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At Opera Philadelphia, Vivaldi’s music meets a contemporary libretto by Sarah Ruhl; in New York, Lincoln Center Theater presents Gian Carlo Menotti’s written-for-television opera in a production starring Joyce DiDonato.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Dec. 22, 2025 at 5:19 pm ET

Abigail Raiford and Megan Moore STEVEN PISANO

Philadelphia

“The Seasons,” an ambitious project performed last weekend by Opera Philadelphia in the Perelman Theater, shakes up Vivaldi’s famous orchestral score “The Four Seasons” to sound a warning about climate change. In the libretto by playwright Sarah Ruhl (who conceived the project with Anthony Roth Costanzo, countertenor and general director of the company), five artists have retreated to a farm in the country where their artmaking and lovemaking are upended by the strangeness and violence of the weather. The frantic warnings of a Cosmic Weatherman go unheard as winter, confoundingly, follows spring, and summer arrives as a double cataclysm of fire and floods.

Musically, the piece is hugely enjoyable, with the orchestra stylishly led by Corrado Rovaris. Additional Vivaldi arias and ensembles are deftly interpolated among the scrambled “Seasons” movements, their words a combination of Ms. Ruhl’s new English texts and the original Italian and Latin. Outer and inner personal weather start to match: In a stunningly sung “Gelido in ogni vena” from “Farnace”—now “Frozen inside my body”—the Poet (Mr. Costanzo) is sad after a fight with his crush, the Painter (Kangmin Justin Kim), but also lost and freezing to death in a blizzard.

Kangmin Justin Kim and Anthony Roth Costanzo STEVEN PISANO

Theatrically, however, “The Seasons” is sometimes obscure. The setup of the scenario and characters feels rushed and thin when placed against the surging emotion of the arias and the impending menace of the weather. Also, the inventive, nonliteral staging by director Zack Winokur, choreographer Pam Tanowitz, co-set designers Mimi Lienand Jack Forman and lighting designer John Torres is astonishing to look at but not always intelligible.

Six dancers persuasively interpret the seasons and sometimes accompany the arias; Ms. Tanowitz’s angular, evocative choreography is enhanced by costumes in shiny textiles and chiffons by Victoria Bek and Carlos Soto. There is no built scenery. Instead, there is smoke and vivid use of light—in the most dramatic sequences, such as the fire, a wall-size blaze of color angles forward from a bank of instruments on the floor upstage. Dozens of individual silvery metal tears descend on wires; ranks of horizontal pipes (usually employed for hanging drop curtains or other scenery) bob up and down, threatening to crush the performers. Most ingenious of all are the soap bubbles, devised by Mr. Forman, an MIT doctoral student, that drift around the stage as whirling snow.

John Mburu STEVEN PISANO

With his sensitive interpretations, Mr. Costanzo was the standout among the singers, but they all gamely tackled the challenges of their full da capo arias. As the Choreographer, Megan Moore’s plangent mezzo was especially effective in her mourning aria; soprano Whitney Morrison was dramatic as the Performance Artist, the only member of the creative quintet who sees what is coming. With her bright soprano, Abigail Raiford brought a pealing earnestness and flexible coloratura to the Farmer (a former actress): In an aria accompanied by two piccolos, she happily prepared vegetables from her organic farm and fed them to the Poet. In his desperate bid to awaken the Poet from his frozen trance (“Sol da te,” or ”Oh my soul” in Ms. Ruhl’s text), Mr. Kim’s resonant countertenor combined elegantly with the flute obligato of Emi Ferguson, the onstage soloist. As the Cosmic Weatherman, John Mburu ably demonstrated how smoothly baroque arias for bass—regardless of their original subjects—can be repurposed as howls of despair about a modern apocalypse.

The piece ends with the Performance Artist realizing that the boat she built out of garbage is too small to save everyone; a children’s chorus arrives and sings “Et in terra pax” from a Vivaldi “Gloria.” The sun rises, perhaps a hopeful sign, but the staging does not suggest a happy ending.

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A scene from ‘Amahl and the Night Visitors.’ JULIETA CERVANTES

New York

Gian Carlo Menotti’s evergreen chamber opera “Amahl and the Night Visitors” is the epitome of family-friendly holiday fare, and Lincoln Center Theater, in association with the Metropolitan Opera, is presenting a luxuriously cast production of it through Jan. 4, 2026. One might worry that the 300-seat Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater would be too small for the operatic mezzo-soprano of its star, Joyce DiDonato, but director Kenny Leon has shrewdly calibrated the space and the voices and stayed true to the spirit of Menotti’s work. 

Intimate and accessible—it was written for television, first broadcast in 1951 and for many years thereafter—“Amahl” balances sweet, comic and serious elements without slipping into sentimentality. Its tunes are indelible. Over a tightly plotted 45 minutes, the opera explores poverty, love, generosity and a Christmas miracle as the disabled Amahl (Albert Rhodes Jr., a forthright young performer with Broadway presence) and his destitute mother (the intense Ms. DiDonato) are visited by the Three Magi (Bernard Holcomb, Todd Thomas, Phillip Boykin) on their way to Bethlehem.

