Justin Vivian Bond and Anthony Roth Costanzo's Genre-Hopping Collaboration

After eighteen months of pandemic lockdown, it was only fitting for Brooklyn's celebrated St. Ann's Warehouse to reopen in September 2021 with a show that offered a stirring reminder of the power of collaboration and togetherness. When the cabaret star Justin Vivian Bond and the countertenor Anthony Roth Costanzo took to the stage for the first time to perform their two-hander Only An Octave Apart, their commingling of pop, rock, cabaret, and classical music vividly announced the return of live performance to one of the city's most innovative theaters. "By the time we did it, we were so thrilled to be on stage, obviously," recalls Bond, "but I do think that it [highlighted] the importance of the show being exuberant and joyful. There's a lot of moments which hopefully affect people emotionally in a deep way, but it was important for us to just have the show be a celebration."

For ninety minutes, the pair—who became collaborators and then friends after meeting over a decade ago after a performance of Bond’s at Joe's Pub (where this story was photographed)—banter and tease their way through a genre-hopping program of songs that play together better than would be expected. The lineup ranges from Queen and David Bowie's "Under Pressure" to a Liszt setting of a Goethe poem, with a finale that mashes up "Walk Like an Egyptian" by the Bangles with lines from Akhnaten, the Philip Glass opera about the first monotheistic pharaoh that Costanzo has performed around the world. The show takes its name from a song performed by the opera singer Beverly Sills and the comedian Carol Burnett during their 1976 television special Bubbles and Burnett, which helped the contemporary duo shape what Costanzo calls the "high-low dichotomy" of the show. "It was very flowy and very associative when we started, and some of the associations were silly," he adds. "Some of them were stupid, almost, but then they would turn out to be really interesting. We kept trying to find consonances between classical and non-classical repertoire."

Originally planned for the spring of 2020 at Joe's Pub, Only An Octave Apart was postponed when Covid hit New York, giving Bond and Costanzo the opportunity to expand and rethink the show. They brought in collaborators including director Zack Winokur, music director Thomas Bartlett, arranger Nico Muhly, costume designer Jonathan Anderson of Loewe, and set designer Carlos Soto to "make it into an æsthetic experience, and not just two stools on a stage," Costanzo laughs. After releasing an album featuring songs from the program earlier this year, they're currently in the last week of their run at Wilton's Music Hall in London, where the audience response has been as rapturous as it was last year in Brooklyn. Speaking last month about their scheduled opening just two weeks after Queen Elizabeth's funeral, Bond noted their hopes that the show would serve equally as a salve. "We'll find a way to negotiate that and hopefully it'll have shades of what we went through at St. Ann's a year ago, which is that people, after a period of grief and trauma, will be able to hopefully relax and enjoy and laugh and have a good time," they said. "I came of age as an artist during the AIDS years, so I feel like I'm the trauma singer, like I somehow have managed to, throughout my life, help people negotiate their way out of trauma."

Bond and Costanzo are both intimately familiar with the stage, but the latter admits it took some time getting used to a more casual performance style. "When we first did 'Under Pressure', I was really worried because I sounded like an opera singer trying to sing a pop song, but we figured out how to do it," he says. "I never get to do things that are that exciting, so I love doing that." Bond adds, "It became about trust. At one point, I said, 'No matter what happens, you're not going to look stupid on stage, because we're not going to allow that to happen.' It became about finding a way to make both of us comfortable and shine and play up to both of our strengths."

The show has also offered them, as two queer artists, the opportunity to fully express themselves in ways they haven't always been able to before. Bond has been a leading light of New York's cabaret scene for decades, while Costanzo has more recently come to the fore thanks largely to his demanding performances of Akhnaten, and he notes that the classical world can feel somewhat more constrained. "I'm totally out and not worried about what people think. I can still put myself into the music, but the show doesn't often represent my identity," he says. "Part of it is being on stage with someone who I really care about and really like and have a good time with, but also the collective undercurrent of these songs speaks to this kind of queer identity in a way that no show I'd done before really did. I haven't struggled very much with my identity and I feel lucky about that, but I didn't realize how important that was really, until this show, as an artist."

After an album and two celebrated runs, the pair say they have even bigger plans ahead for Only An Octave Apart. "We're waiting for our EGOT, we haven't even gotten started," Bond says. "No, our NEGOT, because we think we should get the Nobel Prize as well." Costanzo adds, "This is just the beginning."

Only An Octave Apart continues through Saturday at Wilton's Music Hall, London. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our fifth issue here.

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