This weekend will bring a world-premiere opera to IU. Co-produced by the Jacobs School of Music and the Metropolitan Opera, Gene Scheer and Mason Bates’s adaptation of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer-winning novel “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Nov. 15-16 and Nov. 21-22 at the Musical Arts Center.
The opera centers around two cousins, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, living in New York City during the 1940s. Kavalier, a Jewish refugee from Nazi-run Czechia, is working to raise enough money to bring his family out of danger from the Holocaust to the United States. Clay, a closeted gay 17-year-old, is working to make sense of and come to terms with his identity in a world that shuns and imprisons it. While the characters’ specific struggles diverge, their stories converge over themes of escapism, identity, and loss.
The transportation of these stories to the Musical Arts Center stage has been years in the making. Scheer and Bates’s work to adapt Chabon’s novel began about five years ago with a commission from the Metropolitan Opera. While the work was originally set to debut at the Los Angeles Opera, the company found the technologically complex production too great a financial strain. About one year ago, the Met pivoted its sights to Jacobs as the premiere’s new home.
“We were so thrilled with the music – we thought that it would fit our students’ voices really well, and it’s a really compelling narrative, so we were excited to partner with the Met,” Cathy Compton, the IU Opera and Ballet Theater’s managing director, said.
Though the brand-new opera has been in the works for some time, the production itself – featuring intricate staging, elaborate costumes and two robust student casts – has not. Roles were cast in the spring, and while the student performers have been studying the score since then, the formal rehearsal process has only been underway for the past three weeks.
“This is part of the excitement of theater: figuring out how everything’s going to work out in time for opening night,” Compton said.
Though this expedited staging process – a simulation of the professional opera world – has proven demanding, the creative resources available to the casts of “Kavalier and Clay” have made their whirlwind of rehearsals easier.
“With most operas, the composers of which are long dead, there’s the question of what is the authoritative opinion on this show, or this character, or this style of singing,” Sam Witmer, a second-year doctoral student who will portray Kavalier Nov. 15 and Nov. 22, said. “But we have that authoritative opinion sitting in the room with us in all the rehearsals.”
The ability to work directly with Bates and Scheer, as well as Met dramaturg Paul Cremo, Met conductor Michael Christie, and Tony Award-winning director Bartlett Sher has proven similarly novel and helpful for graduate student Zack Olmoz, who will portray Clay on Nov. 15 and Nov. 22.
“By being able to get so much information and feedback instantly, we can float the idea of changing words, changing rhythms, writing new things into the score,” Olmoz said. “That maneuverability has been wonderful.”
Lacking the reference of previous productions to inform their acting, the student performers in “Kavalier and Clay” have the creative freedom to draw on only their imaginations and personal experiences. This freedom, paired with industry-leading artistic guidance, has bridged the casts of “Kavalier and Clay” to creative growth and an invaluable professional network.
Students haven’t been the only ones benefiting from the process of bringing “Kavalier and Clay” to the MAC stage, though. To Scheer, the work’s librettist, working on the opera’s first-ever production in the university setting has held many advantages.
“The students are incredibly talented, and their great enthusiasm has elevated the whole process — it’s infectious,” Scheer said. “The production team is also learning what it needs to do and re-working certain things in response to watching rehearsals.”
Scheer said this highly collaborative, fluid production process of “Kavalier and Clay” will have prepared Jacobs’ students, part of opera’s future, for what lies ahead in their performance careers.
“No doubt, the performers that are on the stage now, who are young, will be the professionals of the years to come,” Scheer said. “I think part of their learning that they bring to projects that they do in the future will have been honed in some measure by the process of doing this opera.”
Tickets to see “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” are available on the Musical Arts Center website.
