The Met Reprises 'Kavalier & Clay' Season Opener, Adds 4 Performances in February

It’s more than a tad unusual for the Metropolitan Opera to re-stage a show in the middle of its season. But that’s exactly what the Met is doing with its electric new production of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Adapted from Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning historical novel of the same name, Kavalier & Clay opened the Met’s 2025-26 season in September and ran through early October.

If you missed its first run, you have one more chance to see it this winter. A total of four performances have been added on February 17, 18, 20, and 21. Those shows will be sandwiched between Madama Butterfly and Tristan und Isolde in the Met’s lineup, two monumental operas in the history of the art form. At press time, tickets were still available for all four added Kavalier & Clay performances.

Set on the eve of World War II, composer Mason Bates’s opera tells the story of two Jewish cousins who create an anti-fascist superhero they call “The Escapist”—a character they hope will persuade America to join the fight against Nazism.

The scene begins in Prague, where Josef Kavalier, a talented artist, escapes the country and arrives in Brooklyn to team up with his American cousin, Sammy Clay, an optimistic (and closeted) New York City archetype.

As his name implies, the cousins’ creation has a knack for getting himself out of difficult situations while fighting fascism and standing up for the little guy. His heroic exploits are reborn on the Met stage.

Bates’s eclectic score, flecked with electronics and cinematic propulsion, darts between the three worlds of Gene Scheer’s libretto: the shadowy terror of Nazi-occupied Prague, the clamor of mid-century Manhattan, and the saturated panels of comic book fantasy.

The New York scenes feature inflections of jazz and big band; the Prague music is more traditional, darker, and somber. While synthesizers and other electronic instruments are interspersed throughout the score, Bates’s trademark use of electronica is most prevalent as the Escapist performs crowd-pleasing bits of derring-do in the scenes set in the comic book realm.

Director Bartlett Sher’s production, aided and abetted by the vivid set pieces and stage-filling projections designed by Jenny Melville and Mark Grimmer of 59 Studio, uses no fewer than 30 sets, 737 video snippets, and 141 video cues to create three distinct worlds that intersect and collide.

“We treated each world as a character, with architectural forms, skylines, and graphic geometries recurring as leitmotifs that anchor the [story],” 59 Studio says in its production notes. “Our task was to keep the audience oriented across the broad array of scenery in a way that enriched, rather than overshadowed, the narrative.”

“The result is a production that feels timeless and timely, welcoming new audiences while rewarding devoted ones,” the Studio adds, “If someone leaves thinking, ‘I didn’t know opera could feel like that,’ then the work has done what it set out to do.”

The focus on creating work that appeals to a wider range of potential opera-goers has paid off. Not only did the original production sell out its final performances at the Met, but it also attracted new and younger audiences—a key milestone for the historic cultural institution.

The decision to mount a rare mid-season extension was based, at least in part, on data that revealed that 35% of Kavalier & Clay’s audience were visiting the Met for the first time. Equally important, half of the show’s attendees were 50 or younger, and 30% were 40 or younger.

The original cast returns for the February encore performances, including baritone Andrzej Filończyk as Joe Kavalier and tenor Miles Mykkanen as his cousin and writing partner, Sam Clay. The cast also includes soprano Lauren Snouffer as Sarah Kavalier, mezzo-soprano Sun-Ly Pierce as Rosa Saks, baritone Edward Nelson as Tracy Bacon, and bass-baritones Patrick Carfizzi and Craig Colclough as Sheldon Anapol and Gerhard, respectively. The Met’s Jeanette Lerman-Neubauer Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, returns to lead the final performance (February 21), and Michael Christie will make his debut leading performances on February 17, 18, and 20.

The Met also announced that Kavalier & Clay has been added to The Met: Live in HD season for North American audiences. Shot live on stage on October 2, 2025, the show will be screened in cinemas across the U.S. and Canada beginning January 24, 2026. Tickets for those screenings are on sale now.

The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay set out to prove that opera can still surprise, captivate, and reinvent itself for the modern world.

It appears to have succeeded.

Peter Gelb, the general manager of New York’s grandest classical stage, called it “one of the most impressive productions in the history of the Met.”

You have four more chances to see it this winter.