Charles Dickens was celebrated for solo public readings in which he would give voice to a novel’s full cast of characters. I’ve watched the great actor David Greenspan take all the roles in Eugene O’Neill’s sprawling play “Strange Interlude” and, earlier this year, saw Eddie Izzard do the same in “Hamlet.”
But when the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has a go at a similar feat — performing Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” as a one-man show at Little Island — it is an altogether different ambition.
An opera singer’s repertoire is usually firmly circumscribed. Sure, transposition can nudge unfriendly music into a more comfortable key. And sure, some mezzo-sopranos can sing some soprano parts, and vice versa. But while Dickens, in a reading, could shift from Scrooge to Tiny Tim simply by adjusting an accent or affecting a growl, it’s another story for one person to hit the notes of both Susanna and the Count in “The Marriage of Figaro,” let alone invest both with beauty and power.
A vocal range can be wide, but it’s not infinite; a singer’s identity tends to be pretty fixed.
It’s that fixity that Costanzo, who has recently been named the general director of Opera Philadelphia, means to have some fun with. Mozart and his “Figaro” librettist, Lorenzo Da Ponte, might well nod along: The opera is full of characters pretending to be other people, even other genders. Human mutability is one of the main themes.
Costanzo — with his director, Dustin Wills, and his arranger and conductor, Dan Schlosberg — takes this to a challenging, chaotic extreme. In this much-trimmed 100-minute “Figaro,” Costanzo sings all the parts, or enthusiastically tries to: men and women, nobles and servants, high notes and low.
I was misleading earlier, however: This isn’t precisely a one-man “Figaro.” It’s more of a one-voice version, with a handful of actors joining Costanzo onstage for much of the relentlessly high-spirited performance, playing main roles, some cast across gender, and impressively lip-syncing along with Costanzo’s sung Italian. (Toward the end, there are also sweet — and audible — contributions from a few child members of the Young People’s Chorus of New York City.)
Wills and Lisa Laratta’s set incorporates an array of trapdoor elements into an old-fashioned, broad-beam thrust stage that wraps around the tiny pit; Emily Bode’s costumes add touches of surreal twee to 18th-century period elements. And while Schlosberg’s arrangement of the score for eight musicians is less radical than the brilliant transmutations he’s done for Heartbeat Opera, it’s resourceful work, and crisply played. The nocturnal start of Act IV is slyly rendered as cabaret music, with a suave saxophone solo.
But the style of this “Figaro” tends toward broad, messy, mostly unfunny farce. There are tumbles on a trampoline, fights with a big bunch of balloons — that kind of thing. For the first half-hour or so, the show has some frantic fizz. But it gradually deflates, and hits a real snag after the Act II finale, which uses looping technology to evoke a sense of the boisterousness of Mozart’s original ensemble from just one singer.
The effort is made to look so exhausting that it’s a sight gag for paramedics to rush onstage and take the collapsed Costanzo out on a stretcher. The actors are left for a long, strained skit-style interlude in which they read an exaggeratedly complicated synopsis of what we’ve already seen and then put on, in French, a snippet of the Beaumarchais play that inspired the opera.
After this sequence, the return to the opera proper is a relief, but the thrown-voice effect grows tiresome — even with the frisson, as Costanzo sings the Countess’s elegant “Dove sono,” of watching prerecorded video of a scope down his throat, giving a view of his vocal cords in quivering motion.
He and his larynx are in the spotlight throughout this “Figaro,” but to what end? Costanzo’s voice has grown more pointed and pale of late, so while he has a couple of lovely moments of otherworldly, floating tone, even the music that’s in his normal, high range doesn’t really bloom. In fact, the lower-range roles are more successful, though his baritone is more passably pleasant than thrillingly robust.
While he doesn’t embarrass himself vocally, he and the production hardly deepen our experience of Mozart’s score. And the central conceit of blurred identity is so strongly present in the original that it hardly feels like an insight to bring it out, especially at the cost of the opera’s emotional weight, which is lost to the laugh-riot tone. Neither particularly beautiful nor particularly clever, the show is glib and self-indulgent.
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