'Lincoln in the Bardo' takes a distinctly American grief to the Met stage

A new opera based on George Saunders' Booker Prize-winning novel, Lincoln in the Bardo, opens Monday evening at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York.With its supernatural setting — a realm between life and the afterlife — adapting this book would appear to be a major challenge.

Yet it's one the show's creators have jumped into enthusiastically.Even before Lincoln in the Bardo starts, the audience can sense there's something spooky going on.The chandeliers and lights in the Met's vast auditorium flicker, as if possessed.

The curtain rises and the audience sees a graveyard at night, with a child walking through it.Suddenly, dozens of people rise from the graves.

These are ghosts, who immediately make their unearthly presence known — by playing kazoos."Sixty-five brilliant, trained opera singers playing the kazoo," clarifies Missy Mazzoli, composer of Lincoln's music and the first woman composer in the Met's history to have a world premiere on its stage."I really wanted to start this opera with a sound that signals to the listener that we are not quite in everyday reality — we are in another realm of some sort," she says.

"And also, to signify that this is not gonna be your typical opera."The source material, narrated in Saunders' Civil War-era novel by 166 different characters, is certainly fantastical.After Abraham Lincoln's son Willie dies, the boy is stuck in a liminal space, surrounded by spirits who haven't yet moved on to the next realm.

A grieving, very much alive Lincoln visits the body in the graveyard, while the spirits — who don't realize they're dead — look on."Lincoln in the Bardo, in particular, really lends itself to the operatic stage, in that it's very surreal," Mazzoli says."We have one foot in reality, but one foot very much not.

… And I think that those sorts of stories really come to life on the stage."Librettist Royce Vavrek, Missy Mazzoli's long-time collaborator, has simplified the narrative arc to focus on five of the c...