In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s celebrated World War II–era novel, composer Mason Bates and librettist Gene Scheer bring to the operatic stage an unforgettable story of two Jewish cousins who unlock a new avenue of resistance against tyranny through the world of superheroes. Music Director Yannick Nézet-Séguin takes the podium for the Met premiere of Bartlett Sher’s action-packed production.

Sam Clay and Joe Kavalier huddle in Sam’s bedroom, batting ideas back and forth. As Joe sketches speculatively and Sam spitballs elements of an origin story, their vision for a new superhero begins to take shape. “Armed with superb mental and physical training, he roams the globe, coming to the aid of those who languish in tyranny’s chains,” sings Sam, a comic book–obsessed Brooklynite who yearns to be a writer. “He frees people. He helps them escape,” continues his cousin Joe, a talented young artist recently arrived in New York after his own narrow escape from Prague as the Nazi fist closed around eastern Europe. Then, in unison, their pitch rising with excitement: “He is ...the Escapist!” With that, a floor-rattling electronic beat drops, grooving in tandem with rhythmic strings and percussion as the brass outline a heroic melody that will become the Escapist’s calling card. Suddenly, the entire Met proscenium fills with dazzling projections—individual pencil strokes become line drawings, taking on more and more detail and building into intricate comic-book panels, which zip through whizz-bang action sequences and then bloom into vivid color. There, before the audience’s very eyes, is the Escapist, in a skin-tight suit emblazoned with a golden key, scaling skyscrapers, running along the roof of a speeding train, and punching Nazis in the face.

It is a thrilling moment of theater and one that encapsulates the way Mason Bates’s new opera—with libretto by Gene Scheer and a cutting-edge production devised by director Bartlett Sher and designed by 59 Studio—translates the exhilarating experience of reading Michael Chabon’s modern classic The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. “The novel has such incredible energy, such an incredible sense of adventure and creation,” says Scheer, whose task it was to condense the nearly 700-page tome and package it for performance on the operatic stage. 

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the novel tells a captivating story of family, war, love, and grief, its timeline sprawling across some 15 years before, during, and after World War II, with numerous diversions along the way. In the early stages of the adaptation, Scheer made two crucial decisions to distill the work down to its essence. The first was to reduce the timeframe to a pivotal four-year span and limit the opera to the fundamental elements of the drama. The libretto closely focuses on Sam, sung at the Met by tenor Miles Mykkanen, and Joe, sung by baritone Andrzej Filończyk, as they break into the cutthroat comic-book industry, channeling their desire to strike a blow against fascism into the superhero they hope will help push public opinion toward supporting America’s entry into the war against Nazism. They also dream of the Escapist becoming the next Superman, showering them with commercial success and money they could use to effect the rescue of Joe’s parents and younger sister, still trapped in Prague. Along the way, Joe and Sam form pivotal romantic relation-ships—Joe with the idealistic artist Rosa Saks (mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce), who helps operate an organization that evacuates Jewish children from Europe, and Sam with Tracy Bacon (baritone Edward Nelson), the strapping actor who voices their superhero in a radio-play version of The Escapist.

The second key structural decision Scheer made was to establish three distinct worlds to frame the action: Nazi-occupied Prague, the bustling streets of New York City, and the mythical plane of comic-book fantasy. It was then up to Bates to bring those disparate environments to life with his music. The job was tailor-made for the eclectic and inventive composer, who is Juilliard-trained and steeped in the classical music tradition but also deeply enmeshed in the world of electronica, often performing as a DJ. He’s also done serious work as a film composer. In his words, it’s all about “integrating classical music into the 21st century in new and surprising ways, while also being true to its long and ancient history.”

