Anthony Roth Costanzo had just finished singing “Casta diva,” his voice reaching the high notes of a soprano, when he was asked, “Do you want to do that again?”
“I want to try it as many times in the corset to see if it needs to be looser,” he answered.
He was rehearsing “Galas,” Charles Ludlam’s 1983 play inspired by the life of Maria Callas, which begins performances on Saturday at Little Island. And like Ludlam before him, Costanzo was dressed for the part of a prima donna.
But unlike Ludlam, he was actually singing Callas’s arias. So the corset might need to be less tight. An opera singer has to breathe.
Eric Ting, the show’s director, cued the scene, and Costanzo stepped out in black heeled boots and a wedding-white corset, singing “Casta diva” again over a recorded orchestra. As the music swelled, he held out his arms, his groomed chest hair visible over the top of the corset. Afterward, he reported that he felt good.
There were more arias to test, though, and costuming was just one detail to refine in this production of “Galas,” an artifact of New York’s downtown theater scene so tailored to its original performers that a revival would seem difficult to pull off. Costanzo, a countertenor who relishes sensational feats like voicing all the roles in “Le Nozze di Figaro,” is giving himself the added challenge of embodying Callas as both an actor and an opera singer would: every high note, and every high heel.
Countertenors like Costanzo, who most often specialize in early and contemporary music, usually don’t get to sing repertoire from the eras in between, including the bel canto and verismo operas that made Callas famous. He has been working with his teacher to navigate its vocal obstacles, he said in an interview, but also its joy. “It’s fun,” he said with an emphatic expletive.
“Galas,” pronounced to rhyme with “Callas,” premiered at the height of Ludlam’s career as a performer and playwright. Less than four years later, he died from complications of AIDS, at just 44. The New York Times’s obituary called him “one of the most prolific and flamboyant artists in the theater avant-garde, who seemed to be on the verge of breaking into the mainstream of American culture.”
Through his Ridiculous Theatrical Company, Ludlam presented shows that had a kind of budget maximalism. They drew admirers like Tony Kushner, who once described them as “funny, erudite, poetic, transgressive, erotic, anarchic, moving and so theatrical they seem the Platonic ideal of everything we mean when we use that word.”
Ludlam had an encyclopedic knowledge of old movies, a Norma Desmond impression at the ready and a penchant for travesty. In “Camille,” his adaptation of “La Dame aux Camélias,” the novel that had also inspired “La Traviata,” he played the heroine with a mix of commitment and camp, not unlike Cole Escola in “Oh, Mary!”
He didn’t consider his “Camille” performance drag. (In general, Ludlam aligned not with gay theater, which he saw as political, but with queer theater, which was more of a sensibility.) Of “Camille,” he wrote that while he could forgive audiences for misunderstanding his and his colleagues’ performances en travesti, “I insist we were nothing more than, nothing less than, nothing other than three actors trying to portray three characters in a play.”
A decade after “Camille,” Ludlam pushed that idea further with “Galas.” But he was also interested in reflecting on his own career through Callas’s life. He saw in her a kindred spirit, a fiery and opinionated character who was fundamentally misunderstood. “Part of the price of fame is that your image becomes simplified enough that a vast number of people can grasp it easily,” he said. “You can never really be all of you. You could become a trademark.”
The play was Ludlam’s attempt to defend Callas by showing “the more complex background” of her public image. Taking biographical liberties, he traced an arc from pure-hearted artistry to celebrity artifice. (The biggest fiction is her death; rather than a heart attack, Galas dies in a ritualistic suicide out of “Madama Butterfly.”) He called the play “a modern tragedy,” and it is more earnest than his previous works.
Still, “Galas” is not without Ludlam-isms, intrusions of levity. The musings that end in Galas’s suicide, for example, include this passing thought: “What do I do from morning to night if I don’t have my career? I have no family, I have no husband, I have no babies, I have no lover, I have no dog, I have no voice and there’s nothing good on television tonight.”
Crucial to the play’s shifting registers was the company of Ridiculous actors, which included Ludlam’s partner, Everett Quinton, as Galas’s maid, the fictional Bruna Lina Rasta, an erstwhile opera singer who devotes her prime to another artist. (When the Brazilian soprano Bidú Sayão saw the show, she had only one correction to offer Quinton: “I knew Lina Bruna Rasa well, and she had much bigger boobies.”)
“Galas” has rarely been staged since its original run. (Quinton, who died in 2023, took on Ludlam’s role in 2019 to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising.) Zack Winokur, the producing artistic director of Little Island, brought it to Costanzo as a follow-up to “Figaro.” Costanzo didn’t know the play, but, as someone with Cecil Beaton’s famous portrait of Callas as his phone’s lock screen, he was immediately interested.
Early in his career, he put on a wig and eyelashes for an opera role. “I thought, ‘God, I look like Maria Callas,’” Costanzo said. “But on a deeper level, I identify with her journey. There are some singers who have a natural instrument and others who have a struggle to get there that comes out in the passion of the performance.”
The Little Island cast grew to include the theater star Mary Testa, who once lived in the same building as Costanzo and knew Quinton well; they used to socialize from a distance while walking their dogs to keep them from fighting. Playing Rasta, she said, “I want to be as good as I can be, because I want to honor Everett, but I don’t want to copy him.”
For Testa, rehearsals have been an exercise in expanding her performance to an operatic scale. For Costanzo, they have been something of the opposite; singers act, but often with broad gestures while facing the audience. Despite his Broadway experience as an actor going back to childhood, “Galas” is a departure.
“In opera, the time is set,” he said. “But in a play, you have control over time.” Ting has told him that he is sometimes “too composed,” so he has worked to balance loosening up with honoring the artifice of Callas’s persona, complete with a take on her fluidly Mid-Atlantic accent.
Ting has also welcomed moments when Costanzo, who as a high-profile artist has his own similarities to Ludlam and Callas, brings himself to the role. One of those is in the final scene, when Galas and Rasta exchange doleful reflections on fame. Rasta tells Galas, “A great artist is acknowledged but never understood.”
“There are certain scenes where I find my voice catching,” Costanzo said of his performance. “I do feel, in my own way, that I am right now devoting my life to opera. I work at it 16-18 hours a day. And that is entirely my own choice. At the end, when she says ‘What do I do when I have no career?,’ my friends who know me well will think I’m talking about myself.”
In that final scene, a despairing Galas asks Rasta to sing “Vissi d’arte,” or “I lived for art,” from the opera “Tosca.” During a rehearsal, Testa began the aria, and Costanzo joined in. But Ting stopped them; something was off with the audio. As people were trying to figure out the problem, Testa remained in place, wiping away a tear. “God,” she said, “it makes me cry.”
Joshua Barone is the assistant classical music and dance editor on the Culture Desk and a contributing classical music critic.
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