‘Omar’: When History Enters the Room

At Lyric Opera of Chicago, musical beauty and an enveloping final chorus bring an enslaved scholar’s story into unsettling proximity with the present.

By Elizabeth Jia

Final dress rehearsal attended: October 20, 2026 | Lyric Opera of Chicago

CHICAGO — Near the end of Omar, the chorus moved into the auditorium. Singers entered the aisles, and voices reached us from several directions. The opera had spent the evening telling a nineteenth-century story. Suddenly, that story seemed to be standing beside us.

Inside Lyric Opera House

I had arrived at the final dress rehearsal with few expectations. What surprised me first was how much I enjoyed the music. The staging drew me in even more, giving its historical subject a physical presence that became impossible to keep at a comfortable distance.

With music by Rhiannon Giddens and Michael Abels and a libretto by Giddens, Omar follows the West African Muslim scholar Omar ibn Said through capture, forced passage across the Atlantic, and enslavement in America. Kaneza Schaal directs Lyric’s presentation, with Issachah Savage in the title role and Kazem Abdullah conducting.

According to the Library of Congress, Omar wrote his autobiography in Arabic in 1831, while enslaved. Now preserved by the Library, the manuscript records a life in its author’s own words. The opera asks us to attend to the person behind them: a scholar whose memories, beliefs, and intellectual life long preceded his enslavement.

The pleasure of listening

Lyric describes a score drawing on hymns, spirituals, gospel, bluegrass and West African percussion. Alongside its operatic writing, I heard blues inflections and passages that suggested jazz. The rhythmic vitality was immediately engaging, but the music’s beauty mattered just as much.

The stage and the orchestra of Omar

I did not feel that enjoying the music diminished the seriousness of the subject. It made me more receptive to the people within the story. Their lives emerged through sorrow, certainly, but also through energy, faith, and feeling that could not be reduced to suffering alone.

My favorite individual performance came from Ryan Opera Center tenor Daniel Luis Espinal, appearing as the Auctioneer and Taylor. As the Auctioneer, he combined a powerful, resonant voice with sharp comic timing and an assured stage presence. A relatively brief appearance became one of the evening’s most memorable.

There was something disconcerting about enjoying his theatricality so much. His salesmanship had an entertaining ease, while the transaction itself was appalling. For me, that tension gave the scene its bite: the character’s apparent comfort with his business made its cruelty more disturbing.

History written on the body

As a visual artist, I was especially drawn to the writing on the costumes. Charlese Antoinette Jones’s work builds on original designs by Micheline Russell-Brown and April M. Hickman. The lettering first caught my eye as pattern—its movement across the fabric, its visual rhythm, its relationship to the bodies wearing it.

In her program note, Schaal explains that the textiles carry Omar’s writing alongside documents of enslavement, including ship manifests and records of sale. That juxtaposition changed how I looked at them. A person’s account of his life appeared alongside the paperwork through which others claimed ownership of human beings. The words were no longer simply beautiful marks.

During the ocean-crossing sequence, the crowded figures in the ship imagery struck me as almost mural-like. Their compression created a sense of confinement before I had absorbed every detail. There seemed to be little visual breathing room.

The blue shirts beneath the costumes prompted another association: their uniformity reminded me of prison clothing.

In the same vein, Schaal identifies a different historical reference in the use of indigo—the knowledge of its production brought by Africans and the indigo and cotton industries sustained by enslaved labor. The resemblance to prison clothing was my own response, not an assertion about her intention. But it left me thinking about confinement and control, and about how readily we imagine racial oppression to belong to a safely completed past.

The chorus among us

These impressions came together when the chorus, prepared by Michael Black, moved into the auditorium. “Immersive” describes the arrangement, but not quite its effect. I was no longer hearing a collective sound arrive from a distant stage. The people producing it were among us.

My attention moved with the voices. What had been a place to sit and watch became part of the performance. Hearing the singers so close made the final chorus feel unexpectedly personal.

We were not witnesses to Omar’s historical experience, but to an act of remembrance carried out by living people in a shared room. 

I left remembering Espinal’s vivid theatricality, the crowded ship imagery and the words on the costumes. Above all, I remembered the voices around me.

Omar made me want to learn more about the man whose writing had survived. Its music had drawn me in; its final chorus made it difficult to leave his story safely on the stage.

Artworks inspired by Omar

It is a pity that Lyric’s run was limited to just three public performances. An opera of such musical beauty and theatrical force deserves to be seen and heard by a wider audience.

For a few minutes, the past had stood in the aisle beside me.

Elizabeth Jia is a Chicago-based artist and arts writer.