• El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego opened at the Metropolitan Opera on May 14, with performances running through June 5.
• The Spanish-language opera — two decades in the making — imagines Kahlo’s spirit returning from the underworld on the Day of the Dead to reunite with a dying Rivera.
• Composer Gabriela Lena Frank and librettist Nilo Cruz are both Pulitzer Prize winners; mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard stars as Frida.
• The Met’s entirely new production is directed by Deborah Colker and features a visually stunning set designed by Jon Bausor, who also co-curated a companion exhibition at MoMA.
• The May 30 matinee will be broadcast live in HD to cinemas across the U.S. and internationally.

Shortly before she died, Frida Kahlo wrote in her diary: “I joyfully await the exit — and hope never to return.” The Metropolitan Opera is betting audiences everywhere will be glad she did.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego — The Last Dream of Frida and Diego — opened at New York’s Met Opera on May 14, and it’s already shaping up to be the cultural event of the spring. The Spanish-language opera, with music by Gabriela Lena Frank and a libretto by Nilo Cruz, imagines Kahlo’s spirit rising from the underworld on the Day of the Dead to reunite with Diego Rivera, the great Mexican muralist who, in this telling, has grown so weary of life without her that he summons her back. It’s a reverse Orpheus story, soaked in magical realism, pain, color and a love that was — by any measure — a complete disaster and completely unbreakable.

“We all see elements of this relationship in our own relationships and how we replicate these kinds of toxic elements too,” Frank said ahead of opening night. “They remind me a little bit of Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, you know, they were just brilliant and charismatic and attracted to one another and then they drove each other nuts also.”

Mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard stars as Kahlo — and not only sings the role but dances it. Baritone Carlos Álvarez plays Rivera. The full cast includes soprano Gabriella Reyes as Catrina, gatekeeper to the underworld, and countertenor Nils Wanderer as Leonardo, a spirit who impersonates Greta Garbo. Met music director Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts six of the seven performances.

Twenty Years to Opening Night

The road to Lincoln Center was a long one. The idea originated more than two decades ago, when the late Joel Revzen — then artistic director of the Arizona Opera — approached Frank about writing an opera centered on Kahlo. Frank, who is of Peruvian Chinese and Lithuanian Jewish descent, was intrigued, and eventually sat down with Cruz, a Cuban-American playwright who had recently won a Pulitzer, at her publisher’s office. It was, as Frank would later describe it, basically a blind date.

Cruz almost said no. “When Gabriela approached me about the project, I immediately said to her, I’m not interested in writing a biopic on Frida and Diego,” he recalled. “I was very resistant because the movie had come out with Salma Hayek, I’d seen several plays, the biographies were out, and so I really wanted to veer away from that.”

Then Frank played him a piece of music she’d written, inspired by the Day of the Dead. Something clicked.

“It immediately inspired me,” Cruz said. “I said, ‘this is the entry into their world. How about if Frida is dead, but Diego is dying and he wants her to come back for the Day of the Dead.'” Frank jumped in to finish the memory: “That’s it. We got the framework in our very first meeting! We didn’t even know each other. It was like a blind date!”

The opera had a COVID-delayed world premiere at the San Diego Opera in 2022, then traveled to San Francisco, Los Angeles and, earlier this year, the Lyric Opera of Chicago. The Met’s production, commissioned by general manager Peter Gelb, is an entirely new one — not a restaging. Gelb brought in director and choreographer Deborah Colker, a Brazilian artist who runs her own dance company and has worked with Cirque du Soleil, along with set designer Jon Bausor, the same team behind the Met’s acclaimed 2024 production of Osvaldo Golijov’s Ainadamar.

“It’s not anything against the original,” Gelb said. “But when you have a work as important and appealing as this there’s no reason why there shouldn’t be more than one production. It’s a sign of its artistic success.”

