The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Comic books meet grand opera in The Met’s 2025–26 season opener
Client
The Metropolitan Opera
Location
New York, USA
Collaborators
Indiana University Jacobs School of Music
Sector
Theatre & Live Performance
Services Provided:
Design
Architectural & Theatrical Lighting Design
Production Design & Set Design (live/theatrical)
Immersive Media Design
Opening the 2025–26 season, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, set shortly before the outbreak of World War II, traces the tale of two Jewish cousins who invent an anti-fascist superhero and launch their own comic-book series, hoping to recruit America into the fight against Nazism.
To realise this ambitious rendition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the Met has chosen 59, a Journey studio, as its sole partner for set, lighting, and video design – a rare step for the company. This unique collaboration ensures a unified creative vision across disciplines, giving the performance the cinematic scope and precision demanded by a story of this magnitude.
Performances will run from September 21 to October 11, 2025. Tickets available here.
“In my career at the Met, which has now spanned 20 years, one of the most exciting, creative partnerships has been with 59 […] In the case of Kavalier & Clay, to create one of the most impressive productions in the history of the Met.”
We wove together new interview footage of Ed Sheeran reflecting on the journey behind the tracks with playful animations echoing his distinctive visual style, creating a narrative that felt both personal and larger than life.
The staging is built around three distinct worlds. First, Prague under Nazi occupation, a monochromatic landscape that reflects the period’s foreboding.
Second, 1940s New York at its most fabulous – a saturated comic-book riot of jazz, neon, and color.
Third, the realm of imagination itself, rendered in line-drawn compositions and rich color imagery that honors the early language of comic books.
Kavalier & Clay moves through 25 locations across these three worlds. Our task was to keep the audience oriented across the broad array of scenery in a way that enriched, rather than overshadowed, the narrative.
We treated each world as a character, with architectural forms, skylines, and graphic geometries recurring as leitmotifs that anchor the narrative. Video extends the built set and stitches transitions in real time, while lighting adds depth and signals time of day. Graphic cues drawn from comic panels guide the eye, allowing the stage to be read with clarity from every seat.
Our production process began with scale model-box projections and then progressed to full-scale mockups and previsualization sessions. We iterated with illusions, sound and lighting to ensure visual cues carried narrative weight rather than being spectacle for spectacle’s sake. Techniques drawn from Broadway and immersive experience design helped us modernize the visual language while honoring the craft traditions of opera.
By letting our contributions support rather than overwhelm the story, we built a clear, emotionally precise world that serves the singers, Gene Scheer’s libretto, Mason Bates’ score and Bartlett Sher’s direction.
The result is a production that feels timeless and timely, welcoming new audiences while rewarding devoted ones. 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 Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay has become one of the Met’s most successful contemporary premieres, with sold-out performances across the show’s run. Beyond box office success, Kavalier & Clay attracted a new generation of opera-goers, with over a third attending the Met for the first time and half aged under 50, marking a major step in expanding their reach. Its ambitious integration of video, light, and live performance reaffirmed the Met’s reputation for innovation on a grand scale, with 30 sets, 737 video snippets, and 141 video cues, proving that opera can still surprise, captivate, and reinvent itself for the modern world.
Results
27,000
Projected Ticket Sales
140th
Season Opening at The Met
★★★★
The Times
★★★★
Financial Times