It’s one thing to be a multi-disciplinary artist tackling traditional and experimental works and your own creations. That’s impressive but Gender and genre jumbling Anthony Roth Costanzo is changing opera’s exclusivity
Abandon is one of the three pillars of art, says Anthony Roth Costanza, pictured here as Akhnaten in Philip Glass' opera of the same name. It’s one thing to be a multi-disciplinary artist tackling traditional and experimental works and your own creations.
That’s impressive but happens. It’s quite another to craft wildly diverse opera and art programming and turn a profit for organizations when others can’t. Countertenor vocalist and the opera world’s punk-diva Anthony Roth Costanzo is that rare person: a classical singer who has graced stages since childhood, from NYC’s Metropolitan Opera to the Teatro Real in Madrid and the Berlin Philharmonic. He then made waves — as you would expect this to do — debuting Philip Glass’This past September Costanzo sold out every date at New York’s Little Island venue in minutes for his revival of Charles Ludlam’s fantastical Maria Callas musical,, in and out of drag. As General Director & President he turned the world-renowned Opera Philadelphia company into an innovative profit center, by opening all tickets to an $11-any-seat program. Its youth marketing has transformed opera to something un-precious and less exclusive. Supported, he says, by “amazing” parents who understood his “going through puberty, wanting to keep singing high,” the boy soprano did his first opera at 13. “There’s a fascinating lineage of countertenors, from the castrated men of the 18th century who popularized opera, to Michael Jackson and Sylvester, children’s heroes such as Mickey Mouse and Elmo, to other falsetto singers across the globe,” he says. But Costanzo goes beyond traditions, with the avant-garde, electronic and genre-mixing operas of Glass and nu-composer Missy Mazzoli, or mod opera cabarets with transgender legend Justin Vivian Bond. “I’m looking for three things as an artist: communication, beauty, abandon,” Anthony says. “Through letting go, the human side comes through. I’m interested in provoking emotion; curious to expand and think different.”Galas . “Ludlum thought of it as female impersonation,” says Costanzo of the work’s late absurdist author. “As a gay man, I wanted to be Callas.”— an hour of art installation, music, and the audience on moveable chairs — live events for BBC Proms —He says that he “approaches art with the mind of an entrepreneur, and business models in the arts with the mind of a creative — that helps me reinvent the enterprise of making opera with artists from different forms and genre, and expanding opera’s reach. I don’t allow myself to get silo-ed.”, with its fear-forward-vision of climate crisis hell, crafted with MIT design students and Broadway choreographers. He tells me he wants to “be able to tell more people’s stories to more people.”commercial, offering new-to-opera audiences real bang for their buck. “When I came in, we had 4 weeks to raise $12 million or we’d go bankrupt, and we weren’t selling as many tickets as we should – like most opera companies around the country. I saw that tickets cost upwards of $150, which means you have to market to a small demographic who could afford it. So, I tried a radically different model that would sell tickets, fill houses and provoke funders to get excited and give more. New audience members would get fresh access to the opera and that would make our brand better.”Costanzo’s Opera Philadelphia will tell diverse stories like upcoming
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