Performances Added for Justin Vivian Bond & Anthony Roth Costanzo's ONLY AN OCTOVE APART

Renowned fashion designer Jonathan Anderson has joined the star-studded Only an Octave Apart team as costume designer.

By: Chloe Rabinowitz Aug. 09, 2021

Performances Added for Justin Vivian Bond & Anthony Roth Costanzo's ONLY AN OCTOVE APART

St. Ann's Warehouse is making a momentous reopening to full-capacity audiences this fall with Only an Octave Apart, a theatrical concert in which two iconic performers, Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo, join forces, subverting distinctions between high and low and juxtaposing their vocal pitches, performance styles, repertoires, and degrees of camp. Today the Brooklyn waterfront theater adds two performances to the run (making for a 12-night world premiere, September 21 - October 3) and reveals the full dream team of designers and musicians collaborating with Bond, Costanzo, director Zack Winokur (The Black Clown), and music director Thomas Bartlett (Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Florence Welch and the Broadway-bound The Great Gatsby) to stage and perform the show.

Justin Vivian Bond has garnered an OBIE Award, a Bessie Award, a Tony Award nomination, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award. The New York Times describes Anthony Roth Costanzo, GRAMMY Award nominee, Musical America's 2019 Vocalist of the Year, and the exquisite star of Phillip Glass' Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera, as a "vocally brilliant and dramatically fearless countertenor." In Only an Octave Apart, they express their queer identities through unique interpretations of classical, pop, and hybrids of the two, making the gendered history of the music their plaything. Whether invoking mythology or nature, romance or radical compassion, Bond and Costanzo carve new pathways between opera and politically subversive cabaret-two art forms that, as Bond puts it, "have been kept alive for generations by queens"-and allow old works to reveal surprising new stories.

Costanzo explains, "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. 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."

Bond says, "Cabaret is really intimate and spontaneous and dangerous because you don't know what's going to happen, whereas opera at its best is very calculated. There are so many people onstage that every piece of the puzzle has to fit perfectly. So in our work together, Anthony and I get to bring elements of both of those things so it loosens up the opera part a bit and recontextualizes it and, for me, it gets me into a more formalized, practiced way of performing. I think it brings out the best, and something new, in both of us."

Bond and Costanzo have been each other's "friends and groupies" since they were introduced a decade ago when Costanzo caught a performance by Bond at Joe's Pub-and, soon after, performed as a guest in Bond's next appearance there. They have long wanted to join their distinct styles in a Julie and Carol at Carnegie Hall/Sills and Burnett at the Met-inspired performance. During the pandemic, across two development workshops at the Fisher Center at Bard, they researched echoes of classical music in pop. They ultimately selected a repertoire of songs that can elevate, deliciously debase, and thematically elucidate one another, such as Purcell's 17th century aria "Dido's Lament" and Dido's early 2000s radio hit "White Flag," and Akhnaten and the Bangles' "Walk Like an Egyptian."

Zack Winokur says of Only an Octave Apart, "One of the things that's curious about this show is when you think about Viv and Anthony, you love them both, but it's sort of hard to imagine what they might sound like or perform like together-and it turns out it's a real 1 + 1 = 3 moment. They're both their own sublime entities, but they're so complementary in being extremely sophisticated storytellers with their voices in completely different ways, both icons doing deeply queer, subversive work outside the mainstream of their respective genres. I have never cried or laughed as much or as hard in any rehearsal process in my life."

To stage the genre-colliding Only an Octave Apart, Winokur is collaborating with a team of designers with aptly expansive bodies of work, including set designer Carlos Soto (Solange, Robert Wilson, Lucinda Childs), lighting designer John Torres (Taylor Mac, Robert Wilson, Hamlet directed by Yaël Farber), and sound designer David Schnirman (Lou Reed, David Byrne, Rufus Wainwright).

St. Ann's Warehouse has announced today that the renowned fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, for his eponymous label, JW Anderson, and for the Spanish luxury house for which he is creative director, LOEWE, has joined the star-studded Only an Octave Apart team as costume designer. Anderson has achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success for his collections. In 2019, Anderson was named trustee to the board of London's Victoria & Albert Museum, one of the world's leading museums of art, design, and performance. Only an Octave Apart is his first-ever stage production.

