Cunningham’s novel consists of three variations on Virginia Woolf’s novel Mrs. It makes sense that artists in different genres have wanted to adapt The Hours, since adaptation is in its DNA. And it was such a box office success that Peter Gelb, the Met’s general manager, is reportedly planning to bring The Hours back next season for an encore run with the same cast-one result of the Met’s recognition that since the pandemic contemporary works have attracted larger audiences than the standard repertory. It wasn’t just reviewed but reported on and gossiped about, not just by The New York Times but by Variety and Good Morning America. All this helped The Hours become a show business event on a scale few new operas can hope for. It was the operatic equivalent of the movie’s all-star cast, led by Nicole Kidman, Meryl Streep, and Julianne Moore. The production also benefited from its star power: it featured Joyce DiDonato, a leading mezzo-soprano, as Virginia Woolf Renée Fleming, one of the Met’s reigning sopranos for a quarter-century, as Clarissa Vaughan and Kelli O’Hara, a Tony-winning Broadway actress, as Laura Brown. Most of the audience at the Met must have been familiar with the story before the curtain rose-though not everyone, to judge by the scattered gasps that greeted the two big plot twists near the end of the second act.

The Hours made a bigger splash than either of these, in part because it arrived laden with prestige: the book won the Pulitzer and the movie was nominated for nine Oscars.

Opera has been in the adaptation game from the beginning: composers like Monteverdi and Lully plundered classical mythology for plots, and their successors did the same with plays, novels, and most recently movies, as in Marnie (2017) by Nico Muhly and The Exterminating Angel (2016) by Thomas Adès.

Now Kevin Puts and Greg Pierce have adapted it as an opera, which premiered at the Met in November to unusually high interest. The Hours began as a novel by Michael Cunningham in 1998, then found a wider audience as a movie directed by Stephen Daldry in 2002.

The hours michael cunningham review