Right here’s the pitch: countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will carry out Marriage of Figaro at Little Island. He’ll sing all of the components. Nevertheless will he do it?
The reply is that he doesn’t do it alone. Whereas the title card reads “Anthony Roth Costanzo *is* The Marriage of Figaro,” that’s not strictly true. For the main ensembles, Costanzo sings atop with tracks of himself. For the dramatic motion, he has a troupe of actors—Chris Bannow, Daniel Liu, Ryan Shinji Murray, Emma Ramos and Ariana Venturi—play off him, serving as stage fingers, supernumeraries, ventriloquist dummies and, sure, as co-stars.
With out them, the central idea couldn’t have sustained itself for ninety minutes, each as a result of this was a versatile, humorous ensemble that added loads of life to the present and since a purely solo present would have shortly grown tiring for the viewers and for Costanzo. The anticipated screwball bit with Costanzo switching hats and costumes at lightning velocity solely lasted for the primary, breathless act. After that, the opera is essentially completed by lip-synch, with Costanzo typically actively a part of the drama and typically off to the aspect, a visual or invisible puppet grasp whose voice enlivened the characters.
Decreased for an eight-piece orchestra and minimize to 90 minutes, Costanzo and music director Dan Schlosberg ably and intelligently repackaged Mozart and Da Ponte’s work for Costanzo’s functions; sure main plot factors and minor characters get dropped, however the integral narrative and probably the most essential arias and ensembles are all there.
Costanzo’s vary is spectacular however there have been few moments of actually stunning singing. That is for the all-too-obvious cause that opera singers don’t typically sing bass, baritone, tenor, mezzo-soprano and soprano. Costanzo sounded greatest when singing Suzanna, worst when singing Cherubino (surprisingly, given it’s closest to his typical vary), and sang every thing else ably sufficient.
However stunning singing was not this Figaro’s major aim; the aim was to make us snicker, dazzle us with Costanzo’s wit and stamina and take a masterpiece aside in playful fashion. There are many wacky hi-jinks, comedic grace notes, and enjoyable visible gags: the credit sequence with Costanzo’s face photoshopped onto each character, your complete first act with spinning doorways and flying costume items, some very intelligent work (and a few much less so) on the supertitles. The slapstick components make contact, the comedic timing is on the dot (compliments to director Dustin Wills), and everybody appears to be having a grand outdated time on stage.
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I love the dedication to comedy; so few comedic operas are literally humorous in observe, which suggests credit score is due when a manufacturing goes for laughs with such zeal. However lots of the gags are offered with such an exaggerated, faux-humble cleverness that it appears like an try to extract laughter out of the viewers as a substitute of inviting us to affix within the enjoyable organically. At instances, the premise overextends itself, leaving the setup funnier than the payoff.
The Act II finale was Costanzo’s most virtuosic set piece. Because the vocal tracks piled up, Costanzo switched between the seven (!) components, flipping from octave to octave, whirling himself round, earlier than lastly standing atop a podium like a demented choir director because the actors scurried round him. It was each probably the most self-indulgent second of the present, and to my eye, the very best, as a result of Costanzo disbursed with any humble-bragging and straightforwardly confirmed off.
There are additionally some completely gonzo moments that had combined outcomes: Typically one of many actors accompanied Costanzo on a kazoo. The present grinds to a halt within the center, as Costanzo, maybe-not-quite feigning exhaustion after the madness of doing the Act II finale himself, is dragged offstage by EMTs, solely to reappear through video singing an aria from the ambulance. Later, Costanzo sings “Dove sono” with a laryngoscope down his throat, so the viewers is handled to a closeup of his focal folds smacking collectively. There’s a spoken dramatic interlude in French, with every actor’s voice processed so it appeared like Darth Vader was making an attempt to seduce a sassy chipmunk. Antonio the gardener does acrobatic flips on a trampoline within the background of multiple scene.
Within the second half, one of many actors pauses the drama once more to carry out Figaro’s speech from Act V of Beaumarchais’s play, the one which obtained the playwright censured for its open critique of birthright the Aristocracy and which Lorenzo da Ponte minimize from his adaptation in favor of an aria whereby Figaro rails towards untrue ladies. This try to deconstruct Figaro didn’t absolutely land, partly as a result of its class politics don’t slot in Costanzo’s manufacturing and partly as a result of different poignant moments in Mozart’s opera are handled virtually uniformly for laughs. Costanzo frames them inside a bigger visible gimmick, just like the laryngoscope within the in any other case heartfelt “Dove Sono.” But Suzanna’s “Deh vieni, non tardar” was sung with full sincerity. Why play this second so straight, as a substitute of the Countess’s materials? I don’t know.
More often than not, this manufacturing felt like an inside joke, one maybe particularly aimed toward singers (for whom Figaro is studied with close to biblical consideration throughout the nation) and superfans, that was, for higher and worse, being turned outwards to a common viewers. I actually have completed related performances of the opera in my kitchen, singing together with each half—solely it was my dishes I enlivened, not an appearing troupe. So, it appears I’m additionally The Marriage of Figaro, as is everybody who loves it. However a mid-show abstract of the motion of the primary half additionally indicated that this efficiency was additionally meant even for these much less aware of the opera. What such an viewers would get from this efficiency is much less clear, as was Costanzo’s tackle the opera. The laughs have been usually raucous in Little Island’s amphitheater, however the final function of the undertaking receded in favor of the intrigue of the pitch.
