Hoping to attract new audiences and reshape its repertory, the Metropolitan Opera has in recent seasons invested heavily in new American works. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Mason Bates and Gene Scheer’s adaptation of Michael Chabon’s celebrated, multi-layered novel, may be the Met’s most audacious bet so far. The result is a production of extraordinary visual invention strapped to a score that seldom ventures beyond the predictable. As an event it impresses; as a new cornerstone for the repertory, it falls short.
Much of the opera’s weakness stems from Gene Scheer’s libretto. Chabon’s sprawling novel unfolds across multiple threads, from Joe Kavalier’s escape from Prague and the trauma of wartime exile to the exuberance of the comic-book boom, and from the anguish of queer repression to the cultural and personal disillusionments of postwar America. In compressing these threads into a two-act frame, the adaptation favours broad strokes and tidy resolutions. Characters often sing phrases shaped more for vocal convenience rather than dramatic truth, smoothing over the jagged textures of trauma, desire and ambivalence that animate the book. The result is narrative clarity at the expense of the characters’ evolving emotional development.
Like the libretto, Bates’ score favours immediacy and accessibility at the cost of complexity. His idiom is tonal and eclectic, weaving luminous orchestral textures with swing-inflected rhythms and subtle electronic accents. Voices ride comfortably over the ensemble, which in turn moves with cinematic momentum. Bates also differentiates between the opera’s narrative episodes. Prague is cast in darker, Eastern-European sonorities, with brooding harmonies and hints of Ashkenazy chant. New York, by contrast, emerges in brassy vitality tinged with jazz, capturing the city’s bustle and swagger. The Escapist’s world bursts with orchestral brilliance, creating an atmospheric effect. Lyric episodes that might have drawn the drama inward – Rosa’s scenes above all – tend to resolve into easy consolation instead of tension. Comic-book interludes sparkle with verve, but in the opera’s more intimate struggles the music falls back on familiar harmonic patterns rather than opening new expressive ground.
A cohesive cast, strong even in its many supporting roles, instead gave the evening its dramatic focus, shaping the main characters with a depth the libretto seldom provides. Andrzej Filończyk’s Joe Kavalier combined a resonant baritone with a physicality that made Joe’s mix of grief and restless drive fully believable. Miles Mykkanen brought tonal brightness and crisp diction to Sammy Clay, suggesting both outward assurance and inner constraint. Their partnership on stage conveyed the fragile balance between ambition and vulnerability that underpins the opera.
As Rosa, Sun-Ly Pierce offered lyric warmth and poise, her phrasing lending dignity to a role that risked reduction to cliché. Her duet with Sammy was especially affecting in its restraint. Edward Nelson sang Tracy with energy, though the role’s brevity left little chance to leave a lasting mark. Yannick Nézet-Séguin drew polish and momentum from the orchestra and chorus, sustaining color in Bates’ more extrovert passages and lending weight to its moments of reflection.
Bartlett Sher’s production is the outstanding element in this first new staging of the Metropolitan’s season. Working with 59 Productions, he creates a visual world that moves fluidly between contrasting realms. Prague appears in austere grey tones, its streets and interiors etched in shadow to evoke menace and loss. New York is drawn in bustling interiors and period detail, grounding the narrative in its historical moment. The Escapist’s world erupts in vivid projections, its saturated palette filtering the story’s tragic undertones through a lens of fantasy. Smooth transitions among these spheres are achieved through shifting screens that open up or narrow the stage space, as projections redefine the surfaces with striking fluidity. At the same time, the three worlds are allowed to intersect and overlap. The most striking instance comes in a surreal vignette at a New York art exhibition, where Salvador Dalí appears in an underwater diver’s suit and nearly suffocates until Joe Kavalier rushed to free him from his helmet. The scene recalls Joe’s leap from Prague’s Charles Bridge in the opera’s first tableau, when he rehearses wriggling free from a straitjacket while underwater.
Despite its limitations, Bates and Scheer’s Kavalier & Clay succeeds in evoking Chabon’s novel’s central paradox: that art offers the illusion of freedom even as it confronts us with the weight of what cannot be left behind or escaped. The opera’s survival in the repertory might depend less on its ingenuity than on the degree to which its themes of freedom and constraint continue to strike a lasting chord with audiences.
