Anthony Roth Costanzo was explaining the idea of an exquisite corpse, the Surrealist party game in which artists blindly collaborate to create an image, no one knowing what the others are doing. The results can be hilariously bizarre, but sometimes they\u2019re miraculous.<\/p>\n
\u201cTonight\u2019s opera is a living, breathing exquisite corpse,\u201d Costanzo, the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, told an audience at the Academy of Music earlier this year. \u201cAnd you are going to be the first to experience it.\u201d<\/p>\n
Costanzo was introducing \u201cComplications in Sue<\/a>,\u201d a vehicle for the cabaret doyenne Justin Vivian Bond. Told in 10 scenes, it was written by 10 composers, with as much isolation and unpredictability as those Surrealist sketchers. It promised to be, as the company\u2019s slogan for the season goes, \u201cOpera, but different.\u201d<\/p>\n It could have been a mess, but instead was one of the most fascinating, exhilarating, even moving opera productions of the year. Costanzo, who had commissioned the show and assembled its many parts with daunting speed, later said he felt some pride that night and thought to himself, \u201cThis is what you can do in this role.\u201d<\/p>\n Balancing his job with a full-time career as a countertenor, Costanzo is still getting settled in at Opera Philadelphia; he just concluded his second season there this month. But in that time, he has channeled his characteristic tirelessness and derring-do into reversing the company\u2019s financial crisis. If he can keep up the momentum, he may even be able to usher in a kind of golden age, too.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019m thrilled to see Opera Philadelphia thriving again,\u201d said Rene Orth, who contributed a scene to \u201cComplications in Sue\u201d and served as the company\u2019s composer in residence before Costanzo\u2019s arrival. \u201cI\u2019m excited to see what Anthony is doing. He\u2019s really a visionary.\u201d<\/p>\n Costanzo, 44, has long been known as resourceful. As an undergraduate at Princeton University, he gathered enough money to produce a movie by hitting up different departments at the school; he also got the film director James Ivory involved. He has produced his own theatrical recitals and brought in collaborators like the artist George Condo, the designer Raf Simons and the actor Tilda Swinton. At the Metropolitan Opera, he has strategized with the company\u2019s marketing and press departments by day, and performed onstage by night.<\/p>\n When he took over Opera Philadelphia, shortly before the 2024-25 season, it was on a path to bankruptcy. \u201cWe had 12 weeks to raise $4 million,\u201d Costanzo said, \u201cor that was it.\u201d<\/p>\n The programming was already set, and he didn\u2019t want to cancel any of it. Nor should he have. Opera Philadelphia had a rich recent history, under David B. Devan\u2019s leadership, of productions and new works at the cutting edge. First up that season, for example, was the American premiere of Missy Mazzoli and Royce Vavrek\u2019s unsettling and brilliant \u201cThe Listeners.\u201d<\/p>\n Marc Scorca, who retired from his decades-long post as president and chief executive of Opera America last fall, said that while Opera Philadelphia\u2019s experimental reputation brought in \u201csome great media coverage,\u201d it didn\u2019t work financially. \u201cAnthony inherited a company that had done a lot,\u201d he added, \u201cbut it was fragile.\u201d<\/p>\n When Costanzo started, the company had a budget of $11 million, was $4 million in debt and had sold only 30 percent of the coming season\u2019s tickets. \u201cFor my first year,\u201d he said, \u201cwe were about three weeks away from stopping payroll at any point, so it was just a constant race to cover that.\u201d<\/p>\n Through what he called \u201ccreative fund-raising,\u201d Costanzo ended his first year with a $1.5 million surplus. He started a comprehensive campaign with the goal to raise $33 million in three years. (As of now, it has brought in $27.6 million.) When a former donor whose Philadelphia apartment had been on the market for two years gifted it to the company, Costanzo took out a $500,000 loan against it, stayed there whenever in town, then after 18 months sold it for more than the value of the loan.<\/p>\n In his most sensational early move, he created Pick Your Price, a ticketing system that lowered the cost of admission to as little as $11. The entire 2024-25 season sold out within weeks. More recently, the company introduced Opera Pass, a monthly or annual membership that allows early access to Pick Your Price seats; 42 percent of those in the program bought tickets to every production. From Costanzo\u2019s first season to the next, he doubled the number of performances, expanded Opera Philadelphia\u2019s board and set up a reserve fund (which is more liquid than an endowment). Now, he said, \u201cwe\u2019re maybe four months away from stopping payroll.\u201d<\/p>\n Costanzo is not a career arts administrator, nor does he have the bona fides of a business school degree. \u201cThe biggest qualification I have is that my parents are both psychologists,\u201d he said, and psychology is most of his work. \u201cOne miscalculation in fund-raising generally is, \u2018We\u2019re doing this great thing, you should support it.