NEW YORK — The show must — and will — go on for the stars of “Emmett Till, A New American Opera” amid a barrage of negative attention stemming from an online petition calling for its cancellation last week.
The show has come under internet ire for — according to Change.org petition organizer Mya Bishop — being written by a white woman, being centered on “white guilt” and “[exacerbating] the adultification of Black children which has historically led to their brutalization.”
The premiere is still scheduled for the Gerald W. Lynch Theater at New York City’s John Jay College on Wednesday.
Till, brutalized and murdered by white racists in rural Mississippi at the age of 14 in 1955, is a central figure to the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
On March 7, the U.S. Senate unanimously passed the Emmitt Till Anti-Lynching Act, giving final congressional approval to make lynching a federal hate crime for the first time after many unsuccessful attempts to specifically outlaw the brutal attacks used to terrorize Black Americans for centuries.
Based on Clare Coss’ award-winning 2013 play “Emmett, Down in My Heart,” the production stars Robert Mack in the title role.
The Newark, New Jersey-born tenor has been attached to the work since 2016 and portrayed Till in a different show years before. Mack says it’s no coincidence that the pandemic-delayed opera is finally seeing the light of day.
“It’s all God’s design, that’s where I come from with it,” he told the Daily News. “There’s nothing ugly in here. There’s nothing malicious in this piece. And I don’t say it just because I’m a part of it. I say it because I’ve gone through the score from beginning to end for over six, seven years.”
“The story must be told, and why not use every art form that exists?” Mack wondered. “Let it be a book, let it be poetry, let it be a painting, let it be opera, let it be on Broadway, let it be on TV. Now let it be accurate, of course. But don’t shun any genre, any idiom that can be used to tell the story.”
Mack said the work is continuing the tradition of Till’s mother, who made it her mission to expose the ugly truth about racism — specifically in the Jim Crow-era South. Mamie Till-Mobley welcomed media to her son’s funeral and encouraged them to publicize his brutalized corpse in the glass-topped casket.
Lucia Renata Bradord is portraying the stoic matriarch in “Emmett, A New American Opera.”
The Flatbush, Brooklyn, native told The News that she immediately felt a heavy weight when approached to play Till-Mobley.
“There’s so much resonance there for me and I want to make sure that story and her side of it gets told, and we feel the emotion,” Bradford said.
The only reservation the Fiorella H. LaGuardia High School alum had was playing a mother grieving the murder of her son.
She explained, “I was in my mid-30s, as well and to know that a woman at that age to go through all of that, it was difficult for me at first to sort of take that on.”
Braford said the controversy – which made her emotional and upset – did bolster interest and sell out Wednesday’s performance.
“It’s scary, because a lot of the comments I saw, they were just incorrect. And I was like, you know, what, ‘I really hope these people come and see it so that they can get a better understanding at least,” Bradford concluded.
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