Anthony Roth Costanzo The Marriage of Figaro

The night breeze was as pleasant as it could be for late summer, the lights of Jersey twinkled over the Hudson, and the vocal cords of countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo were projected live onto two giant screens, pink and strange and undulating like some beast from Aliens franchise when he sang Countess Rosina’s aria from the third act: “Where are the moments?.” The image made my jaw drop, though perhaps not as much as Costanzo — there it emerged, a kind of strange, meaty synecdoche for the whole feverishly inventive reinterpretation The Marriage of Figaro which is currently bursting at the seams of the outdoor amphitheater on Little Island. Like the entire production — which (full disclosure) I saw in a preview rather than on the critics’ opening night, and (even fuller disclosure) whose creative team includes several people I know — the moment is both revealing and audacious, at once utterly naked and extravagantly theatrical. It’s a “watch This” flourish in a performance that is full of them. Indeed, this Figaro’s sleeves are so stuffed with tricks that at times he seems to be in an arms race with himself—and yet the physical truth of the gesture is a miracle. Here, on display, is the paradox of opera: as a form, it could hardly be more absurd, more blatantly artificial, and yet the whole precarious, glittering edifice rests on the real miracle of the human body. If we are sad for the countess, it is because we stand in awe of the larynx.

Now take that admiration—however much you spend on the nine main characters—and put it into one body. Costanzo, who recently took over the Philadelphia Opera and who appears almost every time something cool happens in the opera world, sings every role in this Figaro Himself. The show is his brainchild, developed by playwright Jacob Mallinson Bird and delivered with a mad scientist’s zeal by the inexhaustible director Dustin Wills. Completing the brain trust is musical director Dan Schlosberg, who helps pull the whole thing off in under 90 minutes, expertly slimming down the arrangement for an eight-piece orchestra, which he conducts with ferocity and precision from behind the keyboard. The virtuosity is omnipresent—and extends to the ensemble. For Costanzo is not alone on stage; he is surrounded by a troupe of actors, all first-rate clowns, who begin the play as his busy, breathless roadies and gradually develop into full-blown Mozarts and Da Pontes. Costanzo may be the Kathy Seldon to their Lina Lamont, but they are no one’s puppets. Their bodies—and ultimately their own voices—are as important to the project as his. This breadth and depth of creative vitality keeps the basic concept from feeling like a party trick. We’re not here just to show up for Costanzo, but to witness something more like a circus — the wild, symbiotic, you-catch-me, I-catch-you thrill of a trapeze act.

It is precisely this kind of skill and dexterity on the part of all the players that farce requires. Figaro‘s up-and-down plots—from Pierre Beaumarchais’s deceptively effervescent 1778 play—are also well-suited to Wills as the high priest of the church of More Is More. At first, you might think that all there is to the show’s set (co-designed by Wills and Lisa Laratta) is an elegant wooden deck and a view of the Hudson, but it’s practically a pop-up book. Trapdoors and sliding sections of floor reveal lights, curtains, furniture, instruments, and people. Ryan Shinji Murray, as Antonio’s drunken gardener, makes the most of his role by somersaulting on a previously hidden trampoline. Every climax outdoes itself; every metatheatrical break falls apart again. Although I sometimes wish for more rigorous editing—especially after Costanzo delivered the opera’s mad second-act finale in one voice and had to have a break built into the performance for him—it would be plain grumpy to be angry with a director who has 50 ideas in reserve when many of them are fighting for just one. FigaroIts multiplicity is, above all, ecstatically funny.

Such a manic, everything-and-everything-kitchen-sink approach requires a certain handshake, and Wills, Costanzo and company immediately define the terms: Here comes the countertenor—slim and muscular, his face somehow chiseled and flexible—wrestling a rolling costume rack down the ramp and onto the stage with the help of actress Emma Ramos, who wears stage manager’s headphones and a Buster Keaton-esque expression of impassive helplessness. The spotlight catches Costanzo like a burglar in an old movie. Ramos shoves a measuring tape into his hand and a tricorn on his head. Poofis Figaro’s suave, cunning servant, busy measuring out the space for his marital bed. But all that is needed for him to become his own fiancée, the clever maid Susanna, is a revolving door and singing through the window inside it, while a dress hung under the window (and a gazelle’s leap into the treble clef) alert us to his new identity. Then, pouf again — a clownish red jumpsuit with a lace collar evokes Cherubino, the charming, sexy boy servant usually played by a mezzo-soprano. (It is here that Costanzo’s voice and personality are most naturally found, and indeed, the seeds of this character were sown Figaro (It’s a long time ago, when he first played Cherubino at 17.) Fleet, Nicholas Betson’s naughty subtitles, and Emily Bode’s witty, rehearsal-like costumes—a hat and waistcoat here, a backless dress, a wreath of flowers and a ribbon there—keep us on our toes and entertain us on many levels: Costanza’s body-hopping experiment is, after all, superimposed on a play that already revels in disguise, costume swapping, and mistaken identity. But there’s no confusion in all this chaos. Wills is the kind of man behind the curtain who wants you to pay attention to the strings and levers. We follow him and marvel, as the magician reveals the trick and trusts the revelation to generate the real magic.

Or magicians, I should say. In addition to Murray and Ramos, actors Christopher Bannow, Ariana Venturi and Daniel Liu, all talented comedians, also become magicians during the course of the play. Parallel to FigaroIts own smiling subversiveness (the original play “caused the French Revolution,” Liu jokes at one point, “because the servants had opinions or something”), the production’s corps of nonsingers eventually abandon their headsets in favor of costumes and their own opinions. No longer will they run after Costanzo, moving furniture and grabbing abandoned props—now they’ll face him, even as he ventriloquizes for them. The results can be funny, as when Costanzo’s lower register spills out of Venturi, who struts and stomps across the stage as the dissolute Count Almaviva, a female form gleefully conveying absurd macho. They can also be surprisingly moving: Sad-eyed and delicate in a gold gown, Countess Liu twice evokes a magnificent scratch off in the frantic pace of the production, just sitting still and embodying the heartache of Costanzo’s mezzo-soprano. Both “Porgies love“And”The pigeon is” become fully hers, the countess’s, and his, Liu’s, even as we gaze into Costanzo’s windpipe during the latter. A delicate act of transference takes place, a gift is given, and given doubly. If Liu is the conduit, then in some ineffable sense Costanzo is too. The fact that the music travels through an additional body on its way to us heightens our awareness of the miracle of its appearance in the first place.

The Marriage of Figaro will be on Little Island until September 22.