The Metropolitan Opera opened its 2025-26 season featuring a coproduction with the Jacobs School of Music, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The production opened on September 21 but had its world premiere on the Musical Arts Center (MAC) stage last November. Commissioned by the Met, the production marks the first such partnership between the esteemed opera company and Jacobs.
Abra Bush, David Henry Jacobs Bicentennial Dean of the Jacobs School, and Tom Kernan, Ted Jones Assistant Dean for Artistic Operations, attended the opening to cheer on four of Jacobs’ own as they shone in the spotlight on this historic occasion.
Doctoral student Jonathan Elmore reprised his role from the MAC, while alumnus Steven Warnock tackled a new one, and trombone professor Paul Pollard performed in the pit as part of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra. Alumna Cadie Bryan is covering the principal role of Sarah Kavalier for the production.
Based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michael Chabon, the new opera, by composer Mason Bates and librettist Gene Scheer, tells the story of two cousins in New York during the 1940s—one a refugee from wartime Prague and the other a closeted queer Brooklynite. The pair create “The Escapist,” a comic book superhero who battles Nazis and frees the oppressed.
As a bonus, the student principal casts who performed in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay last season at the MAC traveled to the Met to attend the final dress rehearsal before opening and meet their counterparts in the production. They enjoyed a backstage tour, attended a reception, and met with Melissa Wegner, lead of the Met’s Lindemann Young Artist Development Program and Laffont Competition, as well as Michael Heaston, deputy general manager.
This unique collaboration has offered students a rare opportunity to collaborate on a new production while working alongside the most prestigious names in the business. After the production’s final dress rehearsal, the students also got to reconnect with the artistic and creative team they worked with in Bloomington, including Bates, Scheer, director Bartlett Sher, dramaturg Paul Cremo, Met executive stage director Paula Suozzi, and others.
Elmore and Warnock will perform as part of the cast throughout the production, which runs September 21 through October 11 at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York City.