The thrust stage, representing Amahl’s humble house, is a simple wooden platform, open to a radiantly starry sky; a lively shepherds’ chorus swirls around it, and the Kings enter down the aisles through the audience. (Derek McLane designed the set; Adam Honoré the effective lighting.) The Kings wear colorful Eastern robes; the rest of Emilio Sosa’s costumes are subtle and more or less contemporary. Steven Osgoodably conducted the two-piano accompaniment; Jesse Barrett played the haunting oboe solos. All the singers brought clear diction (there are no supertitles) and expressive characterizations. Mr. Leon’s staging and Ms. DiDonato’s performance built a compelling arc: The real Christmas miracle is not Amahl’s sudden cure, but the transformation of the Mother’s abject despair into hope. Seen in proximity to “The Seasons,” its optimism felt nostalgically redolent of a very different age.

Philip Venables and Ted Huffman adapt Larry Mitchell’s classic of 1970s gay literature in a joyous, boundary-blurring event at Park Avenue Armory; also in New York, singer Kate Lindsey performed a program that tracked the career of Kurt Weill.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Dec. 5, 2025 at 5:06 pm ET

Themba Mvula (center) and ensemble in the event of music and movement at Park Avenue Armory. STEPHANIE BERGER

New York

Composer Philip Venables and writer-director Ted Huffman are a potent creative team, imagining their way into contemporary stories in unconventional but always arresting ways. “The Faggots and Their Friends Between Revolutions,” now in its North American premiere engagement at the Park Avenue Armory, is their wildest project yet. Based on Larry Mitchell’s 1977 self-published book of the same title—a queer-liberation fantasy that circulated for decades as a kind of samizdat in the gay world—their version of it is a kind of joyous communal theater, with its members recounting their history for one another through speech, song and dance. All of the 15 performers are highly skilled in their own artistic disciplines, but the boundaries are blurred—instrumentalists sing, singers play violins and percussion, and everyone commits vigorously to movement.

Mr. Huffman’s text captures the anarchic, utopian, very 1970s-counterculture spirit of the book, even as his additions and reorganizations streamline the narrative and reflect changes in the world since it was written. The “friends”—originally listed by Mitchell as straight women, lesbians, queens, fairies and queers—now include more categories of people “othered” by the paranoid and repressive capitalist patriarchy, aka “the men” in the country of Ramrod. Fierce, comic and sweet by turns, this depiction of struggle and survival in the battle of love against greed is both satirical and deeply serious.

Scenes are skillfully built out of fragments. Musical instruments, a rack of costumes, and chairs surround an empty stage. A singer intones a haunting melody—“It’s been a long time and still we are not free.” When actor Kit Green recounts an origin story of how the characters found one another, the music searches as well: The instruments, one at a time, offer brief riffs until the entire company is involved, energetically demonstrating “ecstatic communion.” Company members pull odd, often cobbled-together garments off the rack for different scenes (the costumes are by Theo Clinkard); during a tuning break, dancer Yandass writhes on the floor, trying to escape from an enveloping costume that seems almost alive. There are few props. The performers trundle the keyboard instruments out for use and then off again. Everything else is done with lighting (designed by Bertrand Couderc) and bodies.

Mr. Venables’s music, built on baroque and folk styles and instruments, enriches and illuminates the text. A comic song about “the men’s” obsession with papers is a pretty waltz aria accompanied by harp and flute; a saxophone picks up the tune and it turns into a raucous bossa nova, then into an Irish folk song with fiddle and accordion. Harpsichord and viola da gamba act as soloists as well as continuo; a modern lute song is a lullaby. Two sopranos and a countertenor depict a paradisiacal dream world of “fairies in the forest,” accompanied by an improvising violin. Nonverbal sung chorales often shimmer or glower beneath spoken text. The full company claps out one number—“The men never talk about how they feel . . . they pretend to be machines”; in another, everyone drums on plastic buckets. An earsplitting techno-accompanied dance party turns into a raid and a wild rebellion by the “queens”—likely a reference to the Stonewall uprising. While music director Yshani Perinpanayagam occasionally conducts and plays piano and organ, she is an equal part of the acting ensemble in their games, rituals, dances and embraces.

The final “revolution” ends in victory, yet the darkness of the ending—a new ritual, in which these once-marginalized people brutalize one another in order to remember their painful past—suggests, unsurprisingly, that the war is not over.

