On the stage at the Metropolitan Opera, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay stood at drafting tables, animated in word and deed as they gave birth to “The Escapist,” the masked fascist-fighting comic book character at the heart of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” the new opera by Mason Bates.
Squiggles of animation filled the expanse above the stage, the start of a seven-minute visual sequence that moves from the early sketches of the Escapist, to full-color comic book pages showing the character’s exploits fighting the Nazis, to newspaper headlines chronicling the national craze for this new comic hero. There’s an obligatory “BAM!” and a crumbling swastika.
But with all due respect to Kavalier and Clay — and to Andrzej Filonczyk and Miles Mykkanen, the singers who portray them — the real action during this comic-meets-real-life sequence is far from the Met stage. It is at the back of the hall, in a small studio with two windows overlooking the rear orchestra seats. The hideaway is known in Met circles as the switchboard, but for this production, it feels more like the control tower at a busy airport.
There, two lighting technicians and a video operator bring the opera to its full pyrotechnic life. Hunched over banks of consoles, screens and keyboards, they execute a tight script as they manipulate videos, lights, scrims, screens, stage panels and dry ice. Their soundtrack is not Bates’s music — barely audible back here — but the stage manager, Yasmine Kiss, calling out the cues over a speaker.
“Lights and Video 88: Go!
Lights and Video 88. 1: Go!
Lights and Video 88.2: Go!
Auto Cue 13: Go!”
There were seven people crammed into the switchboard the other afternoon, including one controlling the video cues, and two lighting programmers sitting at two boards. (The second one serves as a backup in case the main one fails, in the spirit of the cover singer waiting in the wings.) An old-fashioned telephone console sat on a desk, near a bottle of ibuprofen. Supertitles roll across a small screen at the top of one of the windows; the same as the Met Titles that have been on the back of seats in the hall since 1995. A monitor shows Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the opera.
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