"Ultimately as opera singers we’re human beings and that’s what's most interesting to look at on stage: the human beneath the voice and beneath the performance, and I think it comes across," Anthony Roth Costanzo says from a London hotel room following his opening night triumph as Akhnaten in Philip Glass's opera of the same name.
Before he debuted the role, Costanzo, one of the world's premiere countertenors, went on a weeks-long physical and mental transformation. Not only did he change his diet (carbs were swapped for fruits and veggies) and amp up his exercise routine, he also shaved his head and waxed his entire body, as he prepared to show the full monty on stage. He spoke to us about the measures he took.
Going bald
"(Director) Phelim McDermott said a few things to me on the first day of rehearsals, 'First of all I think we want you to do this naked scene; we’d like you to shave your head and to be sort of Egyptian the way that they were thought to be; and we want you to wax your entire body.' I thought, 'Oh gosh,' and I said, 'Well what about a bald cap? Wouldn’t that look just as good?' He said it’s not really so much how good it looks, because we can make everything look great from the stage, it’s about the psychology. And he told me that when Richard Croft was doing the production for Satyagraha at the Met and the ENO, the day he shaved his head to play Gandhi it really transformed the performance."
Exercise
"We were looking at Egypt through a western lens. Instead of Akhnaten having a belly, the drawings of the costume designer had him with a beautiful body and I thought, 'Gosh I want to look like that.' I wound up with this wonderful trainer who does something called EMS, electronic muscle stimulation. Essentially what she does is she sprays you with water, puts you in a suit and the water conducts electricity to your muscles and it contracts your muscles very hard. You can hardly move, but when you do move against that contraction, it's like lifting a heavy weight, except you're doing it with just motion, no weight. People use it for physical therapy because it targets specific muscles. In 20 minutes twice a week, it was the equivalent of 12 hours at the gym. It was like the jet pack to a perfect body."
Waxing
"I will say that the waxing was very painful. I was prepared, but in certain spots it was more painful than others. The ENO was incredibly supportive — their makeup team, the costumer — we talked about everything. We tested hair removal cremes, we thought should we shave? Should we wax? We finally decided that we were going to do a full-body wax. When we finally found the place, and the guy, and we walked in, he said, 'Come in and get on all fours.' I thought what did I get myself into? He started with the worse, and it was three hours that I will not soon forget.
"When you wax your body as a man and all the hair is gone, you see a lot more muscle definition, so that was one motivation for doing it. But more than that, there’s a certain childlike vulnerability to it. To have this feeling to your body of being completely hairless not only felt more authentic, but it changes the way you move. That sounds funny but it is true. It makes you feel like a shining orb."
Performing in the buff
"The specific challenge of being naked requires a feeling of release for me. Because your body starts to tense up subconsciously, you have to imagine — I’m not a nudist or anything — but you have to imagine that you enjoy it in some way, that it feels liberating. And if you imagine that, it becomes powerful because you are comfortable as a performer and if you are comfortable then the audience can’t be uncomfortable. If you can suspend their attention such that they don’t have a second in which to look at each other and say 'he’s naked, he’s naked' because their eyes are fixed, they can’t look away and they're holding their breath, that is the feeling that I want to create. Otherwise it becomes gratuitous nudity. But because we’re doing it in such a stylized way — I’ve been told that it’s very beautiful, in fact, one of our wonderful chorus members watched a rehearsal and came back with tears in her eyes — it's such an intimate and vulnerable moment. That's when I knew that we did the right thing, that I made the right choice to do the nudity."
Quotes have been lightly edited and condensed.
Costanzo will be performing in Matthew Aucoin's Orphic Moments at National Sawdust on March 23 and 24.