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Mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey and jazz pianist Baptiste Trotignon revisited the repertory of their 2017 recording “Thousands of Miles” on Dec. 2 at Weill Recital Hall. Built around the songs of Kurt Weill, their program tracks his musical life from the caustic Bertolt Brecht shows of 1920s Berlin through his Nazi-forced emigration to France and then to America. Ms. Lindsey finds a compelling interpretive middle ground between raspy, Lotte Lenya-esque cabaret stylings and the smoothed-out renditions typical of opera singers. Aided by Mr. Trotignon’s jazzy accompaniments and improvised segues between songs, she leans on extremes of expression—a whisper for the bitter practicalities of a teenage prostitute’s life in “Nannas Lied”; the refrain of “Denn wie man sich bettet, so liegt man” from “Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny” slowed to an incantation; a build to an outcry of anguish in the chanson “Je ne t’aime pas.” The whiplash between bitter and sweet is arresting, but Ms. Lindsey’s velvety mezzo is never less than beautiful, and her enunciation of German, English and French texts is impeccably crisp. 

The program ably demonstrates how Weill adapted his music to his environment. Yet even in his more conventionally melodic scores for Broadway, the acerbity of his early style peeks through, as in the turbulent “Trouble Man” from “Lost in the Stars” (1949), his heartbreaking musical based on “Cry, the Beloved Country.” There are also early songs by Alexander Zemlinsky, Alma Mahler and Erich Korngold, members of the Viennese musical elite circa 1900 and, like Weill, ultimately emigrés to America. As Ms. Lindsey gives full rein to their lush, chromatic melodies—especially Mahler’s surprising, orgasmic “Hymne”—she conjures up a world and age far from the astringency of Weill, and one they all left behind.

Les Arts Florissants performed a concert in dialogue with an exhibition devoted to the Church of the Holy Sepulcher; Sonnambula, the museum’s ensemble-in-residence, collaborated with singer Davóne Tines to reconstruct a 1605 court entertainment.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Nov. 4, 2025 at 5:09 pm ET

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Singers of Les Arts Florissants. CHRIS SUNWOO/THE FRICK COLLECTION

New York

The Oct. 26 “Music at the Frick” concert by Les Arts Florissants, designed to be in dialogue with the collection’s current special exhibition, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures From the Terra Sancta Museum,” did just that. The church, in Jerusalem, was originally built in the fourth century on what is purported to be the site of Christ’s crucifixion, burial and resurrection. The exhibition encompasses more than 40 religious objects sent to it as gifts by Catholic monarchs in Europe and the Holy Roman Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries. The objects, which include richly embroidered vestments and lavishly sculpted monstrances, Eucharist thrones and sanctuary lamps made of jewel-studded precious metals, are eye-catchingly high Baroque. The music, most of it from the early 17th century, is more austere, demanding concentration and contemplation.

Paul Agnew, who directed and sang tenor in the six-voice ensemble, constructed the hour-long program as a meditation on the origin of the Holy Sepulcher. Each section—crucifixion, burial and resurrection—began with plainchant and continued with more elaborate settings of those and other sacred texts on the subjects. At the heart of the Good Friday and Holy Saturday sections were four responsories from Carlo Gesualdo’s 1611 collection for Holy Week. The word-painting in these arresting madrigal-style pieces, heightened by Gesualdo’s characteristic dissonances, is starkly immediate. Words like “cilicio” (sackcloth) jumped out of the texture; the rushing turbulence of “Vos fugam capietis” (Ye shall take flight), following the first mournful words of Jesus in Gethsemane in “Tristis est anima mea usque ad mortem,” graphically depicted the cowardice of his followers. Dynamics were also crucial: When Jesus cried out on the cross in the “Tenebrae” responsory, “exclamavit” was startlingly loud; his death, “emisit spiritum,” was barely audible.

The excellent singers embraced the storytelling structure and different composers added new qualities to the same texts. Antonio Lotti’s highly dramatic “Crucifixus à 6” contrasted with Claudio Monteverdi’s much earlier version—a dark, four-part setting sung by low voices, with deep bass notes on the concluding “sepultus est” (was buried). The Resurrection section of the program was more cheerful—a “Victimae paschali laudes” motet by the Spanish composer Fernando de las Infantas was jolly, and Jacques Mauduit’s French setting of Psalm 150 (the only non-Latin number) was a positively raucous celebration, its catchy rhythms depicting all the instruments praising God. The program ended on a note of jubilation with William Byrd’s bright-toned “Resurrexi.” It was a sly addition: The nationalities of most of the program’s composers reflected the origins of the exhibition’s objects, and although Byrd was a Catholic, England’s monarchs during nearly all of the period covered by the exhibition were most definitely not.

The Nov. 2 Frick concert, “A Black Masque,” was also an intriguing musical-historical exercise. Devised by Sonnambula—the Frick’s new ensemble-in-residence, directed by viol player and scholar Elizabeth Weinfield—and bass-baritone Davóne Tines, it was a creative reconstruction of the 1605 court entertainment “The Masque of Blackness” by poet Ben Jonson, designer Inigo Jones, and composer Alfonso Ferrabosco II. The original music, apart from one song, is lost, so the performers supplemented an abridged version of the text and stage directions with pieces by other composers of the period, even ingeniously setting some of Jonson’s song lyrics to them.

