PERFORMANCE REVIEW: Teatro Grattacielo brings Joseph Summer’s The Tempest to the stage in an evocative, enchantingly-sung production (New York City, 18 July 2026)

JOSEPH SUMMER (born 1956): The Tempest [world staged première] — Daniel Klein (Prospero), Kayla Viviana (Ariel), Sara Kennedy (Miranda), Benjamin Sieverding (Caliban), Omar Najmi (Ferdinand), Maggie Finnegan (Iris), Chantelle Grant (Ceres), Sarah Johnson (Juno), Jordan Rutter-Covatto (Trinculo), Eliam Ramos (Stephano), David Gordon (Sebastian), Justin Ryan (Antonio), DeAndre Simmons (Alonso), Heather Green (Nereus), Eleanna Finokalioti (Calypso), Shira Ziv (Ligeia), Jenna Weitman (Echo); Teatro Grattacielo Orchestra; Enrico Fagone, conductor [Stefanos Koroneos, director; Hala Shah, choreographer; Gregory Pernicone, Jr., assistant director and properties; Oscar Escobedo, set designer; Will Rossiter, lighting designer; Anabel Simotas, costume designer; Karine Ivey, hair and makeup designer and artist; Matthew Deinhart, projections and mapping; Teatro Grattacielo, Ellen Stewart Theatre, Shares at La MaMa, New York City, USA; Saturday, 18 July 2026]

Likely completed in 1611, as its author entered the final phase of his creative career, William Shakespeare’s The Tempest was from its inception a work of uncommon insight and ingenuity. Shaped by characters and plot devices with autobiographical associations, episodes derived from then-recent history, and allegory that, despite the passing of four centuries, retains its relevance, The Tempest is in many ways an incarnation of what librettists and composers would later designate as ‘dramma giacosa,’ a fascinating domain in which duress and diversion coexist. In Prospero, the deposed duke of Milan who by being robbed of his regal authority learns to govern both his own ambitions and his stewardship of his subjects’ welfare, some scholars find a depiction of Shakespeare himself, contemplating his approaching farewells to life and the stage. Whether this symbolic representation of the artist in what he may have known would be one of his final solo projects was overtly intentional can be debated, but there can be no doubt that The Tempest is an acutely personal piece, an engaged mind’s paean to discovery through deprivation. It is not solely in its chronology, skilled use of language and meter, and still-potent theatricality that The Tempest is a ‘mature’ play: in its themes of isolation, corruption, deception, self-cognizance, magnanimity, and hope, it is akin to a treatise on the ills and healing of humanity, the beauty of its words intensifying the bitterness of their meaning.

The depth and diversity of its character development, allied with the prevalence of music in Shakespeare’s original concept, heighten The Tempest’s appeal to composers. In tandem with adaptations in an array of genres, composers’ settings of texts from and incidental music for The Tempest have introduced the play to audiences with little interest in Jacobean theatre. The obvious advantages of adapting Shakespeare plays for the stage notwithstanding, there is also tremendous peril in the enterprise: even a work like Bellini’s I Capuleti ed i Montecchi, which shares its subject with Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but is not directly sourced therefrom, is illogically subjected to analysis of its merits as a work within the Shakespearean diaspora.

Composers of Shakespeare adaptations acclaimed as worthy of their provenance—notably Verdi’s Otello and Falstaff, Britten’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and Brett Dean’s Hamlet—would surely unanimously cite the efforts of their librettists as a critical component of these successes. Whether using Shakespeare’s own words, in English or in translation, or crafting new texts inspired by them, a librettist faces innumerable questions of which passages, characters, and scenes to include or omit, ever cognizant of the likelihood that their decisions will earn the disapprobation of some observers. A piece like Franco Faccio’s Amleto, a high-quality product of a much-admired musician, is therefore dismissed as a failure because its libretto is deemed to be inadequate in its reworking of Shakespeare—a cautionary tale full of sound and fury, signifying the difficulties of bringing Shakespeare to the opera stage.

The most fruitful familial collaborations between composer and librettist are perhaps those of the brothers Tchaikovsky, but composer Joseph Summer found in his daughter Eve Summer an optimal partner in transforming The Tempest into an opera. Wading into waters commendably navigated in recent decades by composers Lee Hoiby and Thomas Adès and their respective librettists, the Summers dove into Shakespeare’s drama with respect for both its literary and humanistic splendors and its astonishing parallels with events in their own lives. By choosing and arraying Shakespeare’s words with scrupulous consideration of their dramatic purpose and aural potential, the younger Summer fashioned a libretto that possesses necessary concision and clarity without sacrificing any of the play’s spirit and substance. The Summers’s Tempest began its public journey on the concert platform, but Teatro Grattacielo’s world-première fully-staged production, astutely devised to utilize the full space of the Ellen Stewart Theatre at La MaMa, affirmed that the piece belongs in opera houses. Only during the allegorical wedding scene in Act Two was there a loss of momentum, and the fault there is shouldered in part by Shakespeare, whose verses in that sequence are more engrossing as literature than as theatre. Brave are the poets who wrangle with molding Shakespeare texts into libretti: still more valiant—and exceedingly rare—are those who do so as effectively as Eve Summer did in this Tempest.

