A Cavalier Adaptation

In Michael Chabon’s 2000 novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, one of the first things we learn about Joe Kavalier is that, as a boy in Prague, he had “written the first lines of the libretto for an opera, Houdini, set in fabulous Chicago.” But the artistic tribute he pays to the famous Jewish escape artist ends up taking a very different form. After making his own daring escape from Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, Joe ends up in Brooklyn, where he and his cousin Sammy Clay create a popular comic book about a superhero who can get out of any trap: the Escapist.

Today, when Marvel and DC are multibillion-dollar movie franchises, and graphic novels like Maus and Persepolis are regarded as literary masterpieces, it can be hard to remember just how disreputable comic books used to be. “In 1939 the American comic book, like the beavers and cockroaches of prehistory, was larger and, in its cumbersome way, more splendid than its modern descendant,” Chabon writes, as he describes Sammy showing Joe his copy of Action Comics. “The quality of its interior illustrations was generally execrable at best. . . . Lines grew tentative, poses awkward, compositions static, backgrounds nonexistent.”

This cheap, garish, improvised quality is exactly what Chabon celebrates about comic books. Low standards meant low barriers to access; any Depression-era kid with a dime could buy a comic, and almost any kid with talent and imagination could create one. Jews, in particular, thrived in “the marketplace of ten-cent dreams.” Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay are Chabon’s tribute to teams like Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, who created Superman in 1938, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger, who created Batman in 1939.

What makes Kavalier & Clay one of the great American Jewish novels is the way Chabon uses the comic book business as a symbol of American Jewish destiny. Why did Jews thrive in the US in the twentieth century? Because their dreams were as democratic as the country itself. They knew that a superhero, like an artist or a brain surgeon or a financier, was as likely to emerge from the immigrant working class as from the credentialed establishment—or more likely, since the Jews had more drive and fewer inhibitions.

But it has been a long time since American Jewish stories bubbled up from the bottom of the culture. Superman never won a Pulitzer Prize; in 2001, Chabon’s novel did. And in September 2025, the day before Rosh Hashanah, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay premiered as an opera at the Met, with a score by Mason Bates and a libretto by Gene Scheer.

Was this a vindication of Joe Kavalier’s boyhood dream, or a betrayal? How do you tell a story about democratic art and immigrant ambition in the most aristocratic and refined of genres? An issue of The Escapist, or of Superman, cost ten cents; a ticket to the Met these days is $150 for the balcony, $400 for the orchestra. Superheroes could make their creators—or, more often, their publishers—into millionaires. Commissioning and producing a new opera requires patrons willing to write off millions, since even pricey tickets don’t come close to covering the budget.

The economics reflect the most obvious difference between the genres: comic books are popular, opera is not. That difference has artistic significance too. Popular art needs to have clear, strong, immediate appeal, because it is competing for the attention of people with lots of other ways to spend their time. If it doesn’t grab and hold the audience, they are free to wander off. Elite art counts on an audience that is already deeply invested, and so will be patient enough for the delayed gratifications of subtlety, difficulty, and allusion. Only at certain historical moments is it possible for a genre to win both kinds of audience, like drama in Elizabethan England or the novel (or, to some extent, opera) in nineteenth-century Europe.

Among contemporary composers, Bates has a reputation as a populist: His work is tonally friendly and incorporates electronic and digital effects that feel modern in the concert hall, though they would be unremarkable in pop or movie music. His orchestral pieces often have timely, programmatic themes—the 2011 symphony Alternative Energy has movements about the rainforest and the Fermilab particle accelerator. Bates’s previous opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, dramatized the invention of the iPhone. All this made him seem like a natural fit to write an opera based on a high-and-low, smart-and-popular hybrid of a novel like Kavalier & Clay—a book, he told Met manager Peter Gelb, that has “all the ingredients for a great opera.”