What’s Actually Happening on That Stage

Colker’s production is kinetic and surreal — hip-hop popping skeletons, chorus singers in death masks, and a visual language pulled deep from both artists’ imagery. “It’s not biographic. It’s not their painting. It’s a dream, no?” Colker said. “I thought that I needed to bring this surrealism language all the time. It’s through the imagination, through dance, through movement.”

Bausor drew his central inspiration from Kahlo’s painting Tree of Hope, Remain Strong, which depicts two versions of Frida — one seated in an elegant dress on a hospital gurney over cracked earth, another lying behind her with angry red surgical stitches in her back. That image of cracked earth became the stage floor itself, out of which skeleton dancers emerge. A blood-red tree with branches that resemble human arteries rises at the center, linking the world above to the underworld below. The sides of the stage are draped in recycled blue plastic — “a kind of shroud, or blue gauze like you might wrap wounds in,” Bausor said. And above the stage hangs a mirror, a direct nod to the one installed under the canopy of Kahlo’s bed so she could paint while immobilized after her catastrophic 1925 bus accident.

“It gave us a symbol for the audience to understand that we weren’t in a real space,” Bausor said of the tree. “It’s a link between the living world above with the foliage at the top and the dead world with the roots below.”

Bausor also found unexpected inspiration in Rivera’s lesser-known work: a set of watercolor costume designs Rivera created for a 1932 ballet called H.P. (Horsepower) by Mexican composer Carlos Chávez — outfits depicting dancers as a giant bunch of bananas, a cigar, a gold bar. “The ballet was a massive flop,” Bausor said, “but I hadn’t seen these works before or even heard of them. They are weirdly literal for Rivera, but I love them because they’re fun. It was a real discovery for me.” He used those designs as inspiration for some of his own costumes.

Frank’s score is equally immersive. She deliberately avoided leaning on recognizable Latin music tropes. “What I wanted to convey instead was something very colorful, something that sounded otherworldly, sometimes ancient,” she said. The marimba appears in nearly every scene — sometimes so woven into the texture you don’t realize it’s there. “That’s my main tribute to Mexican culture, the inclusion of this magnificent instrument,” Frank said. The New Yorker’s Alex Ross praised the result, writing that Frank “establishes a dreamlike, liminal mood from the start” — no small feat when your subject matter invites every cliché in the book.

Frank, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for her orchestral work Picaflor: A future myth, visited MoMA’s companion exhibition with Cruz before opening night, lingering in front of Kahlo’s surreal self-portrait with her head superimposed on the body of a deer pierced by arrows. “If I had to pick one Frida Kahlo painting that I would look at for the rest of my life, it was always going to be this one,” Frank said. “I remember seeing this as a little girl. I was just kind of haunted by it.”

The Story the Opera Tells

The plot is deliberately not a biography. Frida is already dead. Diego is dying. He calls her back on the Day of the Dead, desperate for a final reunion — and desperate to have their ashes mixed together in death, something his family denied him in reality. (Rivera had explicitly wanted his ashes united with Kahlo’s; his family refused and buried him in a cemetery instead.) “It was fascinating to me that he wanted his ashes to be united with hers,” Cruz said. “I thought — this is a story of love after death. So that became the theme of the opera.”

Down in the underworld, Frida isn’t so sure she wants to come back. She remembers the pain — the polio she contracted as a child, the bus accident that shattered her spine as a teenager, a lifetime of surgeries and suffering. She remembers Rivera’s affair with her younger sister Cristina. But she also remembers the colors, the markets, the animals, the life she loved so fiercely.

“She’s convinced to come back because she actually wants to see her art and she wants to see her house and she wants to visit the world again,” Leonard said. “She loved the world and she was in love with the colors of her home and the animals and the market. She had such passion, I think, for all of those things, including for Diego.”

There’s one rule in this reunion, and it cannot be broken. “They get together, they separate, they cannot touch each other,” Álvarez said. “Death needs to have a distance with life. And then only when they touch each other is when Diego dies.”

