THE NEW YORK TIMES MISSES ITS MOMENT AT THE MET'S "KAVALIER AND CLAY"

When the Metropolitan Opera chose to open its 2025-26 season with The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, they must have felt it was a risky move. The brand-new, sweeping, three-hour adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about two Jewish comic book makers who invent a superhero to fight the Nazis in World War Two had only played at Indiana University, as the co-producing LA Opera had canceled what was to be its debut run due to financial constraints. The top brass decided not even to give it a slot in the “Met in HD” series, which broadcasts the operas in movie theaters around the world. So when The New York Times responded to its grand opening with the headline “A ‘Kavalier & Clay’ Opera Doesn’t Meet Its Moment,” it seemed like a potentially serious hit to the Met’s recent ambitious, financially perilous effort to introduce as many as six new operas each season. However, after that review the full multi-week run of the opera nearly sold out every night in the Met’s cavernous 3,800-seat auditorium, and now, after I was finally able to see the opera last night in my local movie theater, I can say it seems quite clear it’s the New York Times that missed its moment.

It turns out Kavalier and Clay is the most thrilling and original new opera in years, and audiences would appear to agree. In addition to the movie theater run, the Met took the almost unprecedented step of adding a second run in the New York opera house in during the month of February, when the Met is usually dark. The hit comes just in time for for the Met, which announced last week it is slashing jobs and operas next season as a result of financial challenges despite taking what the Times has called desperate steps in the last few years, using up $120 million of its $217 million reserve fund in just two years and launching a controversial collaboration with Saudi Arabia in which the Met will perform there in exchange for investment in the company.

Kavalier and Clay is not perfect, and as others have noted it does not solve the art form’s long drought in melody. Composer Mason Bates writes better for the orchestra than he does for the voice, with only a few soaring arias that contribute to the art form’s storehouse of great melodies, and yet he has written a riveting orchestral score that excitingly combines electronic music with the symphonic and often soars melodically, particularly in the final scene. The score, which put new-music-loving conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin absolutely in his element, makes great use of bass and brass, with what Mason calls “Wagnerian tubas” nestling aside a unique application of mandolin. Barone complained that the opera draws too much from Danny Elfman’s scores for Tim Burton's Batman and Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, but I found it fun to see an opera composer finally using the melodic advances that have occurred in film music in the last century rather than holding his nose at them. Orchestras around the world have been reckoning with how important and meritorious the contributions to classical music of composers like John Williams and Elfman have been, routinely holding days when the orchestra performs the scores while the movie plays in the orchestra hall. But operas have remained strangely old school on the subject even as observers lament that the art form has never recovered from Puccini’s death more than 100 years ago, perhaps because “Nessun Dorma” was the last sort of hit tune in opera.

Barone wasn’t excited by Bates’ innovations; he called the score “almost always obvious.” If this reads more like a review of the Times review than of the opera, it’s a little bit personal: The entertaining, well-written review threatened to keep me from seeing this opera at all, as I tried but was unable to make a trip to New York work in the fall. I’m thrilled that the Met has overcome any impact of Barone’s verdict that the opera is “superficial.”

The alleged superficiality of the opera is, he alleges, rooted in what I find to be a brave and triumphant libretto by Gene Scheer. Sweeping and novelistic, it avoids falling into the trap of trying to repeat the formula of the Puccini era, in which stories were generally boiled down to a myopic focus on a single love triangle, ignoring all the other fascinating historical or thematic material that surrounds the core story. Scheer’s work reminded me of a similarly novelistic libretto on this order, Andrea Chenier, which played the Met in HD series last month. But Barone found it didn’t do justice to the sprawling 600-page novel that inspired it, finding it too simple but somehow complaining that operas are best when they are simple. “Like a skipping stone,” he wrote, “Bates’s adaptation bounces across Chabon’s novel while never really plunging into it, for a treatment that is both too much for opera and not enough: too much plot, not enough transcendence.” “Both too much and not enough” is a hard note to execute. Barone’s introduction read:

“Opera benefits from simplicity. It is an art form of elastic time, of actions and emotions compressed and stretched to elevate drama to something more like a dream.

Because of that, plots tend to be straightforward, making room for the music to add complication and transcendence. Wagner’s four-part, epic “Ring” may run more than 15 hours, but it could be summarized in just a few minutes.

Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is not simple. Its more than 600 pages teem with World War II-era action and lofty themes about Americanness, Jewishness, love, death and, above all, pop culture’s ability to change lives. This is the stuff of fiction that aspires to literary greatness.”