Alas, pretty much all the critics have agreed that the main ingredient the opera lacks is a great score. The New York Times called Bates’s music “obvious,” “unimaginative,” and “nondescript”; New York Magazine added “predictable” and “unmemorable.” These judgments may be too harsh; there are beautiful and memorable moments in the score. But it seems telling that the one I remember best is an aria sung by Rosa Saks, the woman Joe Kavalier falls in love with, as she appeals over the radio for donations to rescue Jewish children from Europe. “Close your eyes, close your eyes, and listen to what I have to say,” she sings, and I actually did close my eyes. Even if I hadn’t, it’s a moment when there’s not much to look at on stage, just the soprano Sun-Ly Pierce standing in front of a vintage radio microphone.

That made it one of the few moments in the opera when the music isn’t struggling for primacy with the visual effects, designed by 59 Studio, which all the reviews agreed were much more interesting. At the performance I attended, the audience thought so too. The first applause of the evening, after half an hour of singing, was elicited by a montage of screen projections showing the development of the Escapist, from Joe’s first pencil sketches to full-color splendor.

It must have been discouraging for the lead singers, Andrzej Filończyk as Joe and Miles Mykkanen as Sam. Both gave strong performances, though they seemed a little too solid and stolid to portray young strivers. But they were fighting an unequal battle. Because the proscenium stage at the Met is so tall and wide, singers are often dwarfed by the sets, even static backdrops of a town square or a throne room. When the visual field is dominated by bright, colorful moving images, the orchestra and singers start to feel like an afterthought.

That is what happened at many key moments in Kavalier & Clay—for instance, when Sammy has his first kiss with Tracy Bacon, the actor who voices the Escapist on the radio, on the observation deck of the Empire State Building during a lightning storm. In the novel, the setting is winkingly cinematic—Tracy picks up a phone and pretends to be King Kong calling Fay Wray. That joke is in the opera too, but here the lightning bolts are IMAX scaled, and the music isn’t.

Whether consciously or not, Bates seems to have accepted the secondary role of his score. Long stretches function like a soundtrack, with ominous pulsations and flourishes that heighten the mood but don’t drive the action. There’s an old joke that no one leaves a theater whistling the set, but with Kavalier & Clay you do—not just because it is so high tech but because the most important moments in the show, the ones that encapsulate its themes most effectively, are seen rather than heard.

At the end of the first act, for instance, Joe learns that the ship bringing his young sister Sarah to safety in America has been torpedoed by a German submarine. Just before the curtain falls, a projection turns the whole volume of the stage into a blue ocean, while Sarah (played by Lauren Snouffer) slowly sinks to the bottom, lowered by invisible wires. The memory of that image returns in the second act, when Rosa creates a superhero named Luna Moth who flies into the air on green wings, reversing Sarah’s fall. It’s a perfect visual expression of the story’s central theme: the way art and imagination are used to compensate for the horrors of history.

What makes Chabon’s novel so interesting is its ambivalence about this use of art. He celebrates the comic book superhero as a response to Jewish powerlessness, as Sammy Clay explains in the novel:

They’re all Jewish, superheroes. Superman, you don’t think he’s Jewish? Coming over from the old country, changing his name like that. Clark Kent, only a Jew would pick a name like that for himself.

Yet the name of the hero Kavalier and Clay create, the Escapist, is a criticism as well as a boast. His mission is liberation, as Sammy explains in an improvised, radio-style introduction: “To all those who toil in the bonds of slavery and, uh, the, the shackles of oppression, he offers the hope of liberation and the promise of freedom!”

But Kavalier and Clay are telling stories about an imaginary rescuer at a moment when actual Jews are being exterminated. In that sense, they are merely indulging in escapism, which is a vice. In the book, Joe is constantly making this accusation against himself. He has only two excuses: He hopes the Escapist’s adventures will inspire anti-Nazi sentiment in America, and he uses the money he earns from the hit comic to pay for Rosa’s rescue mission. When the ship she charters to carry Jewish refugees, the Ark of Miriam, is torpedoed, Joe is forced to confront the truth that his comic has not done any actual good against the Nazis.

In the opera, Nazism is represented by a single character, an SS man named Gerhard who menaces Joe in Prague and then returns in his recurring fantasies about the fate of his family. In a confrontation in the second act, Gerhard dismisses Joe’s art, singing, “Bullets are all that matter.” If the fact that he’s a bass (Craig Colclough) weren’t enough to signal to the opera audience that he’s a villain, this line would do it.

