Where countertenor meets counter-culture

By Jessica Robinson

In a genre-colliding evening of song, cabaret superstar Justin Vivian Bond and Metropolitan Opera countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo, two unlikely collaborators, join together to celebrate their differences in “Only An Octave Apart” at Brooklyn’s St. Ann’s Warehouse beginning Tuesday.

Opening at Brooklyn’s St Ann’s Warehouse September 21 and running through October 3, the evening marks St Ann’s first performances in front of a full audience since the onset of the pandemic.

Bond, a Tony-nominated transgender political activist, has been declared “the greatest cabaret artist of [their] generation” by the New Yorker; The New York Times called world-class opera singer Costanzo, 20 years Bond’s junior, “a vocally and dramatically fearless countertenor.”

The two have been friends since 2011 after meeting at one of Bond’s shows at Joe’s Pub. It wasn’t long before Bond invited Costanzo, 39, to appear as a guest in their next performance. Peripatetic schedules kept them from deeper collaboration before Covid-19’s arrival, giving them the time to begin researching pop songs that had classical reverberations.

“Opera may now be perceived as normative and elitist, but it has a wild lineage as both an interdisciplinary and popular, zeitgeist-driving form—not to mention one whose popularity was rooted in the sex-symbol status of castrated men,” Costanzo tells Opera Wire. “What I have always tried to do, and what I think this show can excel at, is to drop some breadcrumbs for people who are a gateway audience.”

In a collision of high and low vocal pitches, diverse performance styles and varying degrees of camp, the two performers will present an evening of genre-bending songs ranging from historical to hysterical.

There will be arias and there will be show tunes and there will be everything in between. Take the show opener, “There are Fairies at the Bottom of our Garden,” a parlor song that has been sung by divas as diverse as early-twentieth-century opera star Amelita Galli-Curci, actors Beatrice Lillie and Julie Andrews, and impersonator Michael Aspinall, who performed in drag as the Surprising Soprano throughout the 1970s and ‘80s.

Shifting emotional gears from playful to melancholy, “Dido’s Lament,” an aria typically sung by a mezzo-soprano whose character is committing suicide, is next. As Dido sings the heart-breaking aria “when I am laid in earth,” her body slips from the planet on a descending, chromatic, scale. In the St. Ann’s performance, the aria has morphed into a protest song, a lament for our dying planet.

“St. Ann’s Warehouse,” Costanzo tells Out Voices, “is the perfect place to formally introduce this work to audiences. There are very few places with more history and panache, when it comes to presenting great concerts with malleability and theatricality, than St. Ann’s.”

Look no further than “Walk Like An Egyptian,” the Bangels’ tacky-in-hindsight 1986 Billboard No. 1 smash. Surprisingly, the song became something of a political hot potato in the early aughts, and was even included on a list of records to be avoided by the BBC during the Gulf War—and totally banned by Clear Channel Communications following 9/11.

From countertenor to counter-culture, “Only An Octave Apart” highlights surprising parallels between Bond’s and Costanzo’s respective milieux. Whether invoking mythology or nature, romance or radical compassion, the two chart new waters between opera and politically subversive cabaret—two art forms that “have been kept alive for generations by queens,” says Bond.

Even the title of the show, “Only An Octave Apart,” takes its cues from another genre-crossing pair: comedienne Carol Burnett and opera sensation Beverly Sills, who famously opened their 1976 television special at the Metropolitan Opera with a duet of the same name.

Of course, classically-influenced pop music is not a new idea. Billy Joel’s “This Night,” for instance, is inspired by his love of Beethoven’s Pathetique Sonata. Even Elvis Presley caught the classic bug with “It’s Now or Never,” inspired by the Neapolitan song, “O Sole Mio.”

Collaborating with Bond and Costanzo is a dream-team of designers and musicians, including much-lauded British fashion icon Jonathan Anderson, Oscar and Grammy Award nominee, Thomas Bartlett, as music director, and Nico Muhly as song arranger.

And St. Ann’s Warehouse—located in a renovated tobacco warehouse on Dumbo’s waterfront, in the heart of Brooklyn Bridge Park—is itself a performing arts space known for its innovative, multi-disciplinary productions from around the world.

In “Only an Octave Apart,” their queer identities (Costanzo is openly gay) are uniquely revealed through their interpretations of classical, pop, and hybrids of the two, making the gendered history of the music both personal—and playful.

“We both chose art forms that were sort of sleepy at best and calcified at their worst,” Bond tells BOMB magazine in a recent interview. “With all humility, I feel like I’ve done my part to reinvigorate cabaret.”

And Costanzo is arguably modernizing our understanding of opera.

“Opera brought together fashion in the form of costumes, and visual art in the form of set design, and music and drama, which are opera’s foundation,” he says. “Opera can appeal to very different people in our world today—if they are given access.”