The masque’s subject is problematic: Some beautiful African water nymphs—portrayed by the queen and her ladies-in-waiting in blackface—wish to travel to Britain to be made white. The text is an elaborate explanation of the nymphs’ quest, told in the voices of Oceanus (Ocean), Niger (River), and Æthiopia (Moon); there are songs and dances before the nymphs plunge into the ocean to swim to Britannia, which, they have been told, is “Ruled by a sun, that to this height doth grace it: Whose beams shine day and night, and are of force / To blanch an Æthiop, and revive a corse.” The actual transformation occurs in Jonson’s subsequent masque.

The instrumental consort—three viols, two violins, harpsichord and lute/theorbo—offered an invigorating collection of Elizabethan and Jacobean hits by such contemporaneous composers as William Brade, William Lawes, John Dowland and Anthony Holborne. Elegantly played laments and dances were woven between the text sections, and sometimes skillfully repurposed as their background accompaniments. Ferrabosco’s surviving number, “Come Away, Come Away,” was a pleasantly simple tune, less sophisticated than John Coprario’s mourning song, “So Parted You,” in which the violins plaintively echoed the singer. Mr. Tines gave the texts suitably dramatic readings, but his singing voice proved heavy and overly emphatic for this Renaissance style.

It would be difficult to re-create the actual experience of the masque, given its elaborate stage setting, which called for blue-haired tritons (part human, part fish), sea monsters, and a giant shell to contain the performers, for starters. The program made the point about the racist subject without being excessively didactic; the one projection was a period drawing of a costumed lady in blackface. During the final song—Jonson’s text “Now, Dian,” deftly set to Dowland’s famous tune “Flow My Tears”—it slowly transformed into its negative image, so her face became white. It was a thought-provoking hour, offering new contextual insight into period music and art that we think we know.

The company opened its 50th season with a gleefully silly, powerfully sung production that set the 1825 comedy in an art gallery; in New York, Samoan tenor Pene Pati brought warmth and expressiveness to a recital at Park Avenue Armory.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Oct. 1, 2025 at 5:01 pm ET

A scene from the opera. PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

Philadelphia

Opera Philadelphia’s 50th-season opener, Rossini’s “Il Viaggio a Reims,” performed over the past two weekends at the Academy of Music, was appropriately tongue-in-cheek. Anthony Roth Costanzo, who took over as OP’s general director and president last year, is busy upending the prevailing opera-company model, starting with a “Pick Your Price” offer of every available ticket at $11 (or whatever amount above that you want to pay), and a season lineup studded with new, highly unconventional pieces. “Viaggio” itself teases tradition. Written in 1825 to celebrate the coronation of the French king Charles X, it is a comic pageant with the wispiest of plots: An international group of aristocrats is stuck in a spa hotel en route to the coronation without onward transportation. There are tantrums, squabbles and romantic jealousies, but it is mostly an opportunity for bravura singing.

Damiano Michieletto’s well-traveled production, first mounted at the Dutch National Opera in 2015, leans into the silliness. Staged in Philadelphia by Eleonora Gravagnola, it is set in a modern-day art gallery, where a traveling exhibit is being crated up for transfer to its next location. Some of the opera’s characters become figures from the art; others are gallery employees or visitors. The conceit cleverly integrates both worlds and is entertaining without making much more sense than the original. Paintings and sculptures come to life in various amusing ways, and the characters finally coalesce into François Gérard’s 1827 painting of Charles X’s coronation.

The score calls for a large cast with serious bel canto skills, and Opera Philadelphia’s lineup delivered. As Madama Cortese, here the gallery’s proprietor, soprano Brenda Rae looked splendidly Anna Wintour-ish in Carla Teti’s chic outfit, complete with elbow-length black gloves and dark glasses. As she scrabbled for a laser pointer in her large handbag, her coloratura was comically on point, though she was inaudible in her middle range during the cabaletta. Soprano Lindsey Reynolds emerged from a packing crate in 19th-century dishabille and threw a convincing diva fit as La Contessa di Folleville. Her clothes have been lost en route, and she furiously rejected all proffered substitutes. Il Conte di Libenskof (the excellent high tenor Alasdair Kent) and Don Alvaro (the witty baritone Alex DeSocio) drew their swords over La Marchesa Melibea (mezzo Katherine Beck).

Brenda Rae PHOTO: STEVEN PISANO

Everyone was soon corralled into a large picture frame for a typically ebullient Rossini ensemble as Don Profondo (bass-baritone Ben Brady), an antiquarian, hung price tags on them. Then, for a complete change of musical and dramatic pace, Alessandro Carletti’s lighting took on a mysterious dimness; offstage an exquisite lyric soprano (Emilie Kealani), accompanied by solo harp, offered a serene aria; and the figures from Canova’s sculpture “The Three Graces” came to life and struck balletic poses.