At the end, blossoms fall from above. The chorus sings that their art is eternal. And Cruz’s final question hangs in the air: “This is the last dream of Frida and Diego. And then you wonder at the beginning, whose dream is it? Is it his dream? Is it her dream? Or are we all dreaming this dream when we come see this opera?”

Fridamania Has Taken Over New York

The opera doesn’t exist in a vacuum. This spring, New York is deep in a Kahlo moment. MoMA’s Frida and Diego: The Last Dream — named after the opera’s English translation — runs through September 12, featuring paintings and drawings by both artists, archival photographs, and an environment co-created by Bausor himself, making this his first foray into museum curation. Scaffolding holds paintings in the middle of the gallery. A giant red tree sprouts from a blue bedframe and grows into a mirror on the ceiling. Blue stage curtains frame the walls. “The paintings are the divas,” Bausor said. “They’re larger-than-life characters with big ideas that have stood the test of time.”

MoMA curator Beverly Adams, who specializes in Latin American art, offered a striking historical footnote: in his lifetime, Rivera was the far more famous of the two. “In the 1930s, he was the most famous artist in the world,” she told Frank and Cruz during their visit. “He was the second person to have a retrospective at MoMA.” More than 70 years after Kahlo’s death, of course, the calculus has completely flipped. Her floral crown, unibrow and bleeding heart are on coffee mugs and jewelry and stationery worldwide. She is, as Adams put it, someone who “lived her life to the fullest” — and whose pictures make that undeniable.

Kahlo’s family made the trip to New York for opening night. Her grandniece — also named Frida — told the New York Post that the family has just opened a new museum in Kahlo’s honor, the Museo Casa Kahlo, in Mexico City, and is also launching a book called Frida. In person. — written in Kahlo’s own voice. “We want the whole world to appreciate it,” the younger Frida said. “If Frida were around today, imagine what she would say about her paintings now being sold for $56 million.”

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego runs at the Metropolitan Opera through June 5. The May 30 matinee will be broadcast live in HD to cinemas across the U.S. and internationally — which means even if you’re not in New York, you can catch this one.

The post Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera Finally Get Their Opera at the Met appeared first on Cream.

• Conan O’Brien will host the 99th Academy Awards on March 14, 2027, live on ABC and Hulu
• It’s his third consecutive year as host — the first three-peat since Billy Crystal in the early ’90s
• The announcement was made at Disney’s upfront presentation in New York on May 12
• Executive producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan return for a fourth straight year; Jeff Ross and Mike Sweeney back for a third
• The 2027 ceremony will be the second-to-last Oscars on ABC before the show moves to YouTube in 2029

Conan O’Brien is coming back to the Oscars — and at this point, it’s starting to look permanent. ABC and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences officially announced Tuesday that O’Brien will return to host the 99th Academy Awards on Sunday, March 14, 2027, making him the first host to hold the gig for three consecutive years since Billy Crystal did it in the early 1990s.

The news dropped during Disney’s upfront presentation in New York, with Robin Roberts delivering the announcement from the stage. Academy CEO Bill Kramer and Academy President Lynette Howell Taylor confirmed the rehire alongside a full returning production team: executive producers Raj Kapoor and Katy Mullan are back for a fourth straight year, and O’Brien’s longtime collaborators Jeff Ross and Mike Sweeney return as producers for a third time, with Sweeney also pulling double duty as a writer.

“We are thrilled to be working again with Conan, Raj, Katy, Jeff and Mike for the 99th Oscars,” Kramer and Howell Taylor said in a joint statement. “They are an incredible team and have produced such captivating, entertaining and heartfelt shows over the last two years. We are so grateful for their ongoing partnership as we honor our global film community — and we look forward to Conan superbly leading the celebration with his brilliance and humor.”

Craig Erwich, president of Disney’s Television Group, was equally effusive. “Conan has created remarkable energy around The Oscars,” he said. “His singular comedic voice makes Hollywood’s biggest night one of the most entertaining celebrations of the year. We’re proud to welcome him back and look forward to what he and the producing team deliver next.”

