Episode 3: A Comic Book Opera Hits Manhattan

All The World’s a Stage.

This week we’re in New York City.

The Big Apple is arguably the theater capital of the world today. Each year, the city’s hundreds of theaters stage thousands of performances—and most of them are adapted from something.

Theater has been adapting since its birth 2500 in Athens, when Aeschylus adapted Homer’s tales of the Trojan War for the stage.

In recent centuries theater has looked to the novel for stories to adapt for the stage and this month saw one of the most ambitious theatrical treatments of a sprawling American epic: Michael Chabon’s “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.”

The book was published 25 years ago, but its story of two immigrant cousins, one who just escaped Nazi-occupied Prague, who create a comic book character that punches out an infamous dictator on its first cover feels more relevant than ever.

The artist responsible for bringing the Pulitzer Prize winning novel to the stage is composer Mason Bates. Despite Hollywood’s failure over two decades to turn Chabon’s opus into a film, Bates convinced the Metropolitan Opera to adapt it as an opera. They turned to director Bartlett Sher, a veteran Broadway director—who famously mounted “South Pacific” (itself adapted from a Pulitzer winning book) at Lincoln Center.

Early in the opera, Joe Kavalier’s sibling says: “prepare to be astonished!” And Bates and Sher delivered on that promise. The combination of symphonic electronic music and dynamic stagecraft captures the glittering, galloping tone of Chabon’s novel. One of the most thrilling passages is here, a mini origin story of Kavalier & Clay’s creation

“The Escapist”

Like the book, the first half of Bates’ opera moves faster than a locomotive with cinematic set-pieces—like this one, which prompted the opening night audience to burst into applause.

The second half of this staggering story is more elegiac in tone and therefore harder to dramatize.

After the premiere I spoke to Chabon about what he thought and he said, “I toil away on my books working hard to create subtext, and then here in opera, they just say exactly what’s on their minds!”

This is a problem in the second act, when years of time in the book, subtly unearthed in quiet scenes feel like they're all boiled down into one three-minute, declarative song. Prosaic moments in the opera like, this call to mind infamous Met world premiere misfires of the past, where classic literature was turgidly rendered in music; but for the most part, Bates’ vision avoids this fate: its largely entertaining and honors the spirit of the book.

We are only nine decades into our first Superhero Century. Prior to Superman’s arrival on American newsstands in 1938, Greek Gods and heroes ruled Western culture. It's only natural then that operas once written about Hercules and Eurydice are now being written about American superheroes

The Opera “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” continues at the Met through October 11th. The book “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” is available at P&T Knitwear for $21.00.

Tune in next time for another episode of All The World’s A Stage.