Other arias were staged using even more elaborate art-related gags. After the arrival of a new assortment of relatively modern paintings (by Frida Kahlo, Fernando Boteroand Keith Haring, among others) and actor avatars of their subjects, Lord Sidney (Scott Conner)—here an art restorer—sang his aria of unrequited love, full of surprising bass coloratura, to John Singer Sargent’s “Madame X,” who came to life and covered him with paint. Mr. Brady pulled off Don Profondo’s patter song “Medaglie incomparabili,” a tongue-twisting list of precious objects, as an auctioneer’s spiel. 

Some of the best singing of the night came from tenor Minghao Liu (as Il Cavaliere Belfiore) with his boasting yet playful wooing of the poet Corinna (Ms. Kealani), here a modern-day art student; to get past her indifference, he forces an unsuspecting gallery visitor, at sword point, to surrender his clothes and puts them on. The final parade of “national” songs was also cleverly handled: The characters, now appropriately costumed, stepped into a large frame, in front of a throne-room background, to perform. And during Ms. Kealani’s closing paean to Charles X, once again sensitively accompanied by the solo harp, the Gérard picture slowly assembled, with the painting itself finally projected onto the singers and Paulo Fantin’s set.

The chorus, usually engaged in packing or cleanup activities for the gallery, was also lively. Conductor Corrado Rovaris led a sprightly, transparent performance, full of Rossinian sparkle and verve, and the solo musicians, particularly the flutist, were as vivid and idiomatic as the singers.

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New York

The Park Avenue Armory’s recital series is a good place to catch interesting vocalists. Last week, the Samoan tenor Pene Pati made his North American solo recital debut with pianist Ronny Michael Greenberg. Mr. Pati, who has sung in many European houses, got a quick Metropolitan Opera debut this January with a few performances as the Duke in “Rigoletto”; given the warmth and expressiveness of the instrument on display at the Armory, I hope he’ll be back there soon.

The program included French, English and German repertoire. A pair of Henri Duparc chansons sounded too loud in the small Board of Officers room, but for Lili Boulanger’s “Clairières dans le ciel” Mr. Pati found a conversational intimacy rare in big lyric-tenor voices. The English selections were superbly communicative. Mr. Pati’s idiomatic eloquence in pieces by Benjamin Britten, evoking the darkness of the final verse of “The Last Rose of Summer” and the poignant storytelling of “The Choirmaster’s Burial,” made me want to hear him sing Captain Vere in the composer’s “Billy Budd.” His just-released recording of Neapolitan songs with the ensemble Il Pomo d’Oro is similarly surprising. Instead of the full-throated, Pavarotti-style belt that’s common in this repertoire, Mr. Pati makes a familiar song like “O sole mio” as gentle as a caress.

An adaptation of Michael Chabon’s novel about the creation of a comic-book hero at the outset of World War II struggled to come to life in the company’s season-opening production, directed by Bartlett Sher.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 23, 2025 at 5:22 pm ET

Andrzej Filończyk and Miles Mykkanen PHOTO: EVAN ZIMMERMAN / MET OPERA

Like many contemporary operas, “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” by Mason Bates, a commissioned work that opened the Metropolitan Opera season on Sunday evening, walks the line between novelty and tradition without embracing either. (Met commissions are typically given their world premieres elsewhere; “Kavalier & Clay” got its tryout in November 2024 at Indiana University’s Jacobs School of Music.) Librettist Gene Scheer distilled Michael Chabon’s sprawling, Pulitzer Prize-winning book from 2000 into a straightforward, primary-colored plot, losing much of its magical, elliptical atmosphere. Mr. Bates’s music illustrates the story rather than evoking the intense emotional journeys of its two protagonists.

This pair are teenage Jewish cousins. Joe Kavalier (Andrzej Filończyk) has made a dramatic escape from Prague (it is 1939) and taken refuge with his relatives in Brooklyn. A gifted artist, Joe teams up with his writer cousin Sam Clay (Miles Mykkanen) to create a comic-book hero inspired by his exploits: “The Escapist,” who fights Nazis and rescues the imprisoned and persecuted. His goal is to earn enough money to save his parents and sister from Nazi-overrun Prague. “The Escapist” is a wild success; the rescue is not, and Joe’s romance with Rosa (Sun-Ly Pierce) is a casualty.

Meanwhile, Sam tentatively explores his homosexual desires with Tracy (Edward Nelson), the hunky actor who plays The Escapist in its radio version, only to find himself a target of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. Most of this happens in just the first act—overlong at 90 minutes. In Act 2, which spans about three years in 55 minutes, the cousins work their way back from the painful discovery that the creation of an alternative world through art cannot alone solve terrible problems.

