Stepping off the train in Verona, Italy, where she is to perform in “La Gioconda,” the soprano Maria Magdalena Galas (rhymes with Callas) is young, dowdy and self-conscious about her weight. Back in New York, she’d turned down the role of Madam Butterfly at the Metropolitan Opera because of her size.
“I couldn’t see myself as the fragile little geisha,” she tells the man who’s come to pick her up at the station. “Opera is more than singing, you know.”
Certainly it was for the opera star Maria Callas, whose biography gets the Charles Ludlam treatment in “Galas,” a fictionalized, high-camp retelling that’s currently glamming up the Amph at Little Island.
But “Galas” is more than a sendup, you know. A genuine homage to Callas — who was renowned for her acting skill on the opera stage as well as her singing — is mixed in with its relish for her drama-filled, headline-making life: her appearances at La Scala, her rabid fans, her equally rabid detractors and her peculiar taste in men, which had her spending years with the shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis before he married Jacqueline Kennedy.
Ludlam originally staged and starred in “Galas” with his Greenwich Village-based Ridiculous Theatrical Company in 1983, a mere six years after Callas’s death at 53. In contrast to that shoestring-cheap production, the director Eric Ting is offering luxury on Little Island, with a glittering, golden runway as the centerpiece of the Tony Award winner Mimi Lien’s set, and an abundance of sumptuous, sometimes winking costumes adorning a high-caliber cast. (Costume design is by Hahnji Jang; Galas’s costumes are by Jackson Wiederhoeft.)
The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo plays the title role, which means that Galas sings live in the interstitial moments where Ludlam used recorded vocals. Singing not being the main event of this play, it’s an embellishment, but an enriching touch nonetheless. And Costanzo does have the requisite chops for the show’s comedy. When Giovanni Baptista Mercanteggini (Carmelita Tropicana), who will become Galas’s husband, asks at their first meeting whether she is a music lover, she tells him flatly that she is not.
“I am music,” Galas says loftily, and stares off into the distance — a camp heroine in the making.
Trouble is, this production is tenaciously focused on surface beauty. Though much is made of her transformation to svelteness and chic, we never actually do see Galas initially looking fat or dowdy, regardless of what Ludlam put in his script. We also never get a sense of her humanity. This Galas is, essentially, a vocally gifted paper doll, dressed up in one outrageously elegant ensemble after another. (It must be said: She looks exceptional in rose.)
Tropicana’s endearing Mercanteggini dotes on Galas, and the unnerving servant Bruna (Mary Testa) — a former opera singer whose career ended with a pyrotechnic public breakdown — becomes her loyal protector after a frosty start that is entirely the fault of the imperious Galas. But the audience can be forgiven for feeling indifferent to Galas’s story. We have little reason to care how her life turns out, and not because she’s unlikable, though she is.
In the Broadway show “Oh, Mary!,” Cole Escola — an artistic descendant of Ludlam, who died at 44 in 1987 — got audiences to invest in a wildly off-putting title character. In Ludlam’s own production of “Galas,” a recording of which I watched on video at the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts, so did he.
Much of the second act of “Galas” takes place on the yacht of the Onassis character, Aristotle Plato Socrates Odysseus (Caleb Eberhardt). Oddly, instead of making use of the Amph’s Hudson River views for that part of the show, the production obscures the water with fog. (Lighting is by Jiyoun Chang.) It feels very much like a missed opportunity.
So does the operatic ending of the play, which in Ludlam’s staging was simultaneously beautiful, strange, funny, self-conscious and affecting. In Ting’s production, it makes a pretty stage picture. Emotionally, though, it does not signify.
Galas
Through Sept. 28 in the Amph at Little Island, Manhattan; littleisland.org. Running time: 1 hour 40 minutes.
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