San Diego

After a seven-year gestation, Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Anthony Davis and San Diego’s Bodhi Tree Concerts have announced that Davis’ bilingual chamber-opera adaptation of the children’s book “Pancho Rabbit and the Coyote: A Migrant’s Tale” will receive its world premiere in January 2026 in both San Diego and Tijuana.

Combining elements of allegory, fable and social commentary, the chamber-opera is based on author Duncan Tonatiuh’s award-winning 2013 children’s book of the same name, which addresses current immigration issues and is set at the U.S.-Mexico border.

It will be sung in English, Spanish and a “border slang” combination of the two languages. The characters include the titular rabbit, a coyote, a snake, and monarch butterflies that freely migrate each year between the U.S. and Mexico.

“I’m really excited to work with Bodhi Tree, a local arts organization that is very progressive, and I’m excited we’re doing it in San Diego and Tijuana,” Davis told the Union-Tribune Monday afternoon. “This is a piece I’ve been thinking about for a long time.”

His enthusiasm is shared by Diana DuMelle, who co-founded and leads Bodhi Tree with her husband, Walter.

“We’ve been dreaming about doing this for a long time and we feel extraordinarily lucky to work with someone as brilliant as Anthony,” DuMelle told the Union-Tribune. “Anthony is a genius who has lived his whole career telling stories that are not usually told.”

The subjects of Davis’ other operas have ranged from the kidnapping and radicalization of heiress Patty Hearst in 1992’s “Tania” to a pivotal slave rebellion in 1997’s “Amistad” and social injustices against Native Americans in 2007’s “Wakonda’s Dream.”

Davis, who won a 2020 Pulitzer for his politically charged 2020 opera “The Central Park Five,” is composing the music for “Pancho Rabbit.” The libretto is being written by Allan Havis, who — like Davis — is a professor at UC San Diego. Havis has also written the librettos for several of Davis’ operas, including “Lilith” in 2009 and “King Lear on the 2nd Floor” several years later.

Havis is stepping in for former California poet laureate Quincy Troupe, who was originally set to do the libretto for “Pancho Rabbit” but bowed out to complete work on his autobiography. Troupe, now based in New York, was a professor of Caribbean and American literature and creative writing at UCSD from 1991 to 2003.

“I love Quincy’s poetry, but I love the fact that Allan is in San Diego and that he is bilingual,” Bodhi Tree’s DuMelle said. She credits the nonprofit organization’s local donor base and two NEA grants for helping raise underwriting for the production of “Pancho Rabbit.”

Maria Teré Rique, the general director of Opera de Tijuana, will act as co-presenter and as the liaison for the Tijuana performances. J.Ed Araiza, who oversaw Long Beach Opera’s world premiere of Davis’ “The Central Park Five,” will direct “Pancho Rabbit.”

Davis and the DuMelles first agreed in 2018 to collaborate on “Pancho Rabbit.” Obtaining the rights to adapt the book and to raise funding to underwrite its transformation into a chamber opera proved a time-consuming process. The pandemic-fueled shutdown of live events in 2020 and much of 2021, which posed an existential crisis for arts groups large and small, also extended the timeline.

Davis, who will be in residence at the American Academy of Rome for the month of September, has had a remarkable run since his 2020 Pulitzer win. In 2021, he was inducted into the prestigious American Academy of Arts & Letters. In 2023, his acclaimed “X: The Life and Times of Malcolm X,” which premiered in 1986, became only the second opera by a Black composer to be staged by New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Davis has long worked to expand the parameters of opera, both with his chosen subject matter and by expertly drawing not only from classical music but from jazz, funk, hip-hop and other contemporary styles. For “Pancho Rabbit,” he plans to incorporate such instruments as marimba and accordion, and to draw from both nortēno music and rock.

” ‘Pancho Rabbit’ is in the tradition of ‘Peter and The Wolf’ and George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’,” Davis said. “It has an adult subtext but I want to keep the appeal and specialness of it as a children’s story.”

Union-Tribune freelance music writer Beth Wood contributed to this report.