The Met’s 2025–2026 season opened with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, adapted from the novel by Michael Chabon.1 Judging by the crowd at its second performance, the company is having some success in its efforts to cultivate younger audiences. Chabon offered ideal material for that: the book, published at the turn of this century, has served for many readers as a sourcebook of sorts for a swath of twentieth-century cultural history. (Jules Feiffer expressed amazement that a younger writer could so perfectly have grasped and described the world of his youth.) Its picaresque narrative gathered, as it went, every stray artifact that came to hand—catchphrases, song titles, headlines, billboards, buildings, garments, devices and novelties of every kind—to create an encyclopedia of embedded histories that never weighed down the exhilarating forward movement of the story. What it evoked above all was the excitement of reading itself, at the age when it is a newly discovered power, extending the dream of a book that can contain everything—or a comic book that can contain everything.
The early history of comics proved a perfect terrain on which to chart the intersection of the harshest realities—personal traumas, global horrors—and the fantasy of liberation from all constraints, as embodied in a Houdini-like superhero called the Escapist. It was Chabon’s particular achievement that the buoyancy of his tale did not collapse under the weight of the historical suffering woven into it. Kavalier reflects toward the novel’s end:
Having lost his mother, father, brother, and grandfather, the friends and foes of his youth,…his city, his history—his home—the usual charge leveled against comic books, that they offered merely an easy escape from reality, seemed to Joe actually to be a powerful argument on their behalf.
A stage adaptation running some two and a half hours can only suggest the profusion of a very long novel. The multiple subplots of the book are reduced to its core narrative of two young cousins—Sammy Klayman, aka Sam Clay, of Brooklyn (Miles Mykkanen) and Josef, or Joe, Kavalier (Andrzej Filończyk), a refugee from the Nazis whose family is still trapped in Prague—and how they find success as the creators of a comic book hero, inspired by Joe’s skills as an escape artist, who does battle against fascists. Joe meets Rosa (Sun-Ly Pierce), who works for the Jewish Children’s Fund and arranges the rescue by ship of his sister Sarah (Lauren Snouffer)2; the ship is torpedoed, all the passengers are lost, and Joe in despair runs off to enlist; the hitherto repressed Sam discovers his passion for the radio actor Tracy Bacon (Edward Nelson), but when a gay revel is raided by the FBI, Sam is sexually assaulted by one of the agents; Rose bears Joe’s son and Sam helps raise him; in a muted finale Joe finally returns from the battlefield. Filończyk and Mykkanen wholly inhabit Kavalier and Clay through all the upheavals that reveal them to be fundamentally outsiders, and as Rosa, Pierce radiates a unifying clarity from her first appearance.
Even pared down, the opera is densely populated and crowded with incident. Gene Scheer is by now adept at such downsizing, having previously adapted An American Tragedy and Moby-Dick, and his libretto’s invisible stitchwork of compression and condensation is impressive. If the scope of Chabon’s novel—with all its teeming side details of financial, legal, and political machinations, not to mention its annotated tour of New York in the 1940s—is necessarily reined in, Scheer manages to crystallize much of its essence while maintaining a brisk tempo. That impetus is echoed in the insistent rhythms of Mason Bates’s score, whose fusion of live orchestra with prerecorded electronica reflects his wide experience as a DJ and sound designer. The diverse sources, thoroughly interwoven, shift constantly in texture, injecting little jabs of variation even into repetitive rhythms. In an interview, Bates likened the score’s pace to Raiders of the Lost Ark; however the comparison is intended, it does suggest how the music lays down a pulse that seems not so much to underscore as to drive the action.3
The action here encompasses not only what the performers are doing but what every aspect of their surroundings is doing. To the sonic saturation is joined a visual saturation aspiring to replicate the experience of watching an enormous comic book unfold page by page. At one moment the perspective widens, so that a backdrop of a pier at night becomes a splash page occupying the entire visual field; at another, the parallel worlds of Prague and Brooklyn are juxtaposed in contiguous columns; at many others, in a constant readjustment of scale, sliding walls subdivide space into comic book panels of varying size. Separate locations overlap or are superimposed. In the manner of comic book artists like Will Eisner or Jim Steranko, frames are spliced or sliced, expanded or contracted at will. The art envisioned by Joe Kavalier becomes visible in the form of immense two-dimensional projections or, eventually, as actual bodies soaring on wires. Intermingled with all this are the neatly choreographed maneuverings of crowds: the pedestrians, office workers, and gallerygoers of New York, the fugitives and SS squads of Prague. The mood is of constant urgent transition in anticipation of some further surprising tableau.
