"Before Night Falls" gets revival in Miami

Wes Mason as Reinaldo Arenas (left) and Elliot Madore (right)

Jorge Martín's opera Before Night Falls will get its first revival since the summer of 2010, when it premiered at the Fort Worth Opera. The Florida Grand Opera will perform the opera from March 18-25 at the Sanford and Dolores Ziff Ballet Opera House in Miami.

Barihunk Elliot Madore will sing the role of Reinaldo Arenas. The only cast member returning from the original production is tenor Javier Abreu, who is reprising the role of Pepe.

Based on the famous memoir of Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, Before Night Falls follows Arenas’ life from childhood poverty in the Cuban countryside to his emigration to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, and his last decade in New York City. Disillusioned by the Cuban Revolution and persecuted by the Castro regime as a dissident writer and gay man, the opera follows his trials and tribulations as a political prisoner forced to smuggle his manuscripts abroad for publication.

In 2000, Before Night Falls was made into an award-winning feature film directed by Julian Schnabel and starring Javier Bardem and Johnny Depp.

Reinaldo Arenas led a life full of tragedy and didn't live to make any real money off his writing. While dying of AIDS in 1990, he committed suicide in his New York apartment because he did not want return to a hospital.

Tickets and additional cast information is available online.