Love is Not a Verdict: Teatro Grattacielo's Così fan tutte at La MaMa
On a summer night in the East Village, Mozart's most unsettling comedy stood as a mirror — and a full house leaned in to watch itself reflected as Mozart learned to breathe again. Inside the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa — that scrappy, sacred cradle of downtown experimentation on East 4th Street, where the walls still seem to ring with sixty years of first nights — Teatro Grattacielo unveiled a new Così fan tutte that came across less like a museum visit than a confession whispered over a candlelit table. Indeed, the company's general and artistic director has declared that opera is not retreating but "reinventing itself, night after night," and here, unmistakably, was the proof. To begin with, the room was full — gloriously, encouragingly full — and that fact alone rebuts a hundred gloomy essays about the form's demise.
The bones of the piece are, of course, immortal. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and his poet Lorenzo da Ponte — collaborators on the three greatest comedies in the repertory — built this one, their last together, on the most dangerous premise: that the heart is not a fortress but a weathervane. Moreover, whereas earlier ages dismissed the opera as a trifle, our own has learned to hear the quiver below its symmetry. What Da Ponte spun as farce, Mozart scored as something closer to compassion, and the tension between those two truths is precisely where this production chooses to live.
Cupid (Cate Pasaroni) greets Conductor and pianist Abdiel Vázquez as she enters an opening scene from Teatro Grattacielo's production of W. A. Mozart's Così fan tutte at La MaMa. Photo by Jennifer Katzman
Cate Pisaroni's Vision: Cupid, Clean Lines, and the Determination to Sit With Discomfort
The evening belonged, first, to two artists newly and shrewdly welcomed into the Grattacielo fold. The first is director Cate Pisaroni, founder of the creative studio Lenny's Studio and co-artistic director of the song festival Liedstadt, here making her stage directorial debut. Rather than stage a costume-drama museum piece, Pisaroni stripped away decorative realism and set the lovers inside a spare, almost architectural emotional sphere — Bauhaus geometry, contemporary relationship culture, a dash of Lars von Trier's Dogville — so that "place" dissolved and emotional exposure took its stead. Her wager, as her program statement puts it, is to ask us "to sit with the discomfort, tenderness, and complexity of being human." Consequently, the comedy never softens into a cartoon; it aches.
Central to her reading is a figure Da Ponte never wrote: Cupid, part narrator and part alter ego, whom Pisaroni describes as "part witness, part designer of a new inner landscape." On the page, this could read as a gimmick; on the stage, it became the production's beating conscience — an anachronistic imp cracking wise one moment and, the next, seeing the characters' hearts before they see their own. Above all, the concept honors Walt Whitman's line, quoted in the program, that each of us is "large" and "contains multitudes." That, finally, is the opera's secret: nobody in Così is a single, stable self, and Mozart — who, as Pisaroni beautifully notes, transforms confusion and desire into "music of unbearable humanity" — never once condescends to judge them.
The Plot in Brief: A Wager, Two Disguises, and the Fragile Arithmetic of the Heart
For the uninitiated, the machinery is delicious. Two young officers, Ferrando and Guglielmo, are serenely certain of their fiancées, the sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella; the worldly cynic Don Alfonso wagers that no woman's constancy survives temptation. The men feign departure for war, then return disguised as exotic "Albanian" suitors, each wooing the other's beloved. With the maid Despina conscripted as an accomplice — masquerading first as a doctor, then as a notary — the sisters waver, yield, and consent to a double wedding, after which the ruse collapses, the truth spills out, and forgiveness, bruised and wiser, closes the circle. It is a farce, yes; nevertheless, it imparts a trace.
A scene from Teatro Grattacielo's production of W. A. Mozart's Così fan tutte at La MaMa. Photo by Jennifer Katzman
Abdiel Vázquez and a Chamber Orchestra That Sang Out
The second indispensable artist stood before the keyboard. Conductor and pianist Abdiel Vázquez — a Steinway Artist who last summer led the company's acclaimed Le nozze di Figaro and now returns as its music director — presided over the evening with a wit as quick as his hands. From the first phrases, the players earned their applause, and rightly so. Crucially, the pit was not an orchestra shrunk but an orchestra distilled: Jonathan Lyness's superb reduced orchestration, that quietly renowned craft of turning a symphonic score into a lean and luminous ensemble, remade the score for eleven musicians — flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon, horn, percussion, and a nimble string quintet.
Here, moreover, lay the evening's deepest musical pleasure and its most persuasive argument. Mozart's operatic ensembles have always been chamber music with words — his quartets and sextets are dramatic conversations, every phrase a character arguing, yielding, or overhearing. As scholars of the classical style have long insisted, the miracle of these finales is that counterpoint itself becomes plot. In Lyness's transparent scoring, one heard exactly that: the sighing suspensions passed hand to hand, the woodwinds gossiping beneath the sisters' vows, the bassoon's dry aside landing like a raised eyebrow. Nothing hid in a wash of strings. Consequently, the reduction did not diminish Mozart; it X-rayed him. And when Vázquez slipped, with a conspirator's grin, into a few bars of ballpark-organ mischief — a nod to two characters who ambled on in pinstripes underneath their jackets, an affectionate wink toward the New York Yankees — the house laughed the warm, complicit laugh of people who had forgotten they were watching an eighteenth-century opera at all.
