Frida Kahlo Returns to the Stage: Gabriela Lena Frank’s Met Opera Comes to Hong Kong

The Metropolitan Opera’s acclaimed production arrives in Hong Kong this December.

Frida Kahlo has long existed beyond the canvas.

Her distinctive self-portraits, indigenous-inspired dress and uncompromising artistic identity have made her one of the most recognisable figures in 20th-century art. Now, the painter enters another artistic world: opera.

On 5 December 2026, audiences in Hong Kong can experience the Metropolitan Opera’s El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego (The Last Dream of Frida and Diego) through the Met’s Live in HD cinema series, screening at Emperor Cinemas, Entertainment Building, Central, at 3:10pm.

This is not a conventional biographical opera. Instead, American composer Gabriela Lena Frank and Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Nilo Cruz use magical realism to imagine what might happen after Kahlo’s death.

And, naturally, the dead do not stay dead for very long. Opera has never been especially interested in keeping things simple.

Frida, Diego and the World Beyond

Set around Mexico’s Day of the Dead, the opera begins three years after Frida Kahlo’s death and on the day of Diego Rivera’s death. Rivera arrives at a cemetery and calls upon Frida to return from the underworld.

His plea reaches Catrina, the keeper of the dead, who summons Frida from Mictlán, the Aztec underworld.

Frida eventually returns to the world of the living, where she and Diego confront their complicated relationship, their memories and the possibility of saying farewell on their own terms.

The opera therefore takes the familiar story of Kahlo and Rivera and places it somewhere between history, mythology, memory and imagination.

It is also deliberately shaped as a reversal of the ancient Orpheus and Eurydice myth, with the deceased Frida being called back from the underworld rather than a living lover descending to retrieve her.

Gabriela Lena Frank: A Contemporary Voice with Latin American Roots

At the centre of the production is Gabriela Lena Frank, whose music draws deeply from her multicultural background and from Latin American musical traditions.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego is Frank’s first opera and her Metropolitan Opera debut. Her score brings together the sound world of the symphony orchestra with elements associated with Mexican folkloric and mariachi traditions. The marimba is particularly prominent, helping create the opera’s mysterious and otherworldly atmosphere.

Frank’s career has also included major commissions from leading American orchestras, including the Philadelphia Orchestra, where she served as composer-in-residence. In May 2026, she was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for Picaflor: A Future Myth.

For audiences interested in where contemporary classical music is heading, this makes the Hong Kong screening particularly relevant. Frank is not simply writing an opera about a famous painter. She is using opera as a space where Mexican cultural traditions, contemporary orchestral writing, mythology and visual art can coexist.

A Cast Worth Hearing Live in the Cinema

The production brings together a formidable international cast.

Isabel Leonard takes on the role of Frida Kahlo. The three-time Grammy Award-winning mezzo-soprano has been a major presence at the Met and brings considerable dramatic and vocal experience to the title role.

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As Diego Rivera, Spanish baritone Carlos Álvarez joins her, portraying the celebrated muralist and Frida’s complicated husband.

Gabriella Reyes appears as Catrina, the supernatural keeper of the underworld. Reyes made her Metropolitan Opera debut as the Priestess in Aida in 2018 and now takes on one of the opera’s most distinctive characters.

The cast is completed by Nils Wanderer as Leonardo, with Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting. The production is directed and choreographed by Brazilian artist Deborah Colker, with sets and costumes by Jon Bausor and lighting by Adam Silverman.

Colker’s production is particularly important because the opera does not treat Kahlo simply as a historical character. The visual world draws inspiration from Kahlo and Rivera’s paintings, while the staging moves between the earthly world and the Aztec underworld.

Why See an Opera About Frida Kahlo?

For audiences who may not normally attend opera, El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego offers an unusually accessible entry point.

You do not need to arrive knowing La Traviata, Don Giovanni or three centuries of operatic etiquette. The central figure is already part of popular visual culture, while the story connects painting, Mexican traditions, mythology, theatre and contemporary classical music.

For experienced opera audiences, meanwhile, the attraction is rather different: this is a chance to encounter new opera at one of the world’s major opera houses, performed by leading international singers and conducted by the Met’s Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin.

And for musicians, composers and students of the arts, Frank’s score offers another reason to pay attention. It demonstrates how contemporary opera can draw from cultural memory and traditional musical languages without simply reproducing the operatic conventions of the past.

Why Experience It on the Big Screen?

There is something slightly strange and wonderful about watching an opera about Frida Kahlo in a cinema.

Opera is fundamentally a live art form. The physical presence of the singers, orchestra and stage cannot be completely reproduced on screen. But the Met’s Live in HD series offers its own kind of immediacy, bringing audiences closer to the production through high-definition cinema transmission.

For Frida y Diego, that cinematic perspective can be especially valuable. The production depends heavily on colour, movement, choreography, costume and visual references to Kahlo’s artistic world. Colker’s staging turns the opera into something closer to a moving painting, while the camera allows audiences to see details that may be difficult to absorb from a distant theatre seat.

The Hong Kong presentation runs for approximately three hours including one intermission, and is performed in Spanish with English subtitles.

Supported by Major Arts Patrons

The production forms part of the Metropolitan Opera’s commitment to developing new works.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego is part of the Neubauer Family Foundation New Works Initiative, with the production sponsored by Rolex and additional support from the Francis Goelet Endowment Fund.

The wider Met: Live in HD programme is made possible by the Neubauer Family Foundation, its founding sponsor, with digital support from Bloomberg Philanthropies and in partnership with Rolex.

Such support matters because contemporary opera is expensive, ambitious and, rather inconveniently for anyone trying to balance an arts budget, requires enormous numbers of people to make it happen. New work needs composers, librettists, singers, musicians, designers, choreographers, technicians and audiences willing to encounter something they have not heard before.

See Frida in Hong Kong

For Hong Kong audiences, this December screening offers more than a chance to see a Metropolitan Opera production without boarding a plane to New York.

It is an opportunity to encounter a new opera by a major contemporary American composer, a story rooted in Mexican culture and visual art, an international cast and a production that brings together music, theatre, choreography and painting.

Frida Kahlo has already travelled remarkably far from her canvases.

This time, she is singing.

El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego
The Met: Live in HD
5 December 2026, 3:10pm
Emperor Cinemas, Entertainment Building, Central, Hong Kong
Sung in Spanish with English subtitles
Approx. 3 hours including one intermission

Tickets: The Met: Live in HD in Hong Kong – official programme and ticket information

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