Stagecraft is sometimes conceived as an added attraction, an intensification or articulation of what is already present in the music drama it assists. In my experience, Das Rheingold or The Cunning Little Vixen in minimally staged concert performances lose nothing of their dramatic force, which may well be enhanced in the absence of peripheral distractions. On the other hand, I cannot now imagine Richard Strauss’s Die Frau ohne Schatten apart from Herbert Wernicke’s Met staging, with its tiered geography of the celestial and earthly realms, or Dmitri Shostakovitch’s The Nose apart from the hyperactive three-dimensional collage into which William Kentridge transformed it. In Kavalier & Clay, directed by Bartlett Sher in collaboration with 59 Studio, spectacle provides something that music and words by themselves could never convey—the purely optical level on which comics wield their most powerful effect. Like the music, the settings are designed to change with the speed of an action movie or a fireworks display, one flashing image rapidly succeeded by another.
The superheroes around whose creation and marketing the story revolves—the Escapist and his female colleague Luna Moth—are seen but not heard. Instead people sing about them, Sam and Joe in a lively duet during which the Escapist takes shape, and then employees of the Empire Novelty Company in a celebratory ensemble when the cousins sell their idea and their careers take off. In one circumstance or another the superheroes continue to be invoked and acted out, while their mute forms take to the air. Their silence keeps them in a separate, not quite touchable realm, necessary compensations for all that the world takes away or has never provided in the first place. For the cousins they are a ticket to celebrity and money in a city that celebrates those things, as Bates underscores with gusts of big band sonorities evoking Artie Shaw or Leonard Bernstein.
The worlds of Prague and New York are the opera’s poles, setting the onset of the Holocaust against the insouciant hustling energy of Manhattan, somber liturgy against upbeat nightclub sounds, the jagged contrast sketched inevitably in broad strokes. Understandably but regrettably the opera omits the Golem of Prague, a more ancient counterpart to comic book heroes and a crucial through line in the novel both as a literal if inanimate presence and as a secret inspiration for the Nazi-fighting Escapist.
The pivotal moment both dramatically and musically occurs at the radio station where an adaptation of The Escapist is airing. It is a culmination of Kavalier and Clay’s triumph, an entry into the magic sound studio that in the 1940s could still stand in for the center of the world, a source of comfort and distraction and urgent information. As the sound effects man works his craft, Sam catches his first sight of the actor who is the real-world embodiment of the Escapist and will later become his lover. In the hermetic studio, the mingled elements—the sound effects, the silent, off-mic byplay of those standing by, the recitation of the comic book dialogue—settle for a few moments into a period coziness, a lighthearted nostalgia for vanished entertainments. The program ends, and Rosa enters to broadcast her appeal for the Jewish Children’s Fund and its rescue ship The Ark of Miriam. As beautifully sung by Pierce, this is a moment of suspension and focus, an aria in the dark that connects the two cities, her voice bringing the war into a space still imagining itself at peace. It is like stepping out of time, but it feels also like historical reality making its incursion into the playland of radio.
This is also the first sustained solo singing thus far, and it introduces a note of melancholy that becomes increasingly predominant as the narrative of overnight success is undermined. After a blowout comic episode at the art gallery where Rosa is holding a benefit for The Ark of Miriam (Salvador Dalí, amusingly played by Efraín Solís, is brought on for a quick slapstick turn), the losses begin to pile up—the deaths of Joe’s parents at the hands of the Nazis, the torpedoing of The Ark of Miriam, Joe’s breakdown, Sam’s brutalization by the FBI—and the comic book flamboyance gives way to a more dark and plaintive mood. In this latter stretch the libretto’s abridgments make themselves apparent. There was not enough room for side developments that might have allowed for more contrast, and as the second act progresses the effect feels almost like a single prolonged threnody of grief and unappeasable longing. Escape, even as fantasy, has left the scene.
English (US) · 