Is ‘The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay’ the Opera We Need or Just the One We Deserve?

September 27, 2025Uncategorized

An actor in a blue superhero costume performs a kick on stage in front of a giant comic-book-style projection showing the hero punching a Nazi officer, while other actors dressed as Nazis point at him.An actor in a blue superhero costume performs a kick on stage in front of a giant comic-book-style projection showing the hero punching a Nazi officer, while other actors dressed as Nazis point at him.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay opens with a magic trick; a young man leaps into the Moldau in a straitjacket with only eighty seconds to escape. But, in a bit of dramatic sleight of hand, the real nail-biter is happening back on the riverbank, where a band of SS thugs come upon his sister, demanding her papers. She, too, narrowly slips away. These various forms of escape, from the stylized to the real, encapsulate Mason Bates’s new opera, an adaptation of Michael Chabon’s 2001 novel, which took home a Pulitzer Prize. (Bates’s first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs with librettist Mark Campbell, looks at the rise of the tech giant in a circular fictionalized narrative that eats itself like an ouroboros.) For Kavalier and Clay, Bates turns to a pair of fictional boy geniuses, two teenage cousins who invent an anti-fascist superhero called The Escapist. Unlike the increasingly power-mad Steve Jobs of his first opera, the two young men at the center of this opera are very clearly the good guys. Josef “Joe” Kavalier, a refugee from Nazi-occupied Prague with a love for Houdini, and his cousin Sam Clay, a Brooklynite whose early battle with polio has left him in a leg brace, find an instant bond and a lucrative creative partnership after Joe comes to live in the Clays’ apartment. Together, they create their answer to Superman: The Escapist. He doesn’t fly, or shoot lasers; instead, he liberates the oppressed with his golden key and punches Nazis—literally. As their creation launches the cousins to stardom, both Kavalier and Clay fall in love: the former with an artist and activist named Rosa, who is fundraising for the Ark of Miriam, the latter with the actor who voices The Escapist. By the end, each man must choose to stop running from themselves and to live authentically.

Gene Scheer condenses Michael Chabon’s novel with great economy. While this leads to some clichés in the writing, the final product is balanced and dramatically compelling. What emotional stakes Scheer establishes in the first act, he pays off methodically in the second. It is as satisfying as any Marvel movie. Bates’s music is similarly consumable, filled with variety and energy. The score combines orchestra with synthesizer and electronics, resulting in an animated—and sometimes overloud—swirl of sounds with a driving rhythmic pulse. A plucky mandolin accompanies the Prague scenes, and rubbery synth adds an edgy heartbeat to the rising action of the first act. In other scenes, Bates turns the Met Opera Orchestra into a swing band, a move that was less successful at first but grew on me. Bates also has a welcome grasp for vocal writing; more than one scene soars with lush melodies, and he shows his singers off to advantage.

Kavalier and Clay isn’t groundbreaking, either in its dramatic structure or its score, but it is eminently competent and entertaining. Like the superhero comics that inspired its source text, there are plot points you can see coming at you faster than a speeding bullet and some schlocky lines. But the execution is so lively, the emotions so clearly drawn, and the characters so lovable that what could be eye-roll-inducing is heartwarming instead. It takes advantage of the grand opera format and puts the more filmic qualities of Bates’s writing to perfect use. Operas are shot through with tropes and highly stylized actions; comic books are a better fit than one might expect.

<img decoding="async" class="lazyload size-full-width wp-image-1583232" src="data:image/gif;base64,R0lGODlhAQABAAAAACH5BAEKAAEALAAAAAABAAEAAAICTAEAOw==" data-src="https://observer.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2025/09/image6_2a657f.jpg?quality=80&w=970" alt="An actor wearing an open shirt and mask raises one arm dramatically on stage in front of a crowd of men in mid-20th-century clothing, with balloons and stage equipment visible behind him." width="970" height="646" data-caption='Edward Nelson as Tracy Bacon. <span class=”lazyload media-credit”>Photo: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera</span>’>An actor wearing an open shirt and mask raises one arm dramatically on stage in front of a crowd of men in mid-20th-century clothing, with balloons and stage equipment visible behind him.

As with big-budget films, the effects are everything here. Bartlett Sher’s production is a delicious marvel of technical theater. One gets the sense that all the stops have been pulled out, from the dynamic projections that show us Kavalier’s drawings to the scrims that narrow in and out to capture our characters within comic panels of their own to the impressively seamless transitions between settings both real and imagined. All of this stage magic comes from Studio 59, a company that does both theatrical productions and large-scale “activation”-type events for corporations. The first act alone moves from the Charles Bridge to a Brooklyn bedroom to a downtown factory to the Prague streets to a recording studio to an art gallery to Pier 39 and, finally, to the top of the Empire State Building, all rendered through a combination of practical sets and projected settings—while also showing us the comics themselves. The first act is relentlessly dynamic, moving swiftly and stylishly through the cousins’ collaboration and their stratospheric rise to fame, interspersed with the horrifying scenes back in Prague. The New York scenes are in color, while Prague is rendered almost entirely in black and white. The second act is slower by comparison—only moving from New York settings to the Western Front to Long Island—but retains much of the momentum.