How We Got Here: From Reluctant Host to Franchise Player

For context on just how rare this is: for much of the past decade, celebrities have treated big awards show hosting gigs as something to avoid. The criticism can be brutal, the ratings pressure relentless, and the upside increasingly hard to justify. O’Brien, though, wanted in from the start.

“When the first offer came in, I told him, ‘You don’t need to do this, you’ve got nothing to prove,'” producer Jeff Ross told The Hollywood Reporter ahead of this year’s show. “When we quit late night, the goal was to only do things that are fun, things that we want to do. Well, this is what Conan wants to do.”

O’Brien himself explained his decision-making in characteristically offbeat terms: “There’s a little bearded Viking inside me. He’s been there since I was 10 years old. And when that Viking decides on something — whether it’s replacing David Letterman with no experience, skiing some advanced slope I have no business going down or hosting the Oscars, that’s what’s going to happen.”

His instincts have paid off. O’Brien’s 2025 debut as host drew a post-pandemic high of 19.7 million viewers, the night “Anora” swept the awards. Ratings dipped roughly 9 percent this year — down to about 17.86 million for the ceremony that crowned “One Battle After Another” as best picture — but social media engagement during the broadcast jumped over 42%, and reviews for O’Brien’s performance remained glowing. The Hollywood Reporter’s chief TV critic Dan Fienberg called him “very good” in his second outing and predicted the Academy would be quick to invite him back.

They were.

The day after the 2026 ceremony, Walt Disney TV exec VP Rob Mills told Deadline the door was wide open: “Conan has, obviously, a standing offer to host as long as he wants. 100% we’d love him back.” After O’Brien “signed off” at the end of the 2026 show with a sketch parodying “One Battle After Another” — in which he was appointed “Oscars host for life,” promptly killed, his body hauled away and incinerated, and Mr. Beast named his successor — Mills was asked if it was just a comedy bit. “Conan is host for life, yes,” he said. “He hasn’t even accepted yet. He’s just being told. We’re going to treat that as if that was fact.”

Turns out, it was.

The Team Behind the Show

The production team reassembling around O’Brien is no accident. Kapoor and Mullan both won Emmys for their work on the 96th Oscars and have built a real creative rhythm with O’Brien over the past two years. “Getting to reunite with Conan O’Brien for a third year at the Oscars is really special,” they said in a joint statement. “He brings that signature humor everyone loves, along with a real warmth and generosity that carry through the entire show. He’s a true creative partner, someone we trust completely, and someone who makes the whole process genuinely fun, both behind the scenes and on stage. We’re incredibly grateful to keep building this together and can’t wait to share what’s next.”

O’Brien himself has six Primetime Emmy wins across 33 nominations — including a nod for his Oscars work — and brings the same writers’ room sensibility to the show that defined his decades in late night on Late Night, The Tonight Show, and Conan. He’s also currently hosting the “Conan O’Brien Needs a Friend” podcast and the HBO travel series “Conan O’Brien Must Go,” so it’s not like he’s been sitting around waiting for the call.

At a press conference ahead of the 2026 show, he offered a peek behind the curtain on his process: he and the writers evaluate jokes for topicality right up until showtime, and he compared the experience to his early improv days at The Groundlings. “You just gotta let it go and go out there and let my natural low self-esteem take over,” he said.

The End of an Era — and What Comes Next

There’s a bittersweet undercurrent to all of this. The 2027 ceremony will be the penultimate Oscars to air on ABC and the second-to-last held at the Dolby Theatre, which has been the show’s home for over two decades. After Disney airs the landmark 100th Oscars in 2028, the broadcast moves to YouTube and the ceremony relocates to the Peacock Theatre at L.A. Live in downtown Los Angeles, beginning with the 101st Academy Awards in 2029.

