Last summer at Little Island Anthony Roth Costanzo performed a solo, singing all parts of "The Marriage of Figaro," even swallowing a scoping camera to reveal his vocal cords. This summer he plays the histrionic diva in Charles Ludlam's 1983 camp melodrama, a role inspired by Maria Callas, matching Callas's glamour and smoky timbre. Jeff Ross's solo show Take a Banana for the Ride pairs roast comedy with reflections on loss, drawing lessons from personal bereavements, including his mother's death from leukemia. The pop-rock sisters Haim began as a family cover band and coalesced into a synthesized, referential trio.
Last summer's season at Little Island scored a hit with Anthony Roth Costanzo's glittering version of "The Marriage of Figaro," in which the countertenor sang all the parts in Mozart's masterpiece, from basso suitor to twittering soubrette. That show was, in its way, radically exposing: at one point, Costanzo swallowed a scoping camera so that the audience could see his vocal cords flexing as his voice changed registers.
This summer, Costanzo becomes just one character: the histrionic diva at the center of Charles Ludlam's camp melodrama from 1983, directed by Eric Ting, inspired by Maria Callas, whose operatic life rivalled the roles she played onstage. The part should fit the extravagantly gifted Costanzo like a long buttoned glove; his dark glamour recalls Callas's mid-century fabulousness, and his extraordinary sound echoes her own smoky timbre, the resonance of a voice and a personality on fire.
Two disparate, if not duelling, impulses inhabit "Take a Banana for the Ride," a solo show written and performed by the comedian Jeff Ross. One is the roasting he's famous for, sometimes directed at audience members (latecomers beware) and sometimes at himself ("a Jeff Bezos blow-up doll"). But barbed humor proves to be only the skin encasing Ross's true purpose: gleaning life lessons from the deaths of loved ones, beginning in adolescence when his mother passed away from leukemia.
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