Mr. Bates’s strongest moments are the jazz-inflected, uptempo chorus scenes. The show first comes to life at the toy company where Sam is a copywriter, as he and Joe work to sell the boss on the comic-book idea, backed by a spirited ensemble of singing typists. The number’s catchy, repetitive structure (“Dime by dime”) is dramatically juxtaposed with a totally different repeated motif—Joe’s mother and another chorus sing a Hebrew prayer on a train to Auschwitz.

The arias and duets, which are almost always slowly paced and formless, lack that visceral, theatrical punch and do not musically distinguish one character from another. Exceptions are Joe’s lament when he finds out that his parents are dead (its repeated line is “Alone in the dark”) and the bluntness of the Nazi Gerhard (bass-baritone Craig Colclough) who tells the hallucinating Joe, “Bullets are all that matter.” Because of this, Sam’s gay awakening story, set against the Nazis and Holocaust, never comes into emotional focus and just makes the show feel longer. Also unsatisfying are some purely plot-driven scenes, such as a sequence in which Joe rescues the artist Salvador Dalí from a deep-sea diver costume. 

The orchestral writing, nicely handled by conductor Yannick Nézet-Séguin, can be colorful, though the ominous Wagner tubas become predictable after a while and the electronica for which Mr. Bates is best known is barely discernible.

The heroes of the evening are director Bartlett Sher; his set, lighting and video design collaborators 59 Studio; and costume designer Jennifer Moeller, who supply the speed, atmosphere and dramatic build missing in the music. Scenes switch effortlessly from Prague, with its shadowy bridge looming over the Moldau, to a Brooklyn tenement, a busy office, a tony art gallery, and the roof of the Empire State Building. Joe’s first drawings take shape on video screens; later, the Escapist comic-book stories scroll across them. The team dealt especially well with the interlocked scenes of Act 2, set as an ensemble with chorus: A turntable deftly alternated Joe’s experience as a soldier on the Western Front in Europe with life back at home where the comic-book company is making money and Sam and Rosa, in a union of convenience, are raising Rosa and Joe’s child on Long Island.

Mr. Filończyk, making his Met debut, displayed a dark, expressive baritone; it helped contrast the older Joe’s buried trauma and Sam’s yearnings, sung in Mr. Mykkanen’s more open, poignant tenor. Ms. Pierce’s soothing mezzo gave Rosa an anchoring presence; as Joe’s 14-year-old sister, Sarah, soprano Lauren Snouffer, also making her debut, was bright and affecting; and Mr. Nelson was a lively Tracy. Standouts in the large supporting cast included soprano Ellie Dehn as Joe’s mother and Amanda Batista as Helen, a perky radio actress. The Met chorus, directed by Tilman Michael, was excellent in its various incarnations.

The Met has committed itself to presenting several modern operas each season, featuring both its own commissions and pieces with track records in other theaters. It is an important project that has had mixed results so far. “Kavalier & Clay” skews toward the safe, to its detriment. The two contemporary operas that will have Met premieres in April and May—Kaija Saariaho’s “Innocence” (2021) and Gabriela Lena Frank’s “El Último Sueño de Frida y Diego” (2022)—are more adventurous and merit their turns on the country’s biggest opera stage.

The countertenor stars and sings in Charles Ludlam’s irreverent 1983 play about the legendary diva, directed by Eric Ting at New York’s Little Island.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Sept. 15, 2025 at 5:03 pm ET

Anthony Roth Costanzo in ‘Galas.’ PHOTO: NINA WESTERVELT

New York

The countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo has a seemingly endless appetite for work and risk—just last year, he took on the leadership of the faltering Opera Philadelphia and starred in a brilliantly eccentric version of Mozart’s “The Marriage of Figaro” in which he sang all the roles. An unusually deep and thoughtful passion for opera informs everything he does, so it seems appropriate that he is now performing at Little Island in the ultimate homage to the ultimate diva.

“Galas,” written by Charles Ludlam, is the lightly fictionalized story of Maria Callas; it was first presented in 1983 by Ludlam’s Ridiculous Theatrical Company with the author as the star. Ludlam didn’t sing in the show; the aria snippets came from Callas recordings. Mr. Costanzo, of course, does. We get a little of “Vissi d’arte” and “Casta diva” and he has added more excerpts, such as Charlotte’s “Letters” aria from “Werther” and Desdemona’s “Ave Maria” from “Otello,” which fit seamlessly into the evening. (The “Ave Maria,” hilariously, is used to help the title character upstage the pope at her private audience.)

Mr. Costanzo sings everything with finesse and brio, as one might expect. The revelation is his strength as a speaking actor. Channeling her distinctive accent and carriage, he’s remarkably believable as Galas/Callas in her many incarnations. Sometimes demure, often fiery, he conveys her drive, perfectionism and heartbreak, all without slipping into caricature or camp. Critical to the illusion is his delicate build, which is swathed in some truly fabulous costumes by Jackson Wiederhoeft and capped with spot-on wigs by Amanda Miller and makeup by James Kaliardos.

