Vittorio Grigolo and Kristine Opolais in a scene from 'La Bohème.' Metropolitan Opera/Associated Press

Classical music's No. 1 news story is the plight of the Metropolitan Opera, whose general manager, Peter Gelb, is facing the possibility of a crippling strike. For that reason, what he said in a recent interview deserves to be quoted at length: "Grand opera is in itself a kind of a dinosaur of an art form…. The question is not whether I think I'm doing a good job or not in trying to keep the [Metropolitan Opera] alive. It's whether I'm doing a good job or not in the face of a cultural and social rejection of opera as an art form."

Is that buck-passing defeatism, or a fair appraisal of the state of American opera?

Consider what Mr. Gelb said in a later interview, this one with the BBC. Asked about the long-term effects of the Met's much-ballyhooed movie-house simulcasts on audience development, he replied that "75% of [the audience members] are over 65, and 30% of them are over 75…. How can we possibly hope to create new audiences for this art form if we are not introducing them or educating them?"

At the Met, such questions still make sense. It is, after all, a 3,800-seat house whose average ticket price is a whopping $156, whose new productions are often pointlessly glitzy and whose choice of repertoire is conservative to the point of stodginess. Of the 26 works scheduled for this coming season, only three were written after World War I.

Peter Gelb Getty Images

But many critics believe that American opera elsewhere is entering a new golden age. "American—and new American—opera has become commonplace all over the land," says Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times. "The art form is not standing still. It's growing, uncontrollably, by leaps and messy bounds." And other opera executives have distanced themselves from Mr. Gelb's pessimistic remarks. One of them, Keith Cerny, general director of the Dallas Opera, says that his company's simulcasts, which are beamed into a nearby football stadium, are reaching a much younger audience: "Only around 20% of [Dallas Opera's] simulcast audience is 65 or older…and 60% is younger than 55." As for Houston Grand Opera, it sold 92% of its available seats last season, and is about to post its fourth consecutive balanced budget.

I don't know anybody in the opera business who isn't worried sick about how best to reach out to underpaid millennials who were suckled on the new on-demand pop culture, which supplies them with cheap, unchallenging amusement around the clock. Many of them inevitably see old-fashioned grand opera as hopelessly unhip. But anyone who gives it a try nowadays is in for a surprise. A growing number of U.S. companies, including Dallas and Houston, are jumping on the new-and-unfamiliar-opera bandwagon, and doing so without busting their budgets.

I should admit I have a horse in this race: I've written the librettos for three operas, one of which was premiered by Kentucky Opera, a company that started presenting "contemporary operas by modern composers that speak to the American experience" and "brilliant, yet less often performed, operas composed by the masters" after its standard-rep ticket sales started dropping. On the other hand, Mr. Gelb also believes that there's no alternative to innovation: "The answer is not in simply playing 'La Bohème' to death… That is a certain recipe for losing the audience altogether."

That said, Mr. Gelb would surely hasten to point out that innovation for its own sake is no guarantee of box-office success, as the Met discovered yet again when "Two Boys," a newly commissioned opera by Nico Muhly, tanked last season. The trick is to remember that you don't necessarily have to do new operas in order to draw a younger crowd. One reason why Shakespeare's plays remain so popular is that they're now regularly presented in updated stagings with a contemporary flavor. Eric Tucker's delightful modern-dress Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of "The Two Gentlemen of Verona," the subject of one of this week's theater reviews, is a prime example of this approach.

"La Cieca," a pseudonymous opera blogger whose recent posting "Turn the Met Around" on the website Parterre Box kicked up a well-deserved fuss, said it best: "Endless runs of 'Aida,' 'Bohème,' and 'Carmen' will have everyone in the doldrums…. The next few seasons have to include experiments in terms of venue, timing, pricing, and repertoire to see what brings in the new audience the Met needs and deserves."

At its best, no art form is more thrilling than grand opera, yet none is at greater risk of following the dinosaurs down the cold road to extinction. The New York City Opera was forced to close its doors last year after seven decades of introducing nonrich New Yorkers to big-house opera. That could happen to the Met, too, unless Mr. Gelb—or his successor—takes a searching look at the company's artistic policy.