It's an expansive time for Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher, musically. Earlier this summer, he helmed the world premiere staging of Adam Guettel and Bob Martin's latest, Millions, at Atlanta's Alliance Theatre—classic musical theatre. Then he took a turn towards country with the Dolly Parton biomusical Dolly: A True Original Musical at Tennessee's Fisher Center for the Performing Arts.

And just earlier this week, on September 21, he opened a brand-new opera adaptation of Michael Chabon's Pulitzer-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Metropolitan Opera. The work, pulling from a much beloved and best-selling novel for its source material, is a surprisingly Broadway-style offering for the Manhattan institution, part of the institution's efforts to develop a new audience. And it appears to be working. Its premiere performances (currently scheduled through October 11) are very well sold, and with some of the priciest ticket prices in several seasons.

If you've read Chabon's book, you know that you needn't expect the usual trappings of stationary operatic sopranos warbling arias and wearing antlered helmets. Set against the backdrop of World War II, the sprawling story follows two Jewish cousins breaking into the then-burgeoning comic book industry with an anti-fascist superhero named The Escapist, inspired by one brother's real escape from Nazi-occupied Prague. And that means bringing action sequences to an operatic stage—not something we tend to associate with that particular art-form.

To find out how this new opera is tackling the challenge—along with catching up on the still in-development Dolly biomusical, we caught up with Sher as Kavalier and Clay was preparing to begin its run at The Met. The conversation below has been edited for length and clarity.

How does developing new operas compare to doing new musicals?
Bartlett Sher: In this case, last November we were in Indiana at Indiana University, which has a full-size space. We could really lay out the structure and do it. We had a lot of meeting with Gene [Scheer, librettist] and Mason [Bates, composer] afterwards and worked through different things. You can’t change things as quickly in opera world. The main difference between doing a Broadway musical and opera is mostly conditions. You just don’t have the time. It’s a very expensive art form, so you don’t have the time to make the changes. Right now, we’re very delicately figuring out how to carve out the most basic amount of time to work on a transition, to fix something here and get it straightened out there. We’re getting it done. And this is a very, very big effort for the Met. There’s like 25 locations. It’s a sprawling work, and based on a major novel, so it covers a huge amount of territory. And as a result, that creates more challenges when it comes to the mise en scène, the world of the piece.

Do you find yourself less in charge as a director than when you’re working on musicals?
Opera is different. The music director is at the top of the hierarchy, and the music is the center of the experience. Then it’s the singers, and then maybe the stage director.

How does that make you feel?
Well it’s the conditions under which we’re working, and I feel like let’s make the best thing we can. That means I have to find my way to getting everybody on the same page and seeing if I can help push us all somewhere new. I don’t say, “Oh, why am I not in charge?” I don’t think like that. It doesn’t matter. It matters that we make something great. And they’re great people to work with.

Tell me about adapting that huge, sprawling novel as an opera. I know that there’s been a lot of struggle with getting a movie version.
It’s quite fascinating that its first iteration gets to be an opera! I think it’s a really beautiful way of expressing the central heart of the novel. At the same time, we have to compress it. We can’t cover every single thing of what is a very, very massive novel, a far-reaching piece. There’s certain compressions, certain things that people may miss. I find it to be very moving, very timely.

I can’t imagine why a story about fascism-fighting superheroes would be timely right now.
Yeah. It’s just that thing. Here we are in a world where we’re working against fascism and using art to figure out how to handle it, and whether you can use your art to deal with your trauma, to express ways of fighting back, whether that works at all.

Did this opera come about as a reaction to everything going on?
It’s happenstance. We started it over two years ago. These things take too long to develop. But I have a kind of vague feeling that these pieces come around when we need them, and this is a good time for this. We’re lucky to be doing it.

What sang about this book to you?
It’s three worlds. You have the world of Prague, and the struggle of the Holocaust, which has its own sound. You have the world of Brooklyn, the world of the toy factory. And then, you have the world of action figures and making comic books. Mason has really built a sonic world around all of them, and it’s been fascinating. I don’t think there’s anything that can’t be addressed with music. And I know that if you’re making a Marvel film, the music is a huge component of how to bring those things to life. The same is true here.

How do you bring action to the stage when you not only have a stationary stage, but also opera singers who are, perhaps, not known for their acrobatics?
We have a parkour dancer who does a lot of the movement of The Escapist. And we’re using projections from 59 Productions for a ton of animation that pours through the piece. It’s especially well-suited to comic books and how the art makes those. And I have found we have a great, young cast that are all up for anything. The most important thing with opera is being able to reach through the human voice, the emotional core of the music and the story.

This definitely feels like the Met’s work to connect with new audiences.
Yeah, people are really excited about it. I think it’s a broad audience, because the older and younger audiences can be attracted to it in the same way. I think Peter [Gelb]’s efforts to make new operas is one of the most incredible things he’s accomplished while being at the Met. New operas are the lifeblood of our future, and he’s done some extraordinary works that we’ve all loved. They don’t always work, but that’s fine. You can feel a kind of excitement for it in the building that’s really special.

What do you think opera is bringing to this story that’s unique from the book?
What an opera does for any kind of piece of writing is to bring a kind of sound—both a musical sound and the expression of the human voice—to the biggest scale of emotions in the writing. That is something we’re reaching for, and we always reach for. It is, as they call it, the Great Tradition, of this very epic, powerful, all-encompassing art form. I think, for a book that is as ambitious as this, they’re well suited to each other.

Tell me why you think the typical Broadway-loving Playbill reader wants to come see Kavalier and Clay.
I think one of the great reasons for going to see anything is to go into our past with our great writers, to see what we can learn about where we are right now. And it’s an exceptionally entertaining evening. It reminds us of important stories from our past, and helps us arm ourselves for the future we’re going into.

Well I would be remiss if I didn’t check in about another of your big projects right now, Dolly! How did the Nashville tryout go?
It was great, and incredibly hard work. We’re doing a very ambitious thing, telling the story of her whole life, from growing up in East Tennessee to almost now. We made a ton of changes—we have so much material. Dolly herself was an exceptional collaborator, and she’s an exceptional human.

It seems like she’s been very involved!
Very involved, which is not always the case. She was there for every single day of rehearsal. She’s been with us through all of the workshops. This story means a lot to her. She’s been learning a lot. She loves the process. She’s, at her core, such a creative spirit and artist. And she’s been absolutely the best of the best.

What do you think makes her real-life story work as a piece of drama?
I think what’s great about Dolly is that she speaks for everyone. She speaks for the young girl who wants to be herself. She speaks for the gay man who is whoever he wants to be. She speaks for everybody—she sees everybody. And we have such an amazing range of music. But watching her story, building her faith, her belief and her work, her love of family and friends … it’s so inspiring. There’s just nobody like her. I think she holds everybody together at a time when nobody wants to be anywhere near each other, and that’s very special. Her narrative is a special one to remind us how we can be at our best.

I know her gay fans also love that element of camp in her, that glitz and sense of humor that she finds in a story that is even sometimes quite tragic.
Her sense of humor is so ridiculous. She sees in everybody who they are and loves them no matter what, and she believes God loves them no matter what, and that’s who we are—that’s what’s so special about her. She dials into people in such a powerful way. Even one-to-one she’s just the best. It’s been one of the great joys of my working life.

So what’s next? Are you thinking another try-out before Broadway?
We’re hoping to come in [to New York] next year.

Tickets to The Amazing Adventure of Kavalier and Clay are available at MetOpera.org.

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See Production Photos of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay at the Metropolitan Opera

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