Music director Thomas Bartlett, on piano, will lead a band of musicians including Claudia Chopek (Natasha, Pierre, and the Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway, Justin Vivian Bond) on violin, Kate Spingarn (Harry Connick, Jr. - A Celebration of Cole Porter, Kinky Boots on Broadway) on cello, Doug Wieselman (Anohni, Lou Reed, Laurie Anderson) on guitar and reeds, Parker Ramsay (recently acclaimed for his recording of The Goldberg Variations, Nico Muhly) on harp, and Alex Sopp (yMusic, St. Vincent, The National) on flute. They will perform new arrangements of the songs by Nico Muhly (The Glass Menagerie on Broadway, Two Boys at the Metropolitan Opera).

Costanzo describes St. Ann's Warehouse as "the perfect place" to formally introduce this work to audiences, "because 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."

Details will soon be announced for the Only an Octave Apart album on Decca Records, produced by Bartlett, that will follow the performances.

Performance Schedule, Tickets, and COVID-19 Protocol

Performances of Only an Octave Apart take place September 21-25 and September 28-October 2 at 7:30pm, and on September 26 and October 3 at 5pm.

Tickets start at $40 and are on sale now at stannswarehouse.org and 718.254.8779.

To reach full capacity safely, ID and proof of full vaccination will be required of all audience members. St. Ann's Warehouse will be following CDC, New York State, and New York City recommendations for audience members to wear masks when attending indoor events. Visit the St. Ann's Warehouse Health & Safety page for more information.

St. Ann's Warehouse is located in Brooklyn Bridge Park, at 45 Water Street|DUMBO|Brooklyn, NY 11201.

St. Ann's Warehouse makes a momentous reopening to full-capacity audiences this fall with Only an Octave Apart, a theatrical concert in which two iconic performers, Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo, join forces, subverting distinctions between high and low and juxtaposing their vocal pitches, performance styles, repertoires, and degrees of camp. Today the Brooklyn waterfront theater adds two performances to the run (making for a 12-night world premiere, September 21 - October 3) and reveals the full dream team of designers and musicians collaborating with Bond, Costanzo, director Zack Winokur (The Black Clown), and music director Thomas Bartlett (Sufjan Stevens, Rufus Wainwright, Florence Welch and the Broadway-bound The Great Gatsby) to stage and perform the show.

Justin Vivian Bond has garnered an OBIE Award, a Bessie Award, a Tony Award nomination, and an Ethyl Eichelberger Award, and has been named "the greatest cabaret artist of [their] generation" by The New Yorker. The New York Times describes Anthony Roth Costanzo, GRAMMY Award nominee, Musical America's 2019 Vocalist of the Year, and the exquisite star of Phillip Glass' Akhnaten at the Metropolitan Opera, as a "vocally brilliant and dramatically fearless countertenor." In Only an Octave Apart, they express their queer identities through unique interpretations of classical, pop, and hybrids of the two, making the gendered history of the music their plaything. Whether invoking mythology or nature, romance or radical compassion, Bond and Costanzo carve new pathways between opera and politically subversive cabaret-two art forms that, as Bond puts it, "have been kept alive for generations by queens"-and allow old works to reveal surprising new stories.

The Boston Globe has deemed director Zack Winokur's work "pure poetry," and WQXR has noted him as a force behind "some of the most interesting productions we have seen on stage and concert halls anywhere lately." He says of Only an Octave Apart, "One of the things that's curious about this show is when you think about Viv and Anthony, you love them both, but it's sort of hard to imagine what they might sound like or perform like together-and it turns out it's a real 1 + 1 = 3 moment. They're both their own sublime entities, but they're so complementary in being extremely sophisticated storytellers with their voices in completely different ways, both icons doing deeply queer, subversive work outside the mainstream of their respective genres. I have never cried or laughed as much or as hard in any rehearsal process in my life."

St. Ann's Warehouse announces today that the renowned fashion designer Jonathan Anderson, for his eponymous label, JW Anderson, and for the Spanish luxury house for which he is creative director, LOEWE, has joined the star-studded Only an Octave Apart team as costume designer. Anderson has achieved both critical acclaim and commercial success for his collections. T, the The New York Times Style Magazine, has called him "one of the most forward-thinking designers working today." In 2019, Anderson was named trustee to the board of London's Victoria & Albert Museum, one of the world's leading museums of art, design, and performance. Only an Octave Apart is his first-ever stage production.