Back in 1993, shortly after his Broadway debut with the music for Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, the pianist and composer Anthony Davis shook up the New York City Opera with X, The Life and Times of Malcolm X. The distinguished South African music critic Andrew Porter, at the end of his long reign as music critic of The New Yorker, gave the work high praise. “[X] has brought new life to America’s conservative operatic scene,” he wrote. “It is not just a stirring and well-fashioned opera—that already is much—but one whose music adds a new, individual voice to those previously heard in our opera houses.” The Central Park Five, Davis’s eighth work for the stage, tells the Kafkaesque story of Black teenagers falsely accused and wrongfully convicted of raping and attempting to murder a Manhattan jogger on her evening run. From its premiere at Long Beach Opera in 2019, The Central Park Five went on to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Music the following year. For its second run, the company is bringing back members of the original cast in an all-new production directed by Desean Terry, a Juilliard graduate best known as Daniel Henderson in the Apple TV+ hit The Morning Show. —Matthew Gurewitsch