The Brooklyn Rail

Last fall, Anthony Roth Costanzo thrilled audiences at the Little Island outdoor amphitheater in Manhattan’s Hudson River Park with a delightfully bravura performance, singing all the parts in a production of Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro. In a change of pace, Costanzo returns to Little Island this month to take on the titular role in Galas, an iconic stage work by the late Charles Ludlam, playwright, actor, director, and founder of the Ridiculous Theatrical Company.

Costanzo is an opera singer gifted with a particularly rare countertenor voice. He has received rave reviews for his performances, which include Christoph Willibald Gluck’s Orfeo ed Euridice and Philip Glass’s Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera. In the Little Island Figaro, he effortlessly switched between baritone and soprano registers with dazzling speed to embody all the characters in the opera. An enthusiastic advocate for expanding the boundaries of his profession, the out, queer artist has worked with a wide range of collaborators to create his own multidisciplinary and innovative work. Audiences at St. Ann’s Warehouse will long remember his collaboration with trans performer Justin Vivian Bond in their playful cabaret act, Only an Octave Apart. In addition to keeping up a challenging schedule of performances on opera stages around the world, Costanzo, now forty-three, took on a new role in June 2024 as the General Director and President of Opera Philadelphia, where he aims to reinvent the art form and draw in new audiences.

Ludlam occupied a singular and influential niche in American theater, writing and performing in his own plays with his downtown theater company, which flourished for nearly two decades during the latter half of the twentieth century. His career—prolific, daring, and continually evolving—was cut short at its peak by his death from AIDS in 1987, at the age of forty-four. Galas, which premiered four years earlier, is Ludlam’s tragi-comic, ridiculous theatrical take on the life of a world-famous opera star inspired by the legendary diva Maria Callas. His performance in the lead role was emblematic of his larger-than-life stage presence and was considered one of the highlights of that year. Aside from a brief 2019 revival featuring Ludlam’s late partner Everett Quinton in the title role, this is the first New York staging of the play since its debut in 1983.

In the conversation below, edited for length and clarity, Costanzo spoke with the Brooklyn Rail about his foray into Ridiculous Theater, his own fascination with Callas, and his passionate mission to make opera accessible to wider audiences.

Gerard Raymond (Rail): What brings you to playing the lead in Galas on the Little Island stage? Was it Charles Ludlam, his play, or was it Maria Callas?

Anthony Roth Costanzo: Well, a little bit of each. Zack Winokur, who is such a brilliant artistic director, and a brilliant producer at Little Island, called me and said, “Don’t you think this would be amazing?” Of course, I love Charles Ludlam’s work. And being a part of the queer community, I think his impact on theater and the legacy he created with the Ridiculous Theatrical Company goes through Charles Busch and Taylor Mac and into somebody like Cole Escola. So there’s a whole lineage there. Celebrating Ludlam and playing one of his iconic roles is the intersection of many things which are dear to me: the queer culture; theater—I grew up on Broadway and doing theater around the country; and then opera.

Rail: And what about La Divina herself?

Costanzo: I was drawn to this idea of playing Maria Callas, whom I’ve loved forever. She’s been the background on my phone since I was in college! I love how emotionally raw she is and how dramatically powerful. Her voice expressed all those things, sometimes with beauty and sometimes not, but that’s really what makes it so fascinating. Callas has always been inspiring to me because she had an imperfect instrument, and what she was able to do with it was so stunning and so spectacular. I feel that I have an imperfect instrument, and my life’s motto is: how can you make the most out of what you’ve got?

I also think that, in some ways, it’s a play about fame, because it was her fame that made her singing difficult. She was the only opera singer in the past hundred years to really break-through and be in the mainstream. Of course, Luciano Pavarotti did in a different way, but Callas was a real celebrity in her time. So, what was it about Callas and what did that do for opera? Obviously, I’m interested in bringing opera to many people, so there was a lot for me to be excited about. Actually, I feel a lot of connection to what Ludlam wrote in the play, and that’s his connection to Callas and her life so it feels a little bit like I’m channeling parts of him as well.

Rail: The role of Galas is very much identified with Ludlam. How do you feel about stepping into those shoes?

Costanzo: I think it’s intimidating in many ways, but I’m also excited because I have one connection to Callas that Ludlam didn’t, which is that I can sing her repertoire. I’m going to sing all of Callas’s music instead of using the recordings (as they did in the original production). Let’s put it this way: I’m as intimidated to sing her repertoire as I am to perform Ludlam’s repertoire.