\u2019 My approach is very much: \u2018What are you interested in? What are you looking to achieve? And how can I make what I am doing do that for you?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n That same approach, he added, has proved essential in union negotiations, as well as in developing partnerships with other institutions in town. He has programmed with the Rodin Museum and worked with the developers TF Cornerstone to produce performances around the famous organ in the Wanamaker Building. With the Four Seasons, he put together a pricey evening of food and music at Jean-Georges Philadelphia. Through Temple University, Opera Philadelphia will be able to release commercial recordings of \u201cComplications in Sue\u201d and its other premiere of the season, Gregory Spears\u2019s \u201cSleepers Awake.\u201d<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cI think,\u201d Orth said of Costanzo, \u201cthat he\u2019s very aware that Philadelphia is really proud of Philadelphia, and that Opera Philadelphia is a Philadelphia company.\u201d<\/p>\n So far, Costanzo has also maintained his singing career; he regularly took Opera Philadelphia in France while starring in a new production of Philip Glass\u2019s \u201cSatyagraha\u201d at the Paris Opera. (\u201cI have never enjoyed singing more,\u201d he said, \u201cbecause every other second is so full, and being onstage is so liberating and beautiful.\u201d) He also announced that he had somehow found time to write a book, \u201cCountertenor,\u201d<\/a> which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in October, accompanied by an album of the same name from Nonesuch.<\/p>\n If Opera Philadelphia has fallen short, it has been in the work itself. Even Costanzo has acknowledged that the company has had failures. It has a talented music director, Corrado Rovaris, and a skilled chorus. And Costanzo has been able to enlist artists from his circle of collaborators in the American Modern Opera Company<\/a>, like the vocalist Dav\u00f3ne Tines and the director Zack Winokur. Still, the five productions of this season were mixed at best.<\/p>\n There was admirable ambition, and an adventurous aesthetic, in Damiano Michieletto\u2019s staging of \u201cIl Viaggio a Reims<\/a>,\u201d but not the high level of artistry needed to support, or even lift, its vision. Costanzo performed with the company in December, in a Vivaldi pasticcio about climate crisis called \u201cThe Seasons.<\/a>\u201d With artists like Winokur, the choreographer Pam Tanowitz and the playwright Sarah Ruhl involved, it had a lot of potential, but ended up a confused and thin slog.<\/p>\n \u201cComplications<\/a>\u201d was the real triumph of the season, revealing Michael R. Jackson, better known in the theater world,<\/a> as a writer worthy of the next great opera libretto. And among the 10 composers were artists deserving of larger commissions: Andy Akiho, for example, and Alistair Coleman and C\u00e9cile McLorin Salvant. Bond, in a parade of costumes by Jonathan Anderson, was joined by four excellent, shape-shifting singers.<\/p>\n Spears\u2019s \u201cSleepers Awake<\/a>\u201d put a hypnotic spin on the Sleeping Beauty tale, showcasing the company\u2019s chorus throughout. And this month the season ended on a high with \u201cThe Black Clown<\/a>,\u201d an adaptation of the Langston Hughes monologue, starring Tines (who was a creator of the show), with infectious music by Michael Schachter, clever direction by Winokur and invigorating choreography by Chanel DaSilva. A work of restless curiosity, passion and sheer charisma, its overwhelming force has only continued to gather since its premiere seven years ago.<\/p>\n This season, 60 percent of audience members were first-time ticket buyers. On Instagram, one of them posted a photo of the curtain call at \u201cComplications\u201d and wrote, \u201cOpera is crazy, dog.\u201d In asking around, Costanzo found that price made a difference, to a degree. \u201cIn my head, I thought it was, \u2018I\u2019ve always wanted to come to the opera, but I could never afford it,\u2019\u201d he said. \u201cThat is not the answer. What I realized is actually much better, which is, \u2018I didn\u2019t know the tickets were $11, and I thought we\u2019d try it.\u2019 And that\u2019s where you get people.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently, Opera Philadelphia announced its 2026-27 season, the first that Costanzo has planned without scrambling and calling in favors. It is a blend of familiar and fresh, of traditional and experimental: Mozart\u2019s rarity \u201cMitridate, re di Ponto\u201d and Verdi\u2019s \u201cAida,\u201d but also the local premiere of Courtney Bryan\u2019s new opera, \u201cSuddenly Last Summer,\u201d the world premiere of Luke Styles and Alan McKendrick\u2019s \u201cSitcom\u201d and a staging of the Gershwins\u2019 \u201cLet \u2019Em Eat Cake,\u201d a presidential satire not so lightly pointed at the Trump administration.<\/p>\n Scorca said that he saw the season lineup as seeking a balance: attracting media attention and new audiences, while pleasing traditional donors, who could just as easily ride a train up to New York to see something like \u201cAida\u201d on a grand scale at the Metropolitan Opera. \u201cI\u2019ll be curious to see how they do it,\u201d he added.<\/p>\n