An adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel about the creation of a comic-book hero at the outset of World War II struggled to come to life in the company’s season-opening production, directed by Bartlett Sher.
By
Heidi Waleson
Sept. 23, 2025 at 5:22 pm ET
Andrzej Filończyk and Miles Mykkanen PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA
Like many contemporary operas, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Mason Bates, a commissioned work that opened the Metropolitan Opera season on Sunday evening, walks the line between novelty and tradition without embracing either. (Met commissions are typically given their world premieres elsewhere; “Kavalier & Clay” got its tryout in November 2024 at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.) Librettist Gene Scheer distilled Michael Chabon’s sprawling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 2000 into a straightforward, primary-colored plot, losing much of its magical, elliptical atmosphere. Mr. Bates’s music illustrates the story rather than evoking the intense emotional journeys of its two protagonists.
This pair are teenage Jewish cousins. Joe Kavalier (Andrzej Filończyk) has made a dramatic escape from Prague (it is 1939) and taken refuge with his relatives in Brooklyn. A gifted artist, Joe teams up with his writer cousin Sam Clay (Miles Mykkanen) to create a comic-book hero inspired by his exploits: “The Escapist,” who fights Nazis and rescues the imprisoned and persecuted. His goal is to earn enough money to save his parents and sister from Nazi-overrun Prague. “The Escapist” is a wild success; the rescue is not, and Joe’s romance with Rosa (Sun-Ly Pierce) is a casualty.
Meanwhile, Sam tentatively explores his homosexual desires with Tracy (Edward Nelson), the hunky actor who plays The Escapist in its radio version, only to find himself a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Most of this happens in just the first act—overlong at 90 minutes. In Act 2, which spans about three years in 55 minutes, the cousins work their way back from the painful discovery that the creation of an alternative world through art cannot alone solve terrible problems.
Mr. Bates’s strongest moments are the jazz-inflected, uptempo chorus scenes. The show first comes to life at the toy company where Sam is a copywriter, as he and Joe work to sell the boss on the comic-book idea, backed by a spirited ensemble of singing typists. The number’s catchy, repetitive structure (“Dime by dime”) is dramatically juxtaposed with a totally different repeated motif—Joe’s mother and another chorus sing a Hebrew prayer on a train to Auschwitz.
The arias and duets, which are almost always slowly paced and formless, lack that visceral, theatrical punch and do not musically distinguish one character from another. Exceptions are Joe’s lament when he finds out that his parents are dead (its repeated line is “Alone in the dark”) and the bluntness of the Nazi Gerhard (bass-baritone Craig Colclough) who tells the hallucinating Joe, “Bullets are all that matter.” Because of this, Sam’s gay awakening story, set against the Nazis and Holocaust, never comes into emotional focus and just makes the show feel longer. Also unsatisfying are some purely plot-driven scenes, such as a sequence in which Joe rescues the artist Salvador Dalí from a deep-sea diver costume.
The orchestral writing, nicely handled by conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, can be colorful, though the ominous Wagner tubas become predictable after a while and the electronica for which Mr. Bates is best known is barely discernible.
The heroes of the evening are director Bartlett Sher; his set, lighting and video design collaborators 59 Studio; and costume designer Jennifer Moeller, who supply the speed, atmosphere and dramatic build missing in the music. Scenes switch effortlessly from Prague, with its shadowy bridge looming over the Moldau, to a Brooklyn tenement, a busy office, a tony art gallery, and the roof of the Empire State Building. Joe’s first drawings take shape on video screens; later, the Escapist comic-book stories scroll across them. The team dealt especially well with the interlocked scenes of Act 2, set as an ensemble with chorus: A turntable deftly alternated Joe’s experience as a soldier on the Western Front in Europe with life back at home where the comic-book company is making money and Sam and Rosa, in a union of convenience, are raising Rosa and Joe’s child on Long Island.
Mr. Filończyk, making his Met debut, displayed a dark, expressive baritone; it helped contrast the older Joe’s buried trauma and Sam’s yearnings, sung in Mr. Mykkanen’s more open, poignant tenor. Ms. Pierce’s soothing mezzo gave Rosa an anchoring presence; as Joe’s 14-year-old sister, Sarah, soprano Lauren Snouffer, also making her debut, was bright and affecting; and Mr. Nelson was a lively Tracy. Standouts in the large supporting cast included soprano Ellie Dehn as Joe’s mother and Amanda Batista as Helen, a perky radio actress. The Met chorus, directed by Tilman Michael, was excellent in its various incarnations.
The Met has committed itself to presenting several modern operas each season, featuring both its own commissions and pieces with track records in other theaters. It is an important project that has had mixed results so far. “Kavalier & Clay” skews toward the safe, to its detriment. The two contemporary operas that will have Met premieres in April and May—Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” (2021) and Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (2022)—are more adventurous and merit their turns on the country’s biggest opera stage.
AndyManshel.nyc 
Thanks as ever for sharing.
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