The Central Park Five, a powerful performance that ran from May 10 to May 18 at the Detroit Opera, is drawing significant attention for its timely themes of social justice, activism, and protest. The opera resonates strongly in 2025, as the Trump administration continues to implement policies widely viewed as harmful to communities of color, echoing Trump’s eerie past, of when he publicly vilified the five innocent Black and Latino teens falsely accused in the 1989 assault of a white jogger named Trisha Meili.
Directed by Nataki Garrett, the opera recounts the harrowing story of the wrongful arrests and convictions of Yusef Salaam, Antron McCray, Kevin Richardson, Raymond Santana, and Korey Wise—five Black and Latino teenagers coerced by police into giving false confessions, which led to their imprisonment for the brutal 1989 assault of Meili. At the time, they were merely boys.
The cast features Freddie Ballentine as Kevin Richardson, Chapmen Williams-Ali as Raymond Santana, Nathan Granner as Korey Wise, Markel Reed as Yusef Salaam, and Justin Hopkins as Antron McCray, each delivering a stirring portrayal of the young men’s anguish, resilience, and fight for justice. Actor Todd Strange depicts Donald Trump in the riveting play.
The opera is an act of resistance against Donald Trump.
As the five teens fought against a public eager to see them punished, Donald Trump inflamed racial tensions by taking out a full-page ad in Newsday, labeling them “muggers and murderers” and calling for them to “suffer” for their crimes, despite no evidence and their eventual exoneration.
During the planning stages of the production—held last year, while Trump was actively campaigning for a second term—Yuval Sharon, artistic director of the Detroit Opera, admitted to the Associated Press that the company hesitated. They were uncertain whether staging such a politically charged work would provoke…
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