Isabel Leonard and Others Offer Tastings of ‘Frida y Diego’

Like all cultural entities, the Metropolitan Opera is always looking for ways to expand its audience and stand out from the fray. Nowadays, this requires trying everything, everywhere, all at once. Which is why the mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard, who plays Frida Kahlo in the Met’s production of Gabriela Lena Frank and Nilo Cruz’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego,” recently found herself promoting the show in decidedly unoperatic places like the Mexican restaurant Cosme in the Flatiron neighborhood of Manhattan and in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

“Outreach is very important to me in many ways because you have to entice people and bring something into their space that they might not be aware of,” Leonard said.

The singer, 44, is a familiar presence at the Met, where she made her debut in “Roméo et Juliette” in 2007. Roles in such classics as “Le Nozze di Figaro” “Il Barbiere di Siviglia” and “Così fan tutte” followed, but she is also committed to new works, like Nico Muhly’s “Marnie” in 2018.

Still, this round of appearances transported Leonard to new places. Literally. “I’ve sung in parks before, but never in a cemetery,” she said in Green-Wood’s modern chapel, shortly before heading to the outdoor stage.

That stop was part of a veritable all-hands-on-deck blitz for the Met, which also collaborated with the Museum of Modern Art for the exhibition “Frida and Diego: The Last Dream” and partnered with restaurants and bars around the city — at Tobalá, in the Bronx, for example, you can sip a cocktail said to be “inspired by Frida Kahlo’s final still-life painting of watermelons.”

As essentially,a brand ambassador for the new opera, Leonard was very much in demand. Here is how she helped advertise Frida.

May 2: Frida sneaks in at “Eugene Onegin”

The Met fills the intermissions of its live broadcasts at movie theaters with various features to keep the audiences there entertained. On a recent Saturday afternoon, Leonard and the baritone Carlos Álvarez, who co-stars as Diego Rivera, Kahlo’s husband, ended up in a basement rehearsal room performing brief excerpts, with Howard Watkins as accompanist, during the first intermission of the “Eugene Onegin” broadcast. “Casual Saturday,” Leonard said, somewhat sarcastically.

She executed a quick practice run with Álvarez and five members of the dance ensemble, under the watch of the production’s director and choreographer, Deborah Colker. When it was go time, the host of that day’s broadcast, the mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato, introduced what viewers were about to hear, then held a quick interview with the two singers and Colker afterward. In a few minutes, the assignment was over.

May 8: The graveyard shift

On May 5, Leonard took a break from “Frida y Diego” to sing “Non più mesta” from Rossini’s “La Cenerentola” at the Carnegie Hall celebration of the 50th anniversary of its “Concert of the Century.” A few days later she was off to Green-Wood, where the Met had joined the popular Death of Classical series for an al fresco evening labeled “Frida, Diego and the Day of the Dead.”

As usual, Leonard was game, if understandably low-key at the end of a long day. “I was in the theater at 8 o’clock this morning, until 2 o’clock,” she said, referring to a rehearsal at the Met. “It is intense.”

Audience members — a remarkably young and varied bunch, perhaps thanks to tickets that started at $10 — reached the seating area via an alley lined with sponsors’ tables like that of Pantalones, the tequila brand Camila and Matthew McConaughey founded. For its part, the Met had set up a kind of altar known as an “ofrenda,” where the visiting souls of the departed are honored on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Festooned with the traditional marigolds, it held portraits of Kahlo and Rivera, along with candles and decorative skulls.

The opera’s creators, Frank and Cruz, were onstage pretty much the entire time, discussing their working collaboration, research and inspiration, and teeing up the various excerpts. The pair, who have been sharing an apartment while working on the Met production, have a warm, funny rapport, and seemed to win over the crowd.

After snacking on sandwiches in the modern chapel, the other “Frida y Diego” emissaries — who in addition to Leonard included Álvarez, the countertenor Nils Wanderer, looking like a rock star in Siouxsie Sioux eyeliner, and the soprano Vanessa Isiguen — headed to the stage via the cemetery’s Tranquility Garden Columbarium. Leonard and Isiguen (the cover for the role of Catrina, the keeper of the dead) sang an excerpt from “El llamado,” then Leonard performed an excerpt from the Frida aria “El Mundo.”

The singer, who wore a simple black ensemble adorned with a white scarf, said that for these snippets, she did not focus on getting inside Frida’s head. “For me, it’s more about singing the music and just communicating it and making that as accessible as possible in the moment to the audience,” she said. “I don’t worry too much about whether I feel like I am so deep into the character at the moment or not. It’s also about preserving your energy and things like that.”

May 11: A feast for many senses

New Yorkers of a certain age may fondly remember Asti, a Greenwich Village restaurant that closed on Dec. 31, 1999, after decades of having its staff serve up both food and arias — The New York Times once described Asti as being “to opera buffs what Scotland is to golf fanatics.”

That spirit was back at Cosme, albeit with a very special singing guest rather than crooning waiters. In its first ticketed collaboration to promote an opera with an outside restaurant, the Met had arranged for a brief Leonard performance between two courses of a Kahlo-inspired feast conceived by the Cosme chef Enrique Olvera — the restaurant had to remove its doors to move in a piano for the occasion.

The irrepressible team of Frank and Cruz was there, too, but just enjoying the meal. “They point, I go,” Frank said, laughing, of the Met’s whirlwind of promotional events.

The dress rehearsal that had taken place earlier that day must have gone well, because Leonard appeared to be in a jovial mood. “Anybody has tickets yet?” she asked the diners in between the truffle esquites and the tlacoyo. She then introduced an excerpt by clarifying that the opera is “not a biopic — it’s a fever dream.”

Like a bonus dessert — which was included as well, because why stop at one? — she then sang an appropriately sultry version of “Bésame Mucho,” encouraging the audience with the quip, “I love singalongs, they make my life easier.”