O’Brien himself seemed to see the writing on the wall. In his opening monologue at this year’s ceremony, he told the audience he was “honored to be the last human host of the Academy Awards… Next year it’s going to be a Waymo in a tux.”

For now, the human is back. The 99th Oscars air live from the Dolby Theatre on March 14, 2027, at 7 p.m. ET on ABC and Hulu.

The post Conan O’Brien to Host the 2027 Oscars for Third Year in a Row appeared first on Cream.

• A Broadway musical based on ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic’s catalog is officially in development, titled Dare to Be Stupid: The Weird Al Musical
• Tony Award-winner Alex Timbers (Moulin Rouge!) will direct, with the book written by Yankovic alongside Scott Brown and Anthony King (Beetlejuice)
• Tony Award-winning production company Seaview is producing the show
• The musical will draw from Yankovic’s four-decade catalog of parody hits including “Eat It,” “Amish Paradise,” and “White & Nerdy”
• A production timeline and full creative team are still to be announced

Broadway is about to get a whole lot weirder. Dare to Be Stupid: The Weird Al Musical, a stage musical built around the songs of five-time Grammy winner “Weird Al” Yankovic, is officially in development — and the team assembled to bring it to life is genuinely stacked.

Tony Award-winner Alex Timbers, the director behind the smash hit Moulin Rouge! The Musical, is set to direct. The book is being written by Tony-nominated duo Scott Brown and Anthony King — the team behind Gutenberg! The Musical! and the Broadway hit Beetlejuice — alongside Yankovic himself. Producing is Seaview, the Tony Award-winning powerhouse behind some of the most talked-about shows in recent memory.

The musical will pull from Yankovic’s unparalleled four-decade catalog — songs that have parodied, celebrated, and cheerfully outlasted virtually every genre and cultural moment of the modern era. Confirmed titles include “White & Nerdy” (his spin on Chamillionaire’s “Ridin'”), “Amish Paradise” (Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise”), “Eat It” (Michael Jackson’s “Beat It”), “Smells Like Nirvana” (Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit”), and “Like a Surgeon” (Madonna’s “Like a Virgin”).

https://youtube.com/watch?v=N9qYF9DZPdw%3Ffeature%3Doembed

Yankovic, characteristically, could not be more on-brand about the whole thing. “Ever since I was a middle-aged man, I’ve always wanted to be a part of the New York theatre community,” he said in a statement. “Plus, the one thing people always say about Broadway is that it’s ‘severely lacking in Weird Al-based entertainment,’ and I think this musical should fix that problem immediately.”

A Dream Project for Everyone Involved

For Timbers, this one is personal. “I first fell in love with Al’s music with the release of ‘Dare to Be Stupid’ and have remained an avid fan ever since,” he said. “Now, it’s a dream come true to work with one of my comedy heroes bringing an original story set to his beloved songbook to the stage. What Al, Anthony, and Scott are creating is unexpected, subversive, meta, and hilarious — and I can’t wait for the world to experience it.”

Seaview CEO Greg Nobile was equally enthusiastic. “Dare to Be Stupid feels like the kind of musical that only comes around once in a while — wildly original, deeply funny, and powered by the unmistakable heart that has made ‘Weird Al’ Yankovic a singular voice in American culture,” he said. “Beneath the absurdity and the joy, is a show about creativity, individuality, and the freedom to be unapologetically yourself.”

The combination of Timbers’ theatrical spectacle instincts, Brown and King’s gift for absurdist comedy (anyone who’s seen Beetlejuice on Broadway knows exactly what that means), and Yankovic’s four decades of pop culture subversion feels like an almost unreasonably good fit. This is a jukebox musical, yes — but one built on songs that were already themselves a form of theatrical performance art.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=bqZVihpOACE%3Fsi%3DeXTPAJj_MU9NlSG3

A production timeline and the rest of the creative team are still to come. But given the names already attached, this one is going to be hard to ignore once it starts moving.

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