The play itself, even in director Eric Ting’s well-calibrated production, hasn’t aged well. At 100 minutes, the show feels long; its slapstick comedy routines grow tedious; and the gay transgressive energy that was exciting four decades ago is now predictable and routine. Seven scenes cover significant beats in Callas’s life, including her meeting with Giovanni (Carmelita Tropicana), the brick manufacturer who would become her husband and manager; the Rome Opera performance of “Norma” that she left after the first act (“The voice is slipping”), causing a national scandal; her love affair with the Greek shipping tycoon here named Aristotle Plato Socrates Odysseus, aka “Sock” (Caleb Eberhardt); her lonely final years after he married Jacqueline Kennedy.

Jeremy Rafal, Mary Testa and Austin Durant PHOTO: NINA WESTERVELT

It’s enacted in a cascade of comedy, with Galas as the relatively sane linchpin circled by a cast of deliberately overacting supporting players. There’s Bruna (Mary Testa), Galas’s maid, a former opera singer who offers career advice and makes oracular pronouncements; the two representatives of La Scala (Austin Durant and Jeremy Rafal) who grudgingly offer her contracts and enunciate the last “la” of La Scala with stuck-out tongues.

Gender fluidity is in the mix: Trans actress Samora la Perdida is both a wildly swishy Pope Sixtus VII (Hahnji Jang, who did the non-Costanzo costumes, provided a striptease-ready white papal robe and high lace-up white platform boots) and the predatory journalist Ilka Winterhalter, who thrills at the hot tip that Galas’s extreme weight loss was deliberately induced by a tapeworm. Ms. Tropicana, short and bedizened with a glittery fake mustache, makes Giovanni the quintessential troll; spurned by his wife at a masquerade party on Sock’s yacht, he puts on a clown costume and chokes out “Vesti la giubba” from “Pagliacci.” Mimi Lien’s set—a gilded catwalk—emphasizes the play’s operatic theatricality. So do Jiyoun Chang’s lighting, complete with explosive flashes and colors, and the recorded musical interpolations—Verdi’s “Dies irae” and the Scarpia chords from “Tosca” ring out as Galas vows revenge on her enemies.

Samora la Perdida PHOTO: NINA WESTERVELT

The cleverest aspect of the show is how it quickly switches tone from quasi-realism to high melodrama and back again. Mr. Costanzo plays these eruptions with appropriately operatic flair—the open-mouthed, silent scream when the news of Sock’s death arrives is an indelible picture—yet even in Galas’s most outrageous moments, we feel her humanity. The play’s principal theme is her loneliness, and while her final speech—“What do I do if I have no career?”— has the inevitable deadpan punchline—“And there’s nothing good on television tonight”—we remember a poignant earlier statement: “I hate freedom. I don’t belong to anyone.” Galas’s (fictional) suicide is a fully theatrical moment, à la “Madama Butterfly,” yet as Mr. Costanzo strips off the kimono and the wig before plunging in the dagger, we get why these operas, even at their most extreme, resonate with reality.

The upstate New York opera company’s 50th-anniversary season stretches from Puccini to a world premiere, and shines in stagings of Sondheim and Stravinsky.

By 

Heidi Waleson

Aug. 13, 2025 at 5:00 pm ET

John Riddle (left) and the cast of ‘Sunday in the Park With George.’ PHOTO: BRENT DELANOY/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

Cooperstown, N.Y. 

The Glimmerglass Festival, which celebrates its 50th anniversary this season (through Aug. 17), changed the face of American opera. Along with its fellow summer festivals in Santa Fe and St. Louis, Glimmerglass pushed the opera world to explore new and forgotten repertory, the cultivation of young singers, and nontraditional stagings of classic works. Glimmerglass has tweaked its formula over the decades; still based in the purpose-built, perfectly sized (918 seats) Alice Busch Opera Theater, it is now headed by Rob Ainsley.

To mark the occasion, the designer John Conklin, a company institution with more than 40 Glimmerglass shows to his credit, came out of retirement to craft an overall set for the season. He died at age 88 two weeks before the season opened, but his typically spare, red-hued backstage concept was a reminder that Glimmerglass knows how to economize.

The summer’s two best shows made the best use of it. Stephen Sondheim’s “Sunday in the Park With George” is about how artists see the new in the ordinary, and Ethan Heard’s seamless direction brought characters seated on the sidelines onto the stage as Seurat imagined his painting into life. In Act 2, unused standing flats became the backdrop for Greg Emetaz’s ingenious figure projections representing the 20th-century George in his frantic, juggling pursuit of patrons (“Putting It Together”). The second act of “Sunday” is often considered an inferior add-on to the perfection of Act 1; here, it was an essential twist, believably depicting how a successful but disillusioned artist finds his way back to inspiration.

