‘Dead Man Walking’ Turns 25 • September 2025
San Francisco, California
Dead Man Walking creative team Jake Heggie, Terrence McNally, Patrick Summers, Joe Mantello
Following more than 80 productions around the world, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking celebrates its 25th anniversary with a return to the War Memorial stage where it premiered. Commissioned by San Francisco Opera in 2000, with a libretto by the late Tony Award-winning playwright Terrence McNally based on the iconic memoir by Sister Helen Prejean, Dead Man Walking was Heggie’s first opera. It has since become the most widely performed new opera of the last 25 years, opening the Metropolitan Opera’s 2023/24 season and earning praise from The New York Times for its “soaring music, swelling tenderness, and sweeping ensemble.” San Francisco Opera presents Leonard Foglia’s captivating production, starring Jamie Barton, Ryan McKinny, and Susan Graham – with Patrick Summers, conductor of the work’s world premiere, in the pit.
Opera Magazine: ‘Dead Man Walking’ at 25
San Francisco Chronicle: Why ‘Dead Man Walking’ is the most performed new opera of the last 25 years
Gramophone Podcast: Heggie on 25 years of writing operas
Mercury News: ‘Dead Man Walking’ opera returns to city that made it a sensation
Gramophone: Classical Music Season Preview
Financial Times: The 10 most anticipated and controversial operas of this season
The Guardian: ‘Raise the questions. Don’t provide the answers’: Heggie on 25 years of Dead Man Walking
Opera Now: Dead Man Walking: Walking with Sister Helen
Critical Acclaim
Dead Man Walking at San Francisco Opera / photo by Cory Weaver
“Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s work premiered at San Francisco Opera 25 years ago before going on to become the most-performed American opera of this century. It’s a piece as immediate as a dinner-table debate yet as heightened as a tug-of-war between heaven’s gate and hell’s mouth. Heggie’s score finds a unique musical hue for each fresh twinge of conscience. God was there to lament the victims during the murder. Now, the opera implies, He’s there at the execution, too — only this time, He’s not just mourning for Joseph. He’s mourning for a state that would kill its own people. He’s mourning for us.”
–San Francisco Chronicle
“Dead Man Walking grabs you by the heart. San Francisco Opera’s production maximizes its emotional impact with a first-rate cast and lavish production values. The fact that an opera by an unknown composer about the execution of an inmate on death row could become an instant hit (and later, the most produced modern American opera) sent a message to the opera world. The opera pulls no punches, opening with a heart-stopping scene of the double murder and ending with the execution. Yet there are also flashes of humor in this grisly tale. Heggie’s music matches the emotional gamut of the story, ranging from intimate moments to sweeping climaxes where characters and ideologies come at each other with gloves off. As the curtain fell, Heggie was presented with the SF Opera Medal, a well-deserved tribute to the prolific San Francisco composer.”
–San Francisco Classical Voice
“As operagoers remarked during intermission on opening night, the subject matter is ‘intense.’ There is a minute and a half of silence at the end of the show when De Rocher dies after a lethal injection. A grey-haired man in a suit was so emotional he had to leave the mezzanine. Equally memorable were the moments that made the audience laugh — unexpected at an opera about the death penalty.”
–Mission Local
“Immediately, the aural and visual atmosphere created through the live orchestra and set design was exceptional. Barton’s vocal performance as Prejean was powerful – more than the legal and ethical questions concerning America’s incarceration system, Prejean’s story also addresses just how personal working with inmates can become. As the victims’ parents recall their murdered children and express their repulsion at Prejean aiding De Rocher instead of them, their outrage is palpable in the auditorium. The uncomfortable realities of “Dead Man Walking” are brought in full force: What is the cost of keeping the death penalty? Would abolishing it let violent criminals off easy? Or, would it spare the lives of those wrongfully convicted? Are some offenders more deserving of forgiveness? The opera leaves these weighted questions for the audience to decide.”
