“I enjoyed the evening very much. Your piece has nothing to do with my movie, it merely has the same story.”
-Ingmar Bergman to Stephen Sondheim, as recounted inFinishing the Hat
The date is May 21st, 2026, and I am sitting in the Luminary Arts Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In front of me is an orchestra, instruments including what you’d see in any given classical piece, but also a DJ turntable. On stage right the principal actors are sitting in chairs, and behind them is a bleacher for the secondary performers and the chorus. They’re packed together so tightly it’s hard to tell if they’re standing or sitting.
The conductor is doing soundcheck. He calls out scenes, pages, measures, bars. The musicians respond at his signal, no delay in response except for the turning of pages. Kamala Sankaram, the composer, sits with her copy of the score and takes notes. I sit and listen. The vocalists, on occasion, throw out a phrase. I know these words. I’ve read these words. But now I’m hearing them sung at me, both in the same context and not. I’m watching Minnesota Opera rehearse their adaptation (tickets available at mnopera.org) ofThe Many Deaths of Laila Starrby Ram V and Filipe Andrade (discussed in a 2023 TCJ article by Ritesh Babu), and I’m wondering how this is going to work.
Every storyteller at some point thinks about adaptation, whether of their own work, or doing it themselves for others. It is in some ways the ultimate tribute; to have one’s achievement recognized by another and transformed into a new form. But adaptation is closer to a roulette wheel than rolling the dice in terms of success. You can make a case for:
-Author involvement (Good: Amadeus.Bad:Tough Guys Don’t Dance).
-Author disinvolvement (Worked out for Cormac McCarthy withNo Country for Old Men.Not so much for J.D. Salinger withMy Foolish Heart).
-Loose interpretation (The Zone of Interestonly focuses on one of the book’s three narrators. Nobody knows what Frank Miller was doing with his adaptation ofThe Spirit, including possibly Frank Miller)
-Total fidelity (Luchino Visconti’s adaptationThe Leopardon one side. James Franco’s entire directing career on the other)
But nothing is guaranteed. Terry Rossio, screenwriter for numerous movies for Disney, summed up the challenge of every adaptation perhaps the most elegantly “Your goal in writing an adaptation absolutely cannot be to’preserve thelm based upon the
This is generally pretty good advice, especially for comics, which are more tricky to adapt then one might think: paneling is not storyboarding, because panels are not meant as tracking or key frames in animation but static images with their own sense of flow. A screen provides a different frame of reference than a page can allow. How many costumes that look magnificent in 4-color ink, for instance, become either dulled by the requirements of live action or, at worse, look like a tacky Halloween costume if they adhere too faithfully? And these are formovies, which are a much closer medium to comics than the stage.
So what would happen when you adapt a visual medium for one that has a much different set of priorities? This was the question I had when I learned of Minnesota Opera’s plans to adapt Ram V and Filipe Andrade’sThe Many Deaths of Laila Starr, which debuts on Halloween Night 2026 at the Ordway Theatre in St. Paul, and the first official operatic adaptation of a comic book ever. I decided to find out.
Full disclosure: I worked at Minnesota Opera for years. This is a fun bit of triopera knowledge primarily comes from classic Bugs Bunny cartoons, asks me questions because they’re still shocked opera is still performed. The most recurring one I get: what exactly makes an opera different from a musical?
I’ve distilled this down to a single line: in opera, as opposed to musicals, the composer is the star of the show. The libretto is there to support the music, rather than carry the story. Change a syllable, change the score. At a certain point, the words don’t matter, and everything is up to the composer, and the librettist must accept this (Tennesse Williams tried to fight this by insisting any operatic adaptation ofA Streetcar Named Desirewould have to use his original script as the libretto. It didn’t turn out as badly as whenThe Simpsonsmade a musical of it, but there’s a reason, adaptation wise, you hear more about the movie). Opera is not as much work for the stage as it is work for the sound. As classical music falls more out of the popular zeitgeist, this leads to more companies retreating more and more to the established big names especially for opera.
All of this is to emphasize how Minnesota Opera is unusual in its commitment to expanding the opera repertoire, having consistently commissioned new operas since their debut 1963-1964 season. The current model for this, The New Works Initiative, pairs composers and writers together with the goal of producing a new work at least once a season. These are not novelties, designed to make an audience feel better about supporting an anachronistic art form. One of its commissions,Silent Night, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and their production ofThe Shiningwas a hit. A graphic novel adaptation, as Minnesota Opera’s director Ryan Taylor explained to me, was perfectly in line with the goals of the program: “Rather than approaching a composer and librettist with an idea already in mind…Mineta [Gandhi, librettist] and Kamala approached us…They thought there would be absolutely no way we’d want to adapt a graphic novel. It was the one the committee unanimously chose.”
