So the story of Emil Griffith was first introduced to me by Terence Blanchard, who's a wonderful composer and jazz trumpet player. Terence and I had worked on two of the pictures that I directed; he wrote the music for two of them. He was commissioned by Opera Theater St. Louis to write an opera, and he chose the subject of Emil Griffith. Then he came to me and asked me to write the libretto for it. At that time, I didn't know anything about Emil, so I did some research and realized what an extraordinary story his life is. So, I agreed to do the libretto, but having never written a libretto before, when I sat down to work on it, I basically wrote a play and then adapted the play into what was needed for the libretto. So, we did

the Opera. It uh two years ago. It was done in St. Louis. It's been pretty successful. It was done in San Francisco. And next year, it'll be done in Washington, DC. Um, and um, what happened was that there was uh so much material that I had sort of written in this play form um that we hadn't been able to get into the uh Opera because in Opera libretto is much shorter than a play. And um, and the music is sort of the center. So when the court theater uh contacted me uh and asked if I were interested in doing a play about Amal based on the libretto, it was really the reverse of that. I already had most of the play um, and I had so much material that I wanted to use the uh parts of his life and aspects of his life and aspects of the story that I just couldn't get into the Opera. So this has been a really great opportunity to finish uh for me to finish telling the story of uh Amal's life.

Michael Cristofer

Michael Cristofer