I’m in agreement about the greatness of the novel, which I read almost a quarter century ago, but every one of the themes he implies didn’t make it into the opera in fact did: Americanness, Jewishness, love, death, and pop culture’s ability to change lives. It is true that there were themes from the novel that did not make it, such as its critique of capitalism’s treatment of Kavalier and Clay, a not-so-subtle commentary on the way Superman’s creators Seigel and Schuster were underpaid, locking them out of the massive profits their hero generated. Similarly, the opera cut the book’s exploration of the comic industry’s initial reluctance before America entered World War Two to have a superhero explicitly fighting Nazis. In this version, the comic book is greenlit right away with its superhero clubbing Hitler on the cover. Both themes could be touched upon quickly in the adaptation and would only require a few short added lines. But Barone doesn’t mention these themes, and everything he seems to miss is done brilliant justice by Scheer. In fact the libretto was so breezily conversational that despite my scouring of the score for melody I was surprised to find I often simply forgot the characters were singing. I don’t remember having that experience in an opera house before.

The cast sang Bates’ score ably, though I did find it somewhat hard to adjust to the two leads, as they are so much larger physically than I imagined, and older than they are written to be in the book. Opera fans, of course, are used to heavy leads, as the discipline benefits from physical heft, and it doesn’t usually bother me; I like that a different body type is celebrated in opera than the kind that gets all the attention elsewhere. But I heard an audience member near me scoff when in act two a dirty cop calls Clay a “small guy.” That’s what Sam is in the book, but not in the opera. Both baritone Andrzej Filonczyk (Joe Kavalier) and tenor Miles Mykkanen (Sam Clay) acted their roles well and sang proficiently.

Lest we resign ourselves entirely to operatic leads who don’t fit the physical mold, however, we can rejoice in the vibrant performance of Edward Nelson as Tracy, a well-built and slim actor who in the story plays Kavalier and Clay’s superhero the Escapist on radio and film. I happened to catch Nelson in a brilliant production of Die Fledermaus at the Opera Theatre of St Louis this summer, and I remember wondering how a “singingactor” (as they are cumbersomely called by some critics) had managed to look so good for so many parts, be so perfectly built, and have such great acting and comedic timing skills and yet not be seen regularly at a house like the Met. Now he has.

The book is a little short on female energy, and Scheer responded by transforming Thomas, Joe Kavalier’s brother in the novel, into a sister. Lauren Snauffer plays that part excellently, with an ageless quality that manages to capture the look and feel of what it’s like to be a precocious 14-year-old. Meanwhile as Rosa, the love interest first for Joe and then for Sam, Sun-Ly Pierce also looked the part beautifully.

The real star of the show, however, is director Bartlett Sher, who has turned out perhaps the single best-directed opera I’ve seen from the Met. Ably handling a real challenge with brilliant visuals and style, Sher uses Studio 59’s brilliant use of projected animation, as well as the constantly shuffling and reshuffling set pieces, to such great effect that one wonders if the the days of the giant met sets that need 45 minute intermissions to change could be – if we wanted them to be – a thing of the past.

In the end, this exciting contribution to the art form ends up in the same conversation the operas usually do. The Met has openly sided with those who feel the art form is not performing in the same league as it was a century ago. “After Puccini, opera started slipping from its creative peak,” Met artistic director Peter Gelb wrote in an Opinion piece in the New York Times in 2024. “Geniuses like Strauss and Janáček followed in the early decades of the 20th century, but with a few exceptions, the second half of the 20th century produced little truly popular opera; composers turned inward, with experimental, sometimes atonal compositions that didn’t appeal to large audiences.”

To those concerns, Barone offers the following closing criticisms: “Bates’s music can be skillful, even enjoyable. But it is also forgettable, in the way that much contemporary opera at the Met has been since the company re-emerged from the pandemic.” He refers to the Met’s recent “house style” of “toothless scores that ask so little of their audiences, they would just be background entertainment anywhere else. That’s not what opera is.”

But opera is an expensive and challenging art form in which to produce new works, especially in post-pandemic financial times, and as the New Yorkers’ Alex Ross has pointed out it takes several failures to produce one success artistically. This is especially true after several decades of almost no new operas at the highest level: opera writing used to be a job, and now it’s a gig. When The Met turns out something as sharp and brilliantly colorful as The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, it deserves praise. Thank goodness audiences have stepped forward to recognize what the Times missed: potentially even a new moment in the art form.