Metropolitan Opera Opens Season September 21 With Michael Chabon’s Kavalier & Clay

The Metropolitan Opera is set to kick off its new season on September 21 with a new adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Beginning performances September 21, the production is directed by Tony winner Bartlett Sher, with a score by Mason Bates and libretto by Gene Scheer. It will feature sets, lighting, and video design by 59 Studio, costumes by Jennifer Moeller, sound by Rick Jacobson, choreography by Mandy Moore, and dramaturgy by Paul Cremo.

Baritone Andrzej Filończyk makes his Met debut as the artist Joe Kavalier, who flees Czechoslovakia and arrives at the Brooklyn doorstep of his cousin, aspiring comic book writer Sam Clay, sung by tenor Miles Mykkanen. The singers also include Lauren Snouffer (Sarah Kavalier), Sun-Ly Pierce (Rosa Saks), Edward Nelson (Tracy Bacon), Patrick Carfizzi (Sheldon Anapol), and Craig Colclough (Gerhard).

Maestro Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducts Bates’s score, which incorporates electronic elements and three distinct musical styles: 1940s big band to represent New York City, the Eastern-European folk music of Prague, and techno symphonic music to characterize the comic-book world.

In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, two Jewish cousins invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism just before World War II.