John Riddle and Marina Pires, gifted musical-theater performers, were an intense pair as George and Dot/Marie; as the Old Lady, Luretta Bybee brought a touching frailty to “Beautiful”; the company’s Resident Artists (formerly known as Young Artists) filled most of the other roles in the large, lively cast. Beth Goldenberg’s costumes nicely differentiated the two eras; Michael Ellis Ingram was the astute conductor.

Aleksey Bogdanov and Adrian Kramer in ‘The Rake’s Progress.’ PHOTO: KAYLEEN BERTRAND/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

The company also shone in Stravinsky’s “The Rake’s Progress,” an enormously challenging score. The orchestra sounded crystalline and propulsive under conductor Joseph Colaneri, Glimmerglass’s music director, and the three leads were sensational. Adrian Kramer’s tenor grew bigger and richer as the eponymous Tom Rakewell sank ever-further into corruption; his clear enunciation of the brilliant English libretto by W.H. Auden and Chester Kallman was especially welcome. Lydia Grindatto brought an unusually velvety middle and low register to Tom’s savior, Anne Trulove, which gave her extra weight. Baritone Aleksey Bogdanov’s commanding baritone captured both the suave façade and the diabolical heart of Nick Shadow. Deborah Nansteel was an unsentimental Baba the Turk.

Director/choreographer Eric Sean Fogel’s smart staging animated Mr. Conklin’s set with a dancing and singing chorus, employed by Shadow to create Tom’s reality and his downfall. An updated 1950s setting was suggested by hard-edged, color field images—Ellsworth Kelly-style—and Lynly A. Saunders’s clever costumes. Some chairs, a movable ladder/platform, and Robert Wierzel’s lighting did the rest. 

Mikaela Bennett (center) and company in ‘The House on Mango Street.’ PHOTO: KAYLEEN BERTRAND/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

Glimmerglass has offered some satisfying world premieres—the finest was Jeanine Tesori’s “Blue” in 2019—but Derek Bermel’s “The House on Mango Street” is not one of them. Its source is the revered 1984 novel by Sandra Cisneros, who collaborated on the libretto with the composer, but the book’s elegant mosaic of subtle, knife-like vignettes about growing up in a Latino neighborhood in Chicago has been expanded beyond recognition. The bloated result is a mawkish, didactic piece that tries to encompass everything from child abuse to gang behavior, guns, immigration, adolescent yearnings, and the writer’s responsibility to her community.

Mr. Bermel’s pastiche score incorporates Latin dances (with echoes of “In the Heights”) and rap (for the local boys and the girls who occasionally stand up to them). It is straightforwardly tonal, and there’s even a dash of Mahler in the interminable culminating sequence, a shamanic ritual that heals Esperanza (the protagonist) after she is raped.

Mikaela Bennett, a big-voiced soprano, was a sympathetic Esperanza; Taylor-Alexis DuPont was a spitfire Sally, a neighborhood teen with a complicated life. Most of the other characters in the large cast were played by Resident Artists; one standout voice in the texture was the resonant mezzo of Kendra Faith Beasley as Shamana 3. Nicole Paiement was the efficient conductor. Chía Patiño’s staging kept things moving around and inside the frameworks of two row houses; Erik Teague’s costumes evoked the neighborhood; and Mr. Emetaz’s projections cleverly shaped buildings and the like out of lines of type—Esperanza’s stories.

Michelle Bradley in ‘Tosca.’ PHOTO: BRENT DELANOY/THE GLIMMERGLASS FESTIVAL

It might be best to draw a veil over Puccini’s “Tosca.” The three principal singers were loud and unsubtle. With her heavy dramatic soprano, Michelle Bradley sounded ready to sing Brünnhilde and her pitch was uncertain at times; tenor Yongzhao Yu’s wiry, metallic timbre made for an unsatisfying Cavaradossi; and bass-baritone Greer Grimsley’s Scarpia was all brute and gravel. Mr. Colaneri’s orchestra blasted away with them.

The staging—the most elaborate of the four—matched their tone. Director Louisa Proske envisioned a contemporary setting in a troubled time; during the intermission, instructions on how to resist authoritarianism were projected on the black drop curtain. The Act 1 church was under renovation; its scaffolding and plastic sheeting were ripped down during the “Te Deum” to reveal a modernist Piéta that bled during the final chords.

Scarpia’s Act 2 lair was an ugly underground bunker. There was a lot of physical violence—Cavaradossi’s hand was smashed with a hammer during his first interrogation—though fortunately, the main torture still happened offstage. Tosca sang “Vissi d’arte” in the bathroom. She was unable to escape the bunker after killing Scarpia and spent Act 3 there as well (her reunion with Cavaradossi was imagined) and she shot herself with the gun purloined from Scarpia’s safe, her blood smearing the white tile wall. Tosca’s costumes—a bright yellow coat; a shimmering lamé concert gown—set her off from the rest of the cast in their grim attire, all designed by Kaye Voyce. Ms. Proske’s authoritarianism concept is intriguing, but without singers who could convey what’s at stake, it was assault without Puccinian pathos.