Photograph by Helen Rouner.
The evening is balmy on Little Island. Already, I’ve forgotten that there’s a highway just on the other side of the slope, beyond which programmers are riding scooters home from the Google offices and tourists are taking selfies with a globally migrating installation of rattan elephants meant to symbolize “coexistence.” The carefully overgrown fauna, maximalist and faintly tropical, is still lush here in early September, and it’s been a long time since the Meatpacking District felt more like a neighborhood than a novelty.
It’s an impression, I’m learning anew, that gets stranger with repetition. I’m standing in the same place I was last night when the authorities canceled the performance of Anthony Roth Costanzo’s The Marriage of Figaro for a rainstorm that never quite materialized. The crowd then had exhibited all five stages of grief at the news: The Marriage of Figaro is sold out for the entirety of its nearly four-week run, and there is no rain date. Returning to the pier tonight, having been granted a reserved seat by the gracious staff, I have a vague sense of traumatic reenactment, that retracing my steps like this and expecting a different outcome might be a sign of my impending insanity.
Behind me in line for the show, a professor from the NYU Stern School of Business is holding forth on the strategies his digital marketing class will have to leverage this term so that their mock businesses might maximize fake shareholder value; in front of me, two women are debating whether the headshot on a CEO’s bio page does, in fact, match another photo one of them has open on her phone, of a man on vacation in a rainforest. The skyline glimmers before us here on Barry Diller’s $260 million pleasure park, on stilts in the Hudson River, and one man wears a fedora with an ace of spades tucked into the ribbon. The opera’s three-and-a-half-hour running time has been cut to an Ozempic-thin ninety minutes, and the exquisite Italian libretto is being projected in internet-speak English subtitles accented with the occasional emoji. The show promises to be art in line with that great contemporary ideal: frictionlessness.
Performances of Beaumarchais’s Le mariage de Figaro, the play on which the librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte based the opera, were banned in Louis XVI’s France and its author imprisoned. Lore has it that Joseph II, the Holy Roman emperor and a self-styled liberal reformer, permitted the opera adaptation on the condition that it omit the protagonist’s iconic speech, about how working for a living ought to earn Figaro a greater right to power than his master, the Count, who has done nothing of value with his life but be born noble. Mozart’s Le nozze di Figaro debuted in 1786; in 1793, a public that had imbibed Beaumarchais’s rhetoric decapitated Joseph’s younger sister Marie Antoinette.
But tonight, any radical politics have been safely contained—so contained as to find voice in a single person. The star countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo is singing all the major roles himself, cheerfully covering seven jobs, alongside a cast who mutely provide more bodies to fill out the stage. Thus, Costanzo is both the servant girl Susanna and the predatory Count Almaviva, who intends to exercise his medieval droit de seigneur and bed his employee on her wedding night. Susanna resists; antics ensue. Opera companies have taken to billing Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni, which can play light or dark, as a #MeToo opera. No such luck with Figaro, indisputably a buffa—even when not performed à la Monty Python, as it is tonight. Conveniently, a solo production can sidestep the issue altogether: the complicated erotics of jealously and coercion are now essentially masturbatory, the audience’s complicity downgraded to invited voyeurism. The nobleman gets to have his cake, and we get to eat it.
When the lights dim on the amphitheater, an eight-piece ensemble begins an electronically amplified rendition of Mozart’s overture beneath a credit reel (all credits to Costanzo, of course) of JibJab-style chattering heads. The spotlight catches our star, who grins: we’re off. In the opening scenes, the production really is a one-man show: Costanzo acts out each role in a tightly choreographed swapping of signifying garments and spinning doors. It’s an astounding feat of vocal stamina and physical comedy, and it’s obviously unsustainable. Sure enough, by “Ah, son perduto!,” the first real ensemble number, Costanzo has retreated into a curtained chair and sings out of sight while other actors hammily lip-synch the libretto in his place. For the rest of the production—with the exception of a genuinely stellar, if unavoidably Ed Sheeran–adjacent, use of a loop pedal in the act 2 finale—our star essentially provides a backing track to deliberately bad acting, accentuated by innumerable stage slaps and shrieking and shooting confetti into the air and bouncing on a trampoline in a desperate bid to hold the attention of an audience who, despite seeming to enjoy the chaos, is already lighting up the theater by scrolling Instagram. It’s a strange mode of attention, in any case, to ask an audience to inhabit, to resist becoming immersed in the scene before them and instead remain aware of how it’s being produced.
An audience unfamiliar with Mozart’s opera has no idea what’s going on, and the tween down my row wants everyone to know she’s upset about that. This, too, the production tries awkwardly to fix: during what presumably would have been an intermission had the production been less afraid of losing its audience, an actor reads out a summary of the plot thus far, forcibly swapping out whatever magic has been made onstage for digestible bullet points. Playing for time so Costanzo can rest his voice, actors explain that Beaumarchais’s play started the French Revolution “because the servants had opinions or something,” and they riff on Figaro’s illicit speech, with a big punch line about his being so desperate to make a living that he resorts to stealing—“I became a banker!” The audience howls with laughter, not a guillotine in sight.
The big joke as we enter act 3 is that the overwork his feat requires nearly kills Costanzo. He collapses after “Voi signor, che giusto siete” and is rushed offstage on a gurney. (One review of the production celebrates Costanzo as “the hardest-working countertenor in the biz.”) He returns to sing the opera’s great seria lament, “Dove sono,” with a medical scope down his throat, his frantically vibrating vocal folds projected onto two large screens. The intubation echo may be inadvertent, but it’s fitting that here grief is literally being swallowed: Little Island was being built during the horrors of spring 2020, just down the Hudson from the USNS Comfort, the ship that became a widely detested symbol of the city’s belated and inadequate COVID-19 response. The association between the two did not help reassure vulnerable New Yorkers about the city budget’s relationship to private wealth.
These kinds of elaborate public parks funded by the aristocracy were popular in Europe in the eighteenth century, their heyday coinciding with Mozart’s. They often have been theaters for the politics of inequality. Families were taking Sunday strolls in the Place de la Concorde when skirmishes between the armed foreign instruments of the ancien régime and the citizens of Paris escalated to the storming of the Bastille. During Little Island’s construction, the Hudson River Park’s sunbathers and rollerbladers gave way to vast choruses of marchers protesting state violence. Three hundred were kettled, assaulted with batons and pepper spray, and arrested in the Bronx. The city promised greater police accountability. Before long, it could seem that American social forces had been placed behind the fourth wall once more, from where they could be applauded.
Amid the final act, fireworks start going off over New Jersey. Costanzo has to project even louder over the explosions, the actors mime even more manically as the crowd en masse turns to look elsewhere. The trampoline has moved behind the stage, to the edge of the railing; one bad bounce and the jumper will launch himself into the Hudson. But it’s all under control. They’ve done this before. As the final minutes of the show arrive, after over an hour and a half of Costanzo singing for them, the actors finally lend their voices to the opera’s ultimate number, grinning and playing directly to the audience from the lip of the stage: “Gente, gente, all’armi, all’armi!” (Gentlemen, to arms!)
Helen Rouner is an associate editor at Penguin Press and the fiction editor of the Cleveland Review of Books. She lives in Brooklyn.