Curiously, comics and opera have had a longer relationship than people think. P. Craig Russell famously adaptedThe Ring of the Nibelung, as well as others includingThe Magic FluteandSalome. The Met recently adapted Michael Chabon’sThe Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, his novel about making comics in the Golden Age of the industry. In a rather eerie bit of coincidence, the subject of John Adams’The Death of Klinghofferwas childhood friends with Jack Kirby, a man whose work has been called operatic so much it is borderline redundant. But a reversal of this, a comic being adapted for an opera? This is again, the first official one. But it’s an appropriate choice.
The Many Deaths of Laila Starris a story of change and rebirth. At the beginning of the story, the Hindu embodiment of Death is informed that a mortal named Darius Shah, who will discover how to make immortality possible, has been born, and thus she’s out of a job. Taking exception to being laid off, Death incarnates into Laila Starr, a recently dead woman, and spends the next few decades attempting to track down this mortal in Mumbai, encountering (among others) ghosts, talking crows, and her opposite, Brahma, who brings her back to life each time she dies in her search. In parallel, Darius Shah grows up. People he loves die, ranging from his childhood hero to his best friend to his wife. Each time, Laila and Darius intersect, just for a moment, until finally Darius realizes who the unaging woman he’s seen at key moments of his life is, and what he’s going to do about it.
Laila Starr as a role is originated by soprano Leela Subramaniam, who looks strikingly similar to Andrade’sart. As played by Subramaniam, Laila’s susceptibility to humanity is more emphasized initially than in the graphic novel.
Part of this is a style choice: the gods in their heavenly realm speak rather than sing, (Not even usingSprechgesang; it’s flat-out dialogue, a rarity in opera). When Death becomes Laila, her single-mindedness, due to the way time passes in acting rather than in the frozen moments of a page, becomes downplayed. The moment where Laila first encounters the infant Darius (below) makes up only a few panels, the kind a reader can finish in seconds. On stage, it is an aria in miniature. A long emphasis on the wordtinyto emphasize how much this moment is not.
art from The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (BOOM! Studios, 2022) illustrated by Filipe Andrade
But the staging also makes very different choices than Andrade’s art. Andrade began his career intending to break into animation, and his line and color choices (the latter with the assistance ofInês Amaro)reflects this: prominent body language in paneling, coloring based on contrast and mood. Laila’s hair stretches past her waist, whereas on stage, she’s given a different look, both as a human…
art from The Many Deaths of Laila Starr (BOOM! Studios, 2022) illustrated by Filipe Andrade
An even sharper contrast is the setting, a choice made deliberately by stage designer Mimi Lien (Tony winner forNatasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812). Lien studied architecture, and is very conscious of the requirements of the space. A story that weaves through Mumbai and Goa likeLaila Starrrequires something evocative but minimal, if only to prevent constant set changes. Concept art from her emphasizes negative space as much as anything, to fit every cast member onstage, but to also allow for the airspace to be used. As Lien told me: “we pretty early on decided that it was going to be worth it to spend half the budget actually to do that…to do this kind of slow motion tumble…we need to make an event out of these deaths. And it felt like using the airspace to do that.” Comics, famously, are about people who can fly. But we can only see it on the page, and it is quite another thing entirely when we see Subramaniam up in the air.
A key change in Gandhi’s libretto from the original graphic novel is its depiction of Pranah. The Hindi god of Life, Pranah is the one who brings Laila back after each demise, though the gaps between resurrections get longer and longer. He is Laila’s equal and opposite: he retains his godly form where she loses hers. He is beloved by all existence, she is shunned and scorned. At the end of the story, Laila leaves with him to parts unknown. Are they lovers? It may be, and it also may not. Her choice, with so little interaction with him preceding this, can come off as strange, almost random. But it is Laila’s karma, in the most literal sense, to do so, to live with the Life that has been given to her.
The opera takes a different approach: Pranah is given more time to speak, and comes off less as an amused witness than a desperate friend who perhaps wants to be more. He brings Laila back until he cannot any more, and when she asks him to let her go, he does as she asks. He does not show up again, but the last words of the libretto are “Let go” for this reason. And, like with our own preconceptions of what a work must be, what is essential, everyone involved in an adaptation must also let go, and take the work on its own terms.
A strange thing happens, as the preview continues. The differences, which I had been keeping track of, begin to stop becoming apparent. Not that I cannot tell what is different, but rather that it does not matter. The piece becomes its own work. I am experiencing the show. The same story, but there isLaila Starrthe comic, and there isLaila Starrthe opera. The same story, told in the way its medium needs. It’s up there on stage, in the air, making the most of its music.
The Many Deaths of Laila Starr will run at the Ordway Center for the Performing Arts from October 31st to November 8th.
