess—as Balthazar.
Leon has brought along an accomplished trio of Broadway designers—Derek McLane on sets, Emilio Sosa on costumes, and Adam Honoré on lights—who combine to provide stunning work. The production uses the authorized two-piano arrangement of the score, augmented by ensemble-member Jesse Barrett performing the on-stage oboe solos. When those two pianos—under the direction of Steven Osgood—are pounding away with Boykin, Thomas, and Holcomb booming out their parts—the Newhouse is filled with the sounds of glorious music.
If rooted in Biblical days, Amahl is very much of its time—which is, specifically, 1951. The Italian-born but American-trained Menotti (1911-2007) achieved acclaim with his first major opera, Amelia Goes to the Ball, which premiered in Philadelphia in 1937. He soon reached the Met, although not quite successfully. But his eerily suspenseful one-act opera The Medium was produced in 1947 at Columbia University to such grand acclaim that it transferred to the Ethel Barrymore for a commercially successful run. Imagine, an opera making money on Broadway!
This was followed in 1950 with his first full-length opera, The Consul. This Cold War-era piece was not only a second consecutive Broadway hit for Menotti; it won both the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award (over Kurt Weill’s Lost in the Stars, Marc Blitzstein’s Regina, and Jule Styne’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes) and the Pulitzer Prize for Music. On the heels of which Menotti was commissioned by NBC to write a one-act television opera for broadcast on Christmas Eve, 1951. Hence, Amahl and the Night Visitors, the composer drawing inspiration from a painting (“The Adoration of the Magi,” by Hieronymus Bosch) he noticed while browsing through the Metropolitan Museum.
This first television opera was a grand success, resulting in annual telecasts through 1965 (starting prior to other popular television annuals, such as the Mary Martin Peter Pan). Menotti continued as a cultural éminence grise through the rest of the century, counting the Spoleto Festivals in Italy and South Carolina among his ventures. But his early Broadway success quickly vanished; after the quick failure of the worthy Saint of Bleecker Street (1954) and the not-quite-worthy Maria Golovin (1958), Menotti has been all-but-absent from the commercial New York theater.
Until now, with Lincoln Center Theater making a compelling case for Amahl. One would like to think there is still an audience for the marvelous Medium. And the 75 year old Consul, which deals with freedom, immigration, institutional red tape and governmental intransigence, might well be too controversial at the present moment.
Lincoln Center Theater’s Amahl and the Night Visitors might not be just the thing for all audiences: it is a bona fide opera (written and performed in English) with religious subject matter, running under 50 minutes. But good theater is good theater, I say, and Lincoln Center’s production of Menotti’s Amahl is good theater.
Amahl and the Night Visitors opened December 18, 2025, at the Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater and runs through January 4, 2026. Tickets and information: lct.org