Bear up and board ’em: countertenor Jordan Rutter-Covatto as Trinculo (left) and baritone Eliam Ramos as Stephano (right) in Teatro Grattacielo’s July 2026 production of Joseph Summer’s The Tempest
[Photographs © by Jennifer Katzman, Steven Pisano, & Teatro Grattacielo]

Its fundamental conflicts between liberating solitude and need for connection drawn from harrowing misadventures with man and nature, Joseph Summer’s score is a marvel: harmonically advanced but tonal, rhythmically vibrant but singable, unapologetically innovative but enchantingly melodic. A particular wonder of the composer’s writing is the skill with which competing texts and emotions are communicated and contrasted in ensembles. Aided by thoughtful casting, characters’ vocal lines remained discernible throughout the performance, including in the most intricately-scored passages. Summer’s orchestral writing also contributed immensely to this quality, as did the virtuosic work of conductor Enrico Fagone and the thirteen musicians under his guidance.

Summer’s instrumental writing allies close attention to individual and combined timbres with text-driven use of colorations, at times recalling pages from Stravinsky’s Oedipus rex and Dallapiccola’s Il prigioniero. In Teatro Grattacielo’s performance, Fagone conducted expertly, mostly maintaining accuracy of ensemble despite spatial trials. Occasional missteps in the strings and winds were quickly righted. Pianist Saverio Alfieri and harpist Tomina Parvanova played with exceptional grace, and Pawel Knapik conquered Summer’s exacting lines for the double bass with unflinching aplomb. Summer’s music deserves nothing less than the committed, euphonious performance that it received, and each musician’s labors were lavishly rewarded.

Continuing the odyssey of self-discovery begun by Shakespeare and furthered by Summer, Teatro Grattacielo’s Artistic and General Director Stefanos Koroneos incorporated aspects of his traumatic origin story into his staging of The Tempest. Conjuring a visual and cultural atmosphere reminiscent of the films of Theo Angelopoulos, the production mirrored Koroneos’s escape from the oppression of his native Greece, finding in Prospero’s exile on and eventual acclimation to a desolate isle vestiges of the director’s quest for safety and acceptance. The action observed by a quartet of mythological personages (Eleanna Finokalioti as Calypso, Heather Green as Nereus, Shira Ziv as Ligeia, and Jenna Weitman as Echo), Anabel Simotas’s chic costume designs and Karine Ivey’s cosmopolitan hair and makeup stylings dovetailed appealingly with Oscar Escobedo’s whimsical sets, dominated by illuminated palm trees, inflatable flamingoes, and an omnipresent typewriter, symbolic of Prospero’s sorcery but one that worked its magic too loudly and distractingly during sung passages.

Both Will Rossiter’s lighting designs and Hala Shah’s choreography danced entrancingly. Koroneos heightened the cinematic pace of Summer’s storytelling by frequently changing the cast’s and the audience’s visual perspectives, not least by relocating the primary setting from one end of the theatre to the other during Act Two. This ‘reset’ intensified focus on the opera’s developing crisis, mimicking the upending of the characters’ lives. Koroneos’s experience as a singer perceptibly informed his management of the staging’s physicality, ensuring that the athleticism of vocal production was never impeded, but the director’s life experiences—danger, dismay, disenfranchisement, and, at last, ascendancy, belonging, and happiness—provided the vessel in which Summer’s opera made its victorious maiden voyage.

Deployed by Summer in his Tempest much as the nymphs Najade, Dryade, and Echo are in Richard Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, notably in the extensive masque celebrating Miranda’s and Ferdinand’s nuptials in Act Two, the spirits Iris, Ceres, and Juno—portrayed by soprano Maggie Finnegan, mezzo-soprano Chantelle Grant, and soprano Sarah Johnson—brought Aliki Vougiouklaki-esque glamour to the stage. Finnegan’s voice glistened as her lines ascended above the stave, and both Grant and Johnson sang with lustrous tone. Summer’s treatment of the comedic characters Trinculo and Stephano, jester and butler to the waylaid king of Naples, also has much in common with the commedia dell’arte players in Ariadne auf Naxos. Countertenor Jordan Rutter-Covatto voiced Trinculo’s ‘Here’s another storm brewing’ incisively, and bass-baritone Eliam Ramos articulated Stephano’s ‘I shall no more to sea’ suggestively. Much farcical business was asked of the perennialy-inebriated Trinculo and Stephano, and Rutter-Covatto and Ramos responded with uninhibited antics that amused without lessening appreciation of the excellence of their singing.