The cast has both the energy and polish to meet the production. Met newcomer Andrzej Filończyk made a strong impression as Joe Kavalier, delivering an emotive, rich baritone and an absorbing dramatic performance. Miles Mykkanen, adorable and compelling as the excitable wise-ass Sam, had a rigorous, nasal tenor that mellowed significantly as his character matured. They are well-matched as an odd couple. As Rosa Saks, Joe’s eventual lover, Sun-ly Pierce had a rich, somewhat chilly mezzo-soprano that gave her character a welcome seriousness, even as she charmed as a plucky activist and artist in her own right. Soprano Lauren Snouffer, as Joe’s little sister Sarah, brought a knife-sharp sound and energy to her young character. She took a moment to settle vocally, but as she did, we were treated to some more warmth. Suave baritone Edward Nelson lent both a supple sound and dancer’s grace to Tracy Bacon, the voice of The Escapist in radio plays and Sam’s lover. A gay party scene in Act II saw him singing a saucy chorus of “we love Dick”—Dick Johnson, that is, a politician whose arrest becomes Sam’s downfall as well. Patrick Carfizzi, opera’s greatest ‘hey, it’s that guy,’ gets a nice feature here as Sam’s boss, Sheldon Anapol. Carfizzi is so effortless in these character roles that it’s easy to forget what a fine singer he is, but it is a treat to watch him ham it up with an entourage of secretaries.

A man in a white vest and bow tie holds a newspaper with a shocked expression while a woman in a red jacket touches his shoulder, surrounded by people in 1940s-style hats and coats.A man in a white vest and bow tie holds a newspaper with a shocked expression while a woman in a red jacket touches his shoulder, surrounded by people in 1940s-style hats and coats.

In the background of this stylized opera is a fairly serious question: what power does art have in the face of fascism? For Joe, art is a way to think through his experiences, to draw himself out of corners, but he’s also tormented by his own imaginative powers; some of the most heart-wrenching scenes show Joe envisioning the fates of his parents and sister in terrible technicolor. Sam Clay, the writer of the duo, theorizes art as a way to see “the world as it could be.” (Here, librettist Gene Scheer recalls an idea from Man of La Mancha; in that show, another dreamer proclaims that it might be “maddest of all to see life as it is, and not as it ought to be.”) As the name of Kavalier and Clay’s creation underlines, art can also be an escape. Not just from horrifying world events and trauma and, for some lucky artists, an escape from poverty, but also from the people who need us. Escapism cuts both ways. It’s not very subtle, either in Chabon’s novel or in Scheer’s libretto, but it is a worthy question and one the opera takes seriously. In the end, the opera leans hardest into the broad optimistic possibilities of art, even as the worst happens to our characters and their loved ones. Joe’s parents don’t escape, nor does his sister. Sam is sexually assaulted, and his lover is killed on the Western Front. Despite all this, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay is full of comedy, sometimes zinging between laughter and weeping with astonishing speed, and it ends on notes of hope and connection. If only the Met sold huge buckets of popcorn! This has blockbuster appeal.

And if only I could end my review there. Is this opera worth seeing? Certainly. It is a tidy, colorful production with a strong cast and engaging characters. But this opera, for all its interest in art versus fascism, can have only a superhero movie’s kind of political critique—right-minded but vague, its tropes easily co-opted by the very enemies it seeks to vanquish. Kavalier and Clay is also an escape back into a distinctly American mindset, that of the superhero-artist-capitalist, the individual who can save themselves. It might be too tidy, too slick, too candy-colorful. I find myself thinking about a moment before the opera started. Senator Chuck Schumer appeared amidst a flurry of booing to introduce the opera, reminding us that the “arts are under attack.” As Schumer spoke, more than one audience member shouted “Do something!” Well? Fascism is knocking on our doors, and there’s no golden key to be found.

A soldier in World War II uniform stands face to face with a young woman in a blue dress who reaches up to touch his forehead, as a chorus of people in striped prisoner uniforms and military gear stands in the background.A soldier in World War II uniform stands face to face with a young woman in a blue dress who reaches up to touch his forehead, as a chorus of people in striped prisoner uniforms and military gear stands in the background.

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