Anthony Roth Constanzo’s Le Nozze di Figaro, presented for a three week-run by Zach Winokur in the Amph theatre on Little Island, is a flamboyant, joyful tour de force that takes risks in every direction, leaving the baffled audience almost as breathless as the star and his outstanding supporting cast. One could argue that it is very indulgent to present an entire Mozart opera as a one man show. But then, opera is always in and of itself an indulgence of sorts, an exalted art form that celebrates excess through style. What matters is the motivation that lies behind that indulgence: mere ego, vanity and a lack of generosity will never lead to a production as genuinely engaging as this one.
The opera starts off like a whirlwind, with Mr. Costanzo continuously switching characters at a rapid-fire pace, aided by a cast of minions who frantically try to keep up with him, aligning the needed costumes and props like a bevy of tumbling clowns in a circus act. Significantly, their openly displayed exasperation with their tasks (and the occasional mistake) is very much a part of the act, making it appear as if indeed they were the servants of an abusive Master who uses them at his every whim to live out his fantasies. This is one but many examples that inform the richness of this spectacle that operates on several levels (and meta levels) at the same time. Just when I began to wonder how the first scene’s approach could possibly be sustained for the entire length of the opera, things began to dissolve into ever more inventive ways to suspend our disbelief, unfolding like nesting dolls, propelling the already convoluted original storyline of the opera into the absurd, irreverently juggling elements borrowed from cabaret, vaudeville, Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Beaumarchais’s plays on which the opera is based, pantomime, drag, circus acrobatics, live video projection, electronic sound looping, and even modern medical exam equipment. All this could easily add up to an unnerving conglomeration of tricks, were it not for Mr. Costanzo’s and music director Dan Schlosberg’s clear sense of respect and love for Mozart’s music, as well as Director Dustin Willis’ merciful instinct for pacing: amidst the madness, there are moments of exquisite stillness, as when a pack of Cherubinos, played by an endearing children’s chorus, join Mr. Costanzo to gently roll up the wooden stage floor to reveal that it is set over glass panes, suggesting that life –the comedy and tragedy of life – is fraught and fragile, sometimes threatening to run away from us, leaving us suspended above thin air (or the Hudson, as it were).
Mr. Costanzo’s vocal range and agility to quickly switch between baritone and falsetto is most impressive in the recitatives, where his theatrics sometimes spun into grand guignol mode, reminding me that Le Nozze is, after all, a musical adaptation of a French farce. The supporting cast frequently launched into lip-syncing to Costanzo’s live singing, adding a cartoonish element to their characters that never veered too far into camp but managed to highlight the exaggeration already inherent within Mozart’s magnificently sparkly score. Having myself spent much of the summer coaching young opera singers and stage arias and ensemble pieces from Mozart/Da Ponte’s joint oeuvres with them, forever urging them to be more playful, it was a delight to see the commedia dell’arte elements of these works acted out with such fearlessness and gusto. In this production, all lines were blurred – be it gender; stage/backstage/the fourth wall; live singing/recorded singing/lip-synching; and even reality itself: performer Emma Ramos, the stand-in for Susanna, had one arm in a sling and at some point wryly remarked, while pointing at it, that “the show must go on,” but when another character donned the same dress as a disguise, he too suddenly had his arm in a sling. Such little details show its director’s confidence and freedom that I dearly miss in traditional opera presentations that, obsessed with technique or rigid “concepts”, forget that ultimately, in producing operas, we should take play at least as seriously as faithful execution. Here, the controlled abandon was palpable with every single player. I was particularly impressed with Christopher Bannow, the stand-in for Figaro and Don Basilio (hilariously voiced by him via a kazoo), who, at one point, delivered a soliloquy that laid bare Figaro’s convoluted, existential identity crisis with such force that it almost flipped the mood into actual seriousness, suspending the action until, as if obeying a physical law, the other particles of the production returned to bounce off one other at a staccato rhythm. Daniel Liu, acting (mostly) as the emotionally wounded Contessa, brought a genuinely touching, tender dignity to the role, infusing it with just a little dose of mischievousness that one would recognize from the play’s actual prequel, which Rossini took up to compose Il Barbiere di Siviglia, thirty years after Mozart and Da Ponte premiered Le Nozze. Ariana Venturi, play-acting the bullish Count Almaviva with gusto, took her physical comedy to such extremes that it reminded me of Jim Hanson’s Muppets.
In the last act, the suspicion of it all being but a star’s vanity project was explicitly played up when Mr. Costanzo, having been wheeled out by paramedics after the particularly demanding famous Act II finale, burst back onto the scene in a hospital gown, an IV catheter stuck in his arm, to stubbornly take back the stage after the actors had scrambled to keep the show going without him, practically bullying the cast to not overshadow him – and then showing his, any singer’s, most vulnerable parts in near-pornographic closeup as he launched into one of the opera’s most iconic arias, Dove Sono, a plaintive lament about the loss of a romanticized past. A close observer could see how Mr. Costanzo watched his cast members whenever he fed them musical cues to play off on – there was great empathy and care, sentiments without which Mozart’s works cannot blossom.
This Le Nozze is not a one man show, it’s a solid, extremely well-constructed ensemble piece where every element gets to shine, masterfully balancing freedom and discipline. Critics ought to be reminded that exceptional artists cannot be measured by common standards. A great performer’s talent lies to a substantial degree in their capability to find the right collaborators to jointly advance their art form. Much of Mr. Costanzo’s force lies in his knack for pulling artists from diverse disciplines into his orbit to jointly create something surprising, ambitious, bold and outstanding, as the audience witnessed on Little Island in his sold out run. His recent appointment as General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia will offer him yet another platform to prove what he is capable of. We ought to be grateful – and excited about what’s to come.