NY park festival to feature one-man Figaro and a gay mountain lion
NewsDetails from the Little Island park festival run by media mogul Barry Diller and Broadway boss Scott Rudin include a production of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in which countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo will sing all the leading roles, and a staging of Henry Hoke’s novel Open Throat, about a mountain lion who identifies as queer and lives in the hills around Los Angeles.
Could you ever make it up? These are testing Times.
Sounds fun!
Great….add that to the bucket list of things I’d never want to see live.
I’m sure the organizers are devastated.
May I know what you have against countertenors?
Why nothing at all…takes real…ahem…balls to do what they do…
How excruciatingly witty! Are still living in eighteenth-century Rome?
Actually, it sounds brilliant. As the NY Times article states, they want to program performances that are creative, different, and (without saying as such) would otherwise probably not get funded or see the light of day. There’s something to be said for this – NYC doesn’t need another “Mostly Mozart” festival or something similarly tired – and yes, I know that MM is no longer. Certainly much of this new festival is not going to artistically succeed, but my best guess is that some of it will and they’ll be the performances that will be greatly remembered. Kudos to Barry Diller and Scott Rudin for doing something bold, original, and without worries for the bottom line. The arts need a whole lot more of that kind of support!
Yes I wholeheartedly agree! I will take leave from my dreary job & plunge into the world of real excitement & creativity! And finally watching a gay lion has always been one of my romantic dreams!
Sally
If I were a billionaire with a $100M to blow every summer on a personal fantasy project, I’d hope that I’d not be as unimaginative as this. But who knows, when you’re rich, people don’t tend to say no, even to your stupidest ideas.
Costanza is WAY overexposed by now
Mr. Costanza is MAKING a career as an artist and administrator, not sitting around waiting for opera companies to deign to find properties that fit his special vocal category. Bravo to him and best of luck.
We need more of his ilk who are positive and creative, not the naysayers who populate this site.
Apparently, we are trying to out Britain, Britain.
TRULY – they have run out of new things to invent…