–The Daily Californian
“It’s in the small moments that Dean Man Walking truly shines. Barton was no diva fending off vicious attacks. She was contrite, trying to figure out what she was even doing there in the first place. It wasn’t her scene, it belonged to the victims. Not many singers would give that space to other singers. McKinny’s DeRocher was just as likely to cede the stage to others as he was to claim it. It got to the point where I forgot several times that he committed murder and sexual assault right in front of us at the top of the opera. Heggie and McNally (and all the artists) gathered us around two grieving families, one broken man, and a woman of faith looking for the path to truth. An opera we know will end in death becomes the most life-affirming of experiences.”
–Parterre Box
“Dead Man Walking juxtaposes two profound and opposing worldviews: the ethical imperative to forgive, and the pain of suffering unbearable loss, with its attendant implacable resistance to forgiveness. Heggie’s brilliant score and McNally’s equally brilliant libretto illuminate this monumental clash in a way that only opera can: music is the fourth dimension here, opening sublime doors to which that artistic form alone possesses the key. The terrible beauty of Dead Man Walking is that it does not flinch from any of the grim realities of its subject, or the overpowering emotions they stir. Heggie’s music is almost telepathically attuned to McNally’s libretto, with piercing fragments of sung melodies set off by majestic, shifting, harmonically rich underscoring. The moment when Joe asks Sister Prejean, and really himself, if he can trust her is a fusion of music and words so heartbreaking and redemptive and painful that I found my eyes overflowing with joy and sorrow and sheer awe at what art can do. There are many, many such moments in Dead Man Walking.”
–Kamiya Unlimited
“San Francisco Opera reprises Dead Man Walking with a stupendous production on the opera’s 25th anniversary. The opera is grand in scale, blessed with melodious tonal music replete with rich categorical diversity and motifs; a libretto of immense thought and consequence; and breathtaking staging that reveals its heart-breaking scenes. The overall production is sensational with the orchestral music of Heggie’s appealing score.”
–Berkshire Fine Arts
“That the [premiere of Dead Man Walking] had come off superbly — especially from a first-time opera composer whose work had thus far been confined to art songs and cycles — was undeniable. But no one with any knowledge of operatic history would have imagined that that meant Dead Man Walking would go on to take its place as an international repertory staple or the most widely performed new opera of the 21st century. It did, though! That’s exactly what it did. And deservedly so. To understand why — to get a full immersion in the work’s moral complexity, theatrical flair, and musical richness — you could hardly do better than catch up with the 25th-anniversary production that opened at the San Francisco Opera. It’s a revival and a homecoming, as well as a magnificently argued case for the splendors of this opera. It’s a lot to take on, as each glimpse of moral certitude seems to give way almost immediately to its opposite. McNally’s terrific libretto — by turns comic, sentimental, probing, and profane — gets us part of the way there. But it’s Heggie’s score above all that helps the audience connect all the dots, by letting the music speak the emotional truths the characters can’t always register through words.”
–Musical America
“When Dead Man Walking had its premiere at San Francisco Opera in 2000, it seemed like a long shot. So much for the doubters. A quarter-century later, Heggie's grippingly dramatic opera is the single most widely produced opera written in the 21st century. It is so for good reason. In eschewing issue-driven polemics, Dead Man Walking draws listeners into a narrative web of violence and mercy, agony and morality, vengeance and faith. Heggie and McNally took a broad lens to the material. Among the peak moments were scenes with the victims' grieving parents, and Graham tore open yet another raw place in this fateful story with her transfixing mix of tentativeness and bottomless misery. In an age when empathy and understanding seem dwarfed by a politics of objectification, peremptory judgement and vengeance, Dead Man Walking may be more pertinent than ever, even transcending its immediate issue of capital punishment. Heggie and McNally created an opera for our times by making it timeless, and San Francisco Opera drove that truth home.”
–Opera Magazine