But the truth is that, when someone is trying to kill you, bullets are all that matter—the bullets he’s aiming at you and the bullets you’d better hope you can aim back at him. That is why the Jewish experience of powerlessness in the Holocaust must lead to thinking about Jewish self-defense, and thus about Zionism.

Chabon is well aware of this complex of issues, and Kavalier & Clay addresses them, though indirectly. (He addresses them directly in his next novel, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, a diasporist alternate history.) The middle third of the novel follows Joe’s improbable wartime career as an American soldier in Antarctica, where he ends up getting the opportunity to kill a German—and immediately regrets it. “In seeking revenge, he had allied himself with the Ice, with the interminable white topography, with the sawteeth and crevasses of death.” Chabon’s clear message is that Jews must never use violence, even against their enemies.

This idea is central to the novel’s celebration of American Jewishness. One of the blessings of America for the Jews is that its strength protects us, so we don’t have to incur the guilt and odium of violence, as Jews in Israel do. If this is escapism, Chabon concludes, so much the better, both for America and for art: “Satisfying the desire to escape,” he writes. “As if there could be any more noble or necessary service in life.”

Opera as a genre is not well suited to this kind of theological-political reflection, and Scheer’s libretto departs sharply from the second half of the novel after following the first half pretty closely. Rather than sending Joe to Antarctica, the opera sends him to what a supertitle calls “The Western Front,” where he spends the entire length of World War II, from shortly after Pearl Harbor until he is demobilized. Besides being historically dubious—American soldiers didn’t fight in France until 1944—this presents the opera with a scenic challenge it fails to meet.

For much of the last twenty minutes, a chorus in Army fatigues prowls around the stage, occasionally attempting a synchronized dance move. The passage of years is depicted clumsily in musical terms, too, as Rosa and Sammy in Brooklyn sing phrases like “Back and forth, over and over.” More important, it elides the whole question of art, escapism, violence, and Jewishness, turning Joe into just a homesick American GI.

Finally the opera dashes to a happy ending, as Joe returns home to Rosa and the child he didn’t know they had, named Sarah in honor of his dead sister. Sammy, who has been acting as a surrogate father, is now free to pursue his own life and love, and the opera ends with him heading for the train station, ready for adventure. This hurried denouement is unsatisfying on its own terms and still more so when compared to the complicated and prolonged process of reconciliation in the novel.

The second act of Kavalier & Clay confirms that, despite Bates’s enthusiasm, the novel is not really a good subject for operatic treatment. An opera is a drama, and most of the great operas obey the dramatic unities: The four acts of The Marriage of Figaro take place on a single day, and a one-act opera like Cavalleria Rusticana unfolds practically in real time. Chabon’s novel spans many years and locations, and to keep up, the opera must become an episodic narrative rather than presenting a dramatic action.

Likewise, opera thrives on elemental human passions: love, hatred, jealousy, despair. Kavalier & Clay is a novel of ideas, with a lot of perceptive things to say about American Jewishness and its contribution to American culture—things that can’t really be translated into stage action. They might be partly translated into music, but Bates uses almost no Jewish musical resources in the opera, with the single exception of a chorus of “Ani Ma’amin,” performed by a chorus of Jews on a train to a death camp. The juxtaposition of life and death, art and war, the Old World and the New is the essence of the story, but on stage the moment feels unearned, a dutiful cliche.

Chabon is far less pious. Near the end of the novel, Joe goes to a Queens cemetery to visit the grave of his childhood hero Houdini, whom he once wanted to write an opera about. There “he noticed that someone had slipped a little note into a fissure in the monument, between two stones, then saw other messages salted here and there, wherever there was a seam or a crack.” Of course, this is an allusion to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where for centuries Jews have deposited written prayers among the stones.

Whether Chabon’s image, replacing God with Houdini and Judaism with show business, constitutes a devastating criticism of American Judaism or a tender celebration, I’m still not sure, but I’ve never forgotten it. I doubt anyone will say as much about the opera.