A scene from Teatro Grattacielo's production of W. A. Mozart's Così fan tutte at La MaMa. Photo by Jennifer Katzman
The Voices: Fine Singing in Solo, Duet, and Ensemble
No such alchemy survives without singers willing to be both virtuosic and vulnerable, and the cast delivered on every front. Across the run, the sisters were shared by Lina Chung and Yi Liu as Fiordiligi, and by mezzo Mairin Srygley and Ashlyn Taylor King as Dorabella; their suitors were the ardent Ferrandos Hayden Smith and Ricardo Diaz, and the sturdy, charismatic Guglielmo, baritone Young Kwang Yoo. Meanwhile, Stella Christine and Giovanna Yang sparkled as Despina, and Ziliang Hao and Nicola Ziccardi lent Don Alfonso his silken, dangerous reason. In solos, duets, and those knotty Mozartian ensembles alike, the singing arrived with aplomb — clean in line, true in Italian, and brimming with the joyous ebullience the composer intended. In turn, the great second-act soul-searchings landed not as vocal display but as genuine moral vertigo.
A scene from Teatro Grattacielo's production of W. A. Mozart's Così fan tutte at La MaMa. Photo by Jennifer Katzman
Costume, Comedy, and the Wink of the Anachronism
Anabel Simotas's costumes dressed the company chiefly in a chic, unifying black, then let color and comedy flare exactly where the story needed them. Ferrando prowled in a brown fringed leather vest; Guglielmo swaggered in a black leather jacket and — in the production's most gleeful bit of business — arrived brandishing a pizza box, the eternal reparations of the guilty boyfriend. Despina bustled in as a nurse; Cupid, propelled by a pair of white angel's wings, presided over the mischief, donning a white bustier, half cherub and half cabaret emcee. Each choice, however playful, served the reading: these are people improvising their identities in real time, trying on selves the way one tries on a jacket, hoping something fits.
A scene from Teatro Grattacielo's production of W. A. Mozart's Così fan tutte at La MaMa. Photo by Jennifer Katzman
Opera Without Barriers: Supertitles, Superb Program Notes, and a Full House
What most distinguished the night, though, was its generosity toward the newcomer. The cast performed delightfully in the authentic Italian, while clear English supertitles scrolled along the back wall; the printed and digital program, meanwhile, provided nearly everything an audience must follow both the story and the score. This is craft in service of welcome — the company's stated mission to make opera accessible in every corner of the city, made visible. At a moment when, as the board president writes, much of the arts is "retracting," Teatro Grattacielo has instead chosen to "expand and thrive," partnering here with the young singers of the Camerata Bardi Vocal Academy. The full house — attentive, laughing, moved — suggested the bet is paying off.
Why Teatro Grattacielo Belongs on Your Calendar
This persisted, finally, not as spectacle but as tenderness: the frisson of recognizing one's own contradictions within a two-hundred-year-old comedy, and the sense of a company genuinely, ardently in love with its art. For that reason alone, do not let this be your last encounter. The season ahead brims — the world staged premiere of Joseph Summer's The Tempest, a fall double bill pairing the premiere of Jefferson Lives! with Puccini's Suor Angelica, and the free, open-air Opera at Gotham Park. As the company's director puts it, with disarming simplicity, "This is our life's work." Seek out the next one; bring someone you love; let this fearless troupe move you all over again.
Creative Team
W. A. Mozart — Composer Lorenzo da Ponte — Librettist Abdiel Vázquez — Conductor and Pianist Cate Pisaroni — Director Hala Shah — Assistant Director Rubén Sosa — Assistant Director Ansley Jackson, Stage Manager Griffen Argyres-Gordon, Assistant Stage Manager Production Manager, Maimouna Camara Oscar Escobedo — Set Designer Anabel Simotas — Costume Designer Gregory Pernicone, Jr. — Properties Will Rossiter — Lighting Designer Affan Malik — Hair & Makeup Designer Matthew Deinhart — Projections & Mapping Jonathan Lyness — Reduced Orchestration
Cast
Cate Pisaroni — Cupid Lina Chung — Fiordiligi Yi Liu — Fiordiligi Mairin Srygley — Dorabella Ashlyn Taylor King — Dorabella Stella Christine — Despina Giovanna Yang — Despina Hayden Smith — Ferrando Ricardo Diaz — Ferrando Young Kwang Yoo — Guglielmo Ziliang Hao — Don Alfonso Nicola Ziccardi — Don Alfonso
Understudy Cast
Samantha Luna — Fiordiligi Neve Moore — Dorabella Sarah Pajonas — Dorabella Meredith Hart — Despina
Orchestra
Lauren Scanio — Flute Andrew Van Der Paardt — Oboe Kai Hirayama — Clarinet Joshua Hodge — Bassoon Ryan Dresen — Horn Oliver Xu — Percussion Anthony Bracewell — Violin I (Concertmaster) Rhiannon Banerdt — Violin II Greg Luce — Viola Iona Batchelder — Cello John Paul Norpoth — Bass
Love is Not a Verdict: Teatro Grattacielo's Così fan tutte at La MaMa
Così fan tutte
Presented by Teatro Grattacielo Cate Pisaroni, Director Abdiel Vázquez, Conductor and Pianist Reduced orchestration by Jonathan Lyness
Performances
July 17 & 19, 2026
Venue
Ellen Stewart Theatre — Shares at La MaMa 66 East 4th Street, New York, NY 10003 646.309.1398
Teatro Grattacielo
420 West 25th Street, Apt 2K, New York, NY 10001 Tickets & Current Season
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