Bates has brought that ethos and all of his varied experience to bear on Kavalier & Clay, his second opera after the Grammy-winning The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs from 2017. In the Prague scenes, for example, “there’s a dark atmosphere as you’re watching the family being pursued by the SS, with mandolin, plectrum, lots of pizzicato, and inflections of Bartók and Janáček,” he says, “but you’ll also hear these very ominous synthesizer drones.” Bates, not Jewish himself, wanted to bring an authenticity to this subject matter, so he spent six months attending services at Temple Emanu-El inSan Francisco, immersing himself in the culture and thinking of ways to integrate elements of what he heard into his music. “I found this incredible tune, ‘Ani Ma’amin,’ which was allegedly written in a boxcar on the way to Treblinka,” he says. A profession of faith with a downtrodden but determined melody, it became part of the score. In the comic-book sequences, Bates pulls out all the electroacoustic stops, conjuring “a techno-symphonic, technicolor world that shows how the power of the imagination is really driving this whole story.” He describes the simultaneously throbbing and soaring music that lends mythological grandeur to Sam and Joe’s creation of the Escapist, for instance, as “a reimagination of hip-hop beats with a Wagnerian build in the orchestra."

But perhaps the most intricate music in the opera is the soundtrack of New York in the booming 1940s. “I grew up listening to Gershwin and Artie Shaw and Glen Gray, and all these incredible big-band guys,” says Bates. “In fact, my dad is probably smoking a pipe and listening to big-band records in his man cave right now. And that music has such sophistication to it, so much that can be done with harmony and rhythm.” This influence is everywhere in the score, with saxophones in the orchestra pit, subtle and expressive twists of harmony adding emotional depth, and Gershwin- and Bernstein-esque swing rhythms keeping the toe tapping. 

While opera is a perfect medium for melding musical cultures and styles, the fast-paced, continent-hopping libretto for Kavalier & Clay posed unprecedented challenges for the production team. “In my experience, we’ve never had this many sets, this many changes of location, this almost cinematic quality in an opera,” says Tony Award–winning director Bartlett Sher, a veteran of eight previous Met productions, many other operas at houses around the world, and numerous Broadway musicals. Sher’s partners in this staging are the members of 59 Studio—the theatrical design team behind the multimedia elements of such memorable Met productions as Satyagraha, Doctor Atomic, and the recent new production of Aida. “You have these distinct worlds, but they might be happening simultaneously,” says Mark Grimmer, 59’s co-founder and director. “So we had to be really agile in order to have a scene that’s taking place on the banks of the Moldau in one moment, and then suddenly in an apartment in New York, and then in a comic-book world.”

Sher and the designers ultimately solved the problem with a series of moving panels that work in tandem with elaborate projections to swiftly reconfigure the playing space and change the scenery. “We’re constantly switching and moving,” says Sher. “For example, the opera begins on the Charles Bridge in Prague. Joe jumps off the bridge, and the scrim becomes a projection of him going underwater and turning upside down, which then cuts to the bank of the river, where a Nazi officer finds Joe’s little sister and questions her. Then, Joe reappears, and we are again in a different location. Half of that is done through projection, and half is done through changing the physical space."

To match Bates’s three sound worlds, Grimmer and his team have designed distinct visual aesthetics for each set of surroundings. The scenes in Prague and on the battle-fields of Europe are monochromatic, dark, and shadowed, while New York is much more saturated, with the bright lights and jazz undercurrent of a city brimming with possibility. But it was the comic-book world that particularly excited the designers. “There’s so much opportunity to be playful because comics contain so much energy and so much movement,” says Grimmer.“ We’ve been very graphical, with line drawing but also richly colored imagery, and we’ve really flexed our animation muscle with extensive action sequences.” 

While the vitality and panache of Chabon’s writing is the first thing to jump off the page, it is ultimately the novel’s richly imagined characters and their overlapping quests for life, liberty, and happiness that linger in the reader’s heart and mind. The same is true of the opera, in which Bates’s multilayered music and the staging’s innovative production elements are simply a means to tell the poignant story as powerfully as possible. “You really feel like you’re being transported somewhere extraordinary, and you’re being asked questions about who you areas a human being, where you came from, and how you respond to challenges and genuine oppression,” says Sher. “It’s based on history, on who we were then and how we’ve changed, and it continues to resonate with me as we struggle to understand what’s going on in the world today. It seems to me a big enough subject to deserve being heard in the biggest possible way of making art, which is opera.” 

Bates agrees. “This is an incredible story that has opera written all over it,” he says, stressing that he hopes both seasoned Met audiences and newcomers will give Kavalier & Clay a chance. “I hope everyone experiences a piece that both challenges and excites them about what opera can do."

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

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