Rail: How do you and director Eric Ting envisage this production? It’s obviously going to be very different from forty years ago at Ludlam’s own Sheridan Square Theater in the West Village.

Costanzo: Well, Eric has been a revelation; Zack introduced us. He is so incredibly creative and sophisticated in how he looks at this material. I feel like he’s bringing out things that you may not even have seen in the Ludlam show, but that are there in the text. Though, of course, we’re inspired by the ridiculousness of Ludlam, Eric is making it all his own. With the casting and with Mimi Lien’s incredible set design, it feels very fresh. It feels like contemporary theater, even though it gestures toward all that Charles Ludlam was. You know, it’s interesting because Ludlam had such a following that often he would only have to turn his head or make some gesture and everyone knew what it was and they would burst into laughter. We have to find somewhat different means of captivating the audience and engaging them in the humor of it. I think there will be moments of hysteria—I hope we find them—and then there’s also a deeply human aspect to it that will come through, especially at the end. I’m hoping that it can be moving and ridiculous at the same time.

Rail: Speaking of the “Ridiculous” aesthetic, much like Ludlam, you have also embraced the high and low in everything you’ve been doing in the opera world.

Costanzo: Yeah. I feel like the high-low is where it gets really exciting. Opera is so often relegated to the high and I try to erase the stereotypes of elitism and also change the barriers that are there. One of the things I look for in performance a lot is abandon. How do we have this feeling that someone is just totally abandoned? We reached that kind of catharsis in Figaro last year. I’m always looking for that because I think it’s exhilarating, it’s emotional. It’s what an audience responds to really well. In Philadelphia, where I run the opera company, I made every ticket 11 dollars or pick your price. So I’m constantly looking to make the high not feel so high and the low not feel so low in some ways.

Rail: The pick-your-price plan at Opera Philadelphia has already become a huge success, hasn’t it?

Costanzo: It’s amazing. We were the only sold-out opera company in America last season, in this first season of pick your price. Every seat was sold, and we had 67 percent first-time ticket buyers, so it was very exciting.

Rail: You mentioned your previous connection with theater. I understand you started in musical theater before you discovered opera.

Costanzo: Yes. I was on Broadway and doing Broadway national tours like The Sound of Music with Marie Osmond. I was singing Doe a Deer (“Do-Re-Mi") and I remember that I was using my chest voice and then I would switch over into my head voice at a certain point. It kept getting lower and lower—that point at which I would switch. And so when I finally did an opera—The Turn of the Screw—when I was thirteen, some of the opera people around said, “Well, maybe you’re a countertenor.” And I said, “What’s a countertenor?” And that’s where they taught me what it meant to sing in countertenor, and I began to study it. And now I’m actually writing this book which is both a personal history and the first book ever about the history of countertenors; it will come out in about a year.

Rail: You credit your parents for letting you discover your own voice; can you say how they helped?

Costanzo: Many parents would probably have said to their kid, “Okay, you went through puberty, stop trying to sing high now, be a man or be masculine” or whatever, because there is this association between pitch and gender. My parents never saw it that way. They just wanted me to be happy making art in the way I did, and that was really rare. They wanted me to be who I was, and that is difficult, I think, for a lot of us finding a way to be ourselves and have some authenticity. My voice was certainly unusual, but not something that they tried to move me away from.

Rail: Getting back to Galas, is there something in the play which resonates with you specifically?

Costanzo: There’s a sense in which Callas gave up love and her life for her career at some points. When Aristotle Onassis came into her life, it was like a big wake-up call. Is that what I should prioritize in life? And, of course, he doesn’t stay with her and it doesn’t work out. It’s almost further proof that she gave it all to her art, instead of finding some balance for herself. Sometimes, as I work eighteen hours a day with all the jobs I have—singing, running an opera company, writing a book, and making a CD, I worry for myself that I’m in the same position. Am I missing out on love? Am I missing out on something that would make my life meaningful in a different way? So reading those scenes and seeing her grapple with that does make me think about those things for my own life.

Rail: What are your thoughts on being a celebrated opera singer in our times?

Costanzo: If Maria Callas were alive today, she wouldn’t have had the same kind of fame, right? Because our system operates differently. Would she have been able to do social media, and do all of these things that are required today? So I guess the question for me is what will make an opera singer, me or someone else, breakthrough in the way that Callas broke through today? It wouldn’t be Pavarotti either, because he was selling albums at Tower Records and doing signings, and stadium tours, in a way that I don’t think would happen in the same way today. So I guess the question is what will do that? I keep trying to find it. What is it that will connect to a broader audience? I don’t know, but I’m willing to try it all.