On a cool October Monday, the Peter B. Lewis Theater, situated beneath Frank Lloyd Wright‘s great white spiral at the Guggenheim, became a kind of antechamber to the afterlife. Works & Process, that indispensable impresario of the unfinished, invited Minnesota Opera to lift the curtain, ever so slightly, on The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, the company’s 52nd world premiere, which opens at St. Paul’s Ordway Center for the Performing Arts on October 31. What followed was part seminar, part séance, and wholly delightful: four excerpts, a panel of nine artists, and a roomful of New Yorkers who, by the third excerpt, could scarcely keep to their seats.

From Graphic Novel to Grand Opera: A Mumbai Fable of Mortality

The premise is irresistible. As humanity remains on the brink of discovering immortality, the avatar of Death is summarily dismissed from her celestial post and cast down to earth as Laila Starr, a twenty-something mortal in Mumbai. Her task, insofar as a fired deity can have one, is to find the man destined to make death obsolete—and decide whether to stop him. Writer Ram V, raised in Mumbai and now based in London, and Portuguese artist Filipe Andrade, a sculptor by training, published the tale with BOOM! Studios in 2021, earning Eisner and Harvey nominations and a devoted readership.

Minnesota Opera calls this the first operatic adaptation of a graphic novel, and it’s easy to see why the form suits it. Andrade’s pages already sing, their panels breathing like rests in a score. Comics theorists locate the real narrative in the gutter, the white space between panels; opera has its own gutter in the held breath before an aria.

Composer Kamala Sankaram, an Indian-American sitarist, soprano, and leader of the Bollywood-surf band Bombay Rickey, and librettist Minita Gandhi, a Mumbai-born, Los Angeles–based playwright and actor, secured the adaptation rights in January 2024 through Minnesota Opera’s New Works Initiative—the same multi-season commissioning engine that gave us the Pulitzer Prize–winning Silent Night. Sung in English and Hindi, the score weaves Konnakol, South India’s dazzling art of spoken percussion, together with the emotional architecture of raga and the throb of electronic dance music. Sankaram has described singing in this opera as something distinctively human, making every note Laila sings an act of becoming.

Works & Process: Four Decades of Letting Audiences In on the Secret

None of this intimacy would be possible without Works & Process itself. Founded in 1984 by the late Mary Sharp Cronson and led today by Executive Director Duke Dang, the series has spent four decades proving that process can be equally thrilling as product. It championed Philip Glass when his music was still a provocation, and in 2021 staged New York’s first permitted indoor performances after the pandemic shutdown. Today it funds more than 25 creative residencies a year across seven states, with housing, studio access, and industry-leading fees so that artists may, in its own phrase, create with dignity.

Inside the Creative Process: The Panel

Moderated with genial authority by Ryan Taylor, Minnesota Opera’s President and General Director, the conversation gathered Sankaram, Gandhi, Ram V, and Andrade alongside stage director Mary Birnbaum, choreographer Rohit Gijare, scenic designer Mimi Lien, and costume designer Oana Botez. Their accounts of months of collaboration over continents revealed a production of truly epic scale: some 250 costumes, an aerialist, multimedia soundscapes, and scenery that the panelists, nodding in unison, described as a vertiginous space. One panelist likened the work to an Indian epic, and recorded scenes and costume renderings showed a sophistication that drew us deeper within its world.

The Music: Four Excerpts, One Argument for Being Alive

Then arrived the music, and with it the evening’s argument. Sankaram writes for voices with old-fashioned operatic generosity: tonal vocal lines, often built from insistent, repeated motifs, set above a piano part that ranges from consonance to atonality to dense, clustered harmony. On paper, the pairing might seem incongruous; in the room, the friction seemed electric. Pianist Mario Antonio Marra, head of music at Minnesota Opera, played the reduction with orchestral color and rhythmic bite.

Excerpt #1 – Act V, Scene 2, “Goa”

The evening began near the opera’s end, on the shores of Goa, which Sankaram imagines as a threshold place where deities and humans meet. Soprano Leela Subramaniam (Laila), tenor Omar Najmi (Darius), and baritone Efraín Solís (Pranah) traded lines in a trio of mounting urgency that established the stakes and the sound world at once.

Excerpt #2 – Act V, Scene 1, “Pranah”

The second excerpt was the evening’s most haunting. Pranah, the god of Life, and Laila, Death made flesh, meet in what can only be called a dissonant berceuse—a serenade rocking uneasily over grinding harmonies. Here life and death do not oppose each other so much as cradle one another. Subramaniam’s gleaming soprano floated above Solís’s warm, burnished baritone, and the effect was tender, hypnotic, and faintly unnerving, like a cradle song heard through a haunting dream.

Excerpt #3 – Act III, Scene 2, “Party”

Then the floor tilted. “Party” detonated with pre-recorded techno, live piano, Subramaniam’s soprano, and Gijare dancing his own choreography—a fusion of Kathak precision, Bollywood swagger, and club-floor abandon. The audience, ordinarily so decorous in this temple of modernism, swayed, tapped, and very nearly rose. Here was Laila tasting mortal pleasure for the first time—intoxicating, loud, ephemeral—and the music made us taste it too.

Excerpt #4 – Act IV, Scene 4, “Darius Shah’s House”

The final excerpt brought the evening home. Najmi’s lyric tenor, at once ardent and vulnerable, met Subramaniam in a duet that gathers the opera’s philosophical threads: why life matters, and how death may be the very thing that makes it matter. It left the room in that rare, grateful silence that precedes applause.

Why Death Makes Life Matter

The idea is ancient. In the Katha Upanishad, the boy Nachiketa questions Yama, lord of death, and receives a lesson in how to live. Montaigne argued that studying philosophy means learning how to die; Tolstoy’s Ivan Ilyich discovers life only at its edge. Joseph Kerman held that in opera the music itself must be the drama, and Sankaram and Gandhi take him at his word. Leonard Bernstein liked to remind audiences that music’s meaning lies in what it makes us feel, while Harold C. Schonberg prized composers who renewed tradition rather than merely obeying it. And one recalls Virginia Woolf’s small moth beating against a bright window, whose brief struggle suddenly made the whole of life visible. Laila Starr is that moth and that goddess at once. When Christopher Franklin takes the podium in St. Paul, with the full creative team behind him, Laila Starr will have an orchestra to carry her.

Contact Information, Tickets, and Support

Minnesota Opera — 620 North First Street, Minneapolis, MN 55401 · Patron Services 612-333-6669 · mnopera.org

Ordway Center for the Performing Arts — 345 Washington Street, Saint Paul, MN 55102 · Box Office 651-224-4222 · ordway.org

Works & Process — 155 East 44th Street, Suite 1005, New York, NY 10017 · 212-758-0024 · info@worksandprocess.org · worksandprocess.org

Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (Peter B. Lewis Theater) — 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10128 · guggenheim.org

BOOM! Studios (publisher of the graphic novel) — boom-studios.com

Tickets: Minnesota Opera 2026–27 Season · The Many Deaths of Laila Starr, Oct. 31–Nov. 8, 2026

Support the Arts: Give to Minnesota Opera · Support Works & Process.