Mind control. Murder. A diabolical plot to shanghai the White House and install a Communist puppet. Richard Condon’s knockout Cold War pulp novel The Manchurian Candidate of 1959 lives on in John Frankenheimer’s iconic film adaptation of 1962 as well as Jonathan Demme’s okay remake of 2004, not to mention a smear from Donald Trump at Joe Biden’s Last Stand at the CNN studio in Atlanta on June 27 of this year. “He gets paid by China,” Trump snarled. “He’s a Manchurian candidate. He gets money from China.” And here, hot on the heels of Election Day, comes The Manchurian Candidate, retooled for the opera house by the librettist Mark Campbell and the composer Kevin Puts. These are the creatives whose Silent Night, reenacting the Christmas Truce on the front lines in 1914, copped Puts the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2012. Given the serendipitous political moment, Austin’s premiere run—just two performances—might not meet the demand. Mapping the opera on the Frankenheimer classic, Mark Diamond spells Laurence Harvey as the brainwashed war hero Sergeant Raymond Shaw, with Frederick Ballentine in Frank Sinatra’s role as his brother in arms Captain Ben Marco and Mary Dunleavy (once tops in La Traviata and as the Queen of the Night) taking charge for Angela Lansbury as Raymond’s gorgon mother Eleanor Iselin. —Matthew Gurewitsch