Opera Philadelphia: Behind Its Comeback

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’re miraculous.

“Tonight’s opera is a living, breathing exquisite corpse,” Costanzo, the general director and president of Opera Philadelphia, told an audience at the Academy of Music earlier this year. “And you are going to be the first to experience it.”

Costanzo was introducing “Complications in Sue,” 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’s slogan for the season goes, “Opera, but different.”

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, “This is what you can do in this role.”

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’s financial crisis. If he can keep up the momentum, he may even be able to usher in a kind of golden age, too.

“I’m thrilled to see Opera Philadelphia thriving again,” said Rene Orth, who contributed a scene to “Complications in Sue” and served as the company’s composer in residence before Costanzo’s arrival. “I’m excited to see what Anthony is doing. He’s really a visionary.”

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’s marketing and press departments by day, and performed onstage by night.

When he took over Opera Philadelphia, shortly before the 2024-25 season, it was on a path to bankruptcy. “We had 12 weeks to raise $4 million,” Costanzo said, “or that was it.”

The programming was already set, and he didn’t want to cancel any of it. Nor should he have. Opera Philadelphia had a rich recent history, under David B. Devan’s 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’s unsettling and brilliant “The Listeners.”

Marc Scorca, who retired from his decades-long post as president and chief executive of Opera America last fall, said that while Opera Philadelphia’s experimental reputation brought in “some great media coverage,” it didn’t work financially. “Anthony inherited a company that had done a lot,” he added, “but it was fragile.”

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’s tickets. “For my first year,” he said, “we were about three weeks away from stopping payroll at any point, so it was just a constant race to cover that.”

Through what he called “creative fund-raising,” 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.

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’s first season to the next, he doubled the number of performances, expanded Opera Philadelphia’s board and set up a reserve fund (which is more liquid than an endowment). Now, he said, “we’re maybe four months away from stopping payroll.”

Costanzo is not a career arts administrator, nor does he have the bona fides of a business school degree. “The biggest qualification I have is that my parents are both psychologists,” he said, and psychology is most of his work. “One miscalculation in fund-raising generally is, ‘We’re doing this great thing, you should support it.’ My approach is very much: ‘What are you interested in? What are you looking to achieve? And how can I make what I am doing do that for you?’”

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 “Complications in Sue” and its other premiere of the season, Gregory Spears’s “Sleepers Awake.”

“I think,” Orth said of Costanzo, “that he’s very aware that Philadelphia is really proud of Philadelphia, and that Opera Philadelphia is a Philadelphia company.”

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’s “Satyagraha” at the Paris Opera. (“I have never enjoyed singing more,” he said, “because every other second is so full, and being onstage is so liberating and beautiful.”) He also announced that he had somehow found time to write a book, “Countertenor,” which Farrar, Straus and Giroux will publish in October, accompanied by an album of the same name from Nonesuch.

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, like the vocalist Davóne Tines and the director Zack Winokur. Still, the five productions of this season were mixed at best.

There was admirable ambition, and an adventurous aesthetic, in Damiano Michieletto’s staging of “Il Viaggio a Reims,” 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 “The Seasons.” 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.

“Complications” was the real triumph of the season, revealing Michael R. Jackson, better known in the theater world, 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 Cécile McLorin Salvant. Bond, in a parade of costumes by Jonathan Anderson, was joined by four excellent, shape-shifting singers.

Spears’s “Sleepers Awake” put a hypnotic spin on the Sleeping Beauty tale, showcasing the company’s chorus throughout. And this month the season ended on a high with “The Black Clown,” 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.

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 “Complications” and wrote, “Opera is crazy, dog.” In asking around, Costanzo found that price made a difference, to a degree. “In my head, I thought it was, ‘I’ve always wanted to come to the opera, but I could never afford it,’” he said. “That is not the answer. What I realized is actually much better, which is, ‘I didn’t know the tickets were $11, and I thought we’d try it.’ And that’s where you get people.”

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’s rarity “Mitridate, re di Ponto” and Verdi’s “Aida,” but also the local premiere of Courtney Bryan’s new opera, “Suddenly Last Summer,” the world premiere of Luke Styles and Alan McKendrick’s “Sitcom” and a staging of the Gershwins’ “Let ’Em Eat Cake,” a presidential satire not so lightly pointed at the Trump administration.

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 “Aida” on a grand scale at the Metropolitan Opera. “I’ll be curious to see how they do it,” he added.

One detail about the rollout was hard to ignore: The news release’s headline, “Anthony Roth Costanzo Announces Opera Philadelphia’s 2026-2027 Season,” placed Costanzo’s name before the company’s. However unintentionally, it harked back to the days when Beverly Sills, another big artist personality, was running New York City Opera in its prime.

“I did not make that decision, for the record,” Costanzo said. “But I did see it.” At this stage, though, it makes sense. His network of fellow artists and deep-pocketed supporters has been crucial to the company’s drastic turnaround. Most performances open with a carnival barker introduction by Costanzo; during the N.F.L. season he even came out in an Eagles jersey. Putting a face to Opera Philadelphia, he has established a relationship with the audiences that would be the envy of his peers across the country.

“I was able to mobilize people I knew in a different way because my personal brand, if I can talk about it that way, has a certain value,” Costanzo said. “But what I am keenly aware of is that I am trying to create a sustainable model for this company, and that means it cannot hinge entirely on me. It has to transfer to the brand. And that’s a process.”