A Comic-Book Crescendo! Kavalier Clay Opens the Met Opera Season

Opera is the realm of heroes: Handel had Hercules, Mozart had Don Giovanni, and Wagner had Brünnhilde, to name a few. So it was fitting that a crusading comic book character opened the Met Opera’s new season last night with a pow. The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay—with music by Mason Bates, libretto by Gene Scheer, and direction by Bartlett Sher—is based on Michael Chabon’s 2000 Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. It tells the epic story of two Jewish cousins in 1940s Brooklyn who create a popular comic as they grapple with the devastation of a war tearing their world apart. A glittering assembly of stars—including Neil Patrick Harris, Julianna Margulies, Christine Baranski, Laverne Cox, Ellen Burstyn, Christopher Abbott, and Sophia Bush—gathered at Lincoln Center for an evening of hero worship.

“We are proudly standing for artistic freedom,” declared Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, on stage before the performance, referring to the recent suspension of late-night host Jimmy Kimmel. Gelb’s remarks brought the audience to its feet, though the follow-up act, New York Senator Chuck Schumer, received a mixed reception. “The arts are under attack!” shouted the senator above a din of cheers and boos.

After a thunderous rendition of the national anthem—a Met opening tradition—the curtain rose. Bates and Scheer’s Kavalier makes lush work of the book’s themes: the despair and horrors of the Holocaust, forbidden love, and the imagining of a world where good triumphs over evil, at least in animation cells. The cousins Kavalier and Clay create a comic book hero, The Escapist, who rescues the oppressed and victimized around the world; his symbol, a shining key. (Yannick Nézet-Séguin, the Met’s exuberant music director, wore a large pin in the shape of the hero’s key.)

Bates’s score—at turns cinematic and electronic, with a pre-recorded synthesizer woven in—beautifully captures the noirish, and occasionally fantastical, mood of the story. Making his Met debut as Kavalier was the hunky Polish baritone Andrzej Filończyk, whose powerful performance, at just 30 years old, promises a bright future on the Met stage.

Once the resounding applause subsided and the curtain fell, guests—including Laverne Cox, in a superhero-evoking black bodysuit and rose-red cape—migrated to David Geffen Hall across the plaza for a late dinner.