The opening-night gala for the Metropolitan Opera’s new season may be the last place you would expect to find yet another sign that Zohran Mamdani is on a glide path to City Hall. The audience is older, more affluent, and, one can safely speculate, less socialist than most audiences for the performing arts in New York. It is the very definition of well-heeled uptown Manhattan’s political and cultural status quo. Yet it turns out that even at the Met — yes, the Met, where Franco Zeffirelli’s warhorse productions of La Bohème and Turandot are both in repertory this season — there are New Yorkers clamoring for change.

Such, for me at least, was the takeaway from the scene that unfolded at the September 21 premiere of the new opera inspired by Michael Chabon’s Holocaust-haunted novel The

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