John Adams’ Antony and Cleopatra will debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York in May with Julia Bullock in the title role. Pulitzer Prize winner John Adams is one of Bullock’s frequent collaborators: she created the role of Dame Shirley in his Girls of the Golden West and sang the role of Kitty Oppenheimer on the Grammy-nominated 2018 Nonesuch recording of his opera Doctor Atomic, with the composer conducting the BBC Symphony. Commissioned to write a new Antony and Cleopatra to celebrate the centennial of the San Francisco Opera, Adams turned to Bullock once again to bring one of Shakespeare’s greatest female protagonists to life. A co-commission and co-production with the Gran Teatre del Liceu and the Metropolitan Opera, the opera debuts at the Met in May of 2025 with Bullock in the title role, and follows her house debut last season in Adams’s El Niño. Adams adapted the libretto himself from Shakespeare’s tragedy, adding supplementary passages from Plutarch, Virgil, and other classical texts and collaborating with director Elkhanah Pulitzer and playwright Lucia Scheckner to combine the mythic image of antiquity with the glamor of 1930s Hollywood. Gerald Finley sings opposite Bullock in the role of Antony, returning to the role after last fall’s European debut of the work in Barcelona. Tenor Paul Appleby sings Caesar, who goes to war with Antony, and mezzo-soprano Elizabeth DeShong is Caesar’s sister and Antony’s forsaken wife, Octavia.