The isle is full of noises: bass Benjamin Sieverding as Caliban in Teatro Grattacielo’s July 2026 production of Joseph Summer’s The Tempest
[Photographs © by Jennifer Katzman, Steven Pisano, & Teatro Grattacielo]

Sebastian, the Neapolitan king’s none-too-loyal brother, was depicted with vocal sheen and wryly obsequious demeanor by tenor David Gordon, and Prospero’s usurping brother Antonio had in baritone Justin Ryan an interpreter who conveyed the illicit duke’s weakness of constitution with vocal strength. Bass DeAndre Simmons triumphed over bizarre costuming to lend regal authority and genuine pathos to Alonso, the distraught king of Naples who believes his son to have perished in the shipwreck that landed him and his misfit band on Prospero’s island. The king’s desperation in seeking news of his son was all the more wrenching for being declaimed with vocal opulence, Simmons’s voice effortlessly filling the theatre. In Act Two, he sang ‘By’r lakin, I can go no further’ with visceral weariness, his tone shaded by despair. His son restored to him and his participation in removing Prospero from his throne forgiven, the proud king was at least in those moments of reconciliation foremost a rejoicing father, and Simmons voiced his music with magnetic poise and beauty.

Unlike Hoiby and Adès, whose writing for the character often rockets into the vocal stratosphere, Summer centered his music for Ariel in mezzo-soprano range, respecting the sprite’s oft-neglected masculinity. In Kayla Viviana’s performance, Ariel was an androgynous, ethereal presence, at times seeming to function as his fellow characters’ collective conscience. Whether Ariel was at center stage or surveying events from peripheral perches, Viviana’s soft-grained timbre floated into the hall to hypnotic effect. The flute-like mellifluence of her voicing of ‘Come unto these yellow sands’ was soothing, and, in Act Two, she sang ‘Where the bee sucks, there suck I’ with growing fervor. There were fleeting insecurities in the lower range, and trills were sketched rather than truly sung, but Viviana recovered with unflustered musicality, her Ariel’s calm disdain for the turmoil in which he finds himself echoing his counterpart Puck’s assertion of ‘What fools these mortals be!’

Vocally and theatrically, bass Benjamin Sieverding inhabited the rôle of Caliban with incredible immediacy and unexpected expressivity. The ill-begotten son of the vengeful Sycorax is unquestionably monstrous of form and intent, as Sieverding’s serpentine movements and thunderous vocalism intimated, but he is also wronged, orphaned by his mother’s death and subsequently enslaved by Prospero. With his singing of ‘All the infections that the sun sucks up,’ his resentful confrontations with Prospero, and his near-manic interactions with Sebastian, Trinculo, and Stephano, this Caliban garnered true pity. In Sieverding’s portrayal, Caliban was often more true to his nature—and therefore, by the standard advocated by Polonius in Hamlet, more human—than his fellow characters. In Act Two, ‘I shall be pinched to death!’ was humorous but also unnerving, prompting new horror at the injustice Caliban was forced to endure. Sieverding’s commands of range, dynamics, inflections, and diction were complete. Too many singers and directors fail to grasp that a villain must be attractive to be credible. Caliban’s villainy is situational and to some degree justified, but he, too, engages most when he is permitted to display modicums of softer feelings. This Sieverding achieved with extraordinary aptitude.

My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up: tenor Omar Najmi as Ferdinand (left) and soprano Sara Kennedy as Miranda (right) in Teatro Grattacielo’s July 2026 production of Joseph Summer’s The Tempest
[Photographs © by Jennifer Katzman, Steven Pisano, & Teatro Grattacielo]

Love as a redeeming force is a theme that is as prevalent—and as complex—in Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets as in the operas of Richard Wagner. The unlikely union of Prospero’s daughter Miranda and Ferdinand, Alonso’s presumed-lost son, in The Tempest is rare in facilitating lasting rapprochement, the lovers’s changing of Prospero’s heart akin to the awakening of paternal affection and protectiveness in Sachs as he accepts Eva’s love for Walther in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg. As sung in this performance by tenor Omar Najmi, Summer’s Ferdinand was pensive and intelligent, an atypical romantic hero except in his refulgence of voice. His singing of ‘Where should this music be?’ exuded a sense of wonder, and the dulcet ecstasy that reverberated as Ferdinand’s desire for Miranda increased robbed the voice of none of its strength and projection. ‘Admired Miranda!’ in Act Two was sung with a young man’s eagerness and earnestness, the words surging from the character’s passion. His polished-garnet timbre luminous in all registers, Najmi’s singing might be said to have been fittingly Shakespearean: nuanced, boundary-defying, and unforgettably sincere.

Soprano Sara Kennedy’s Miranda was a faithful daughter to Prospero and a well-matched partner for Ferdinand whilst also preserving her individuality. Inquisitiveness quivered in the soprano’s voice as Miranda conversed with her father about the circumstances of their arrival on the island, Kennedy ladening ‘If by your art, my dearest father’ with uncertainty and trepidation. Warmth radiated from her singing as Miranda fell in love with Ferdinand, however, her upper register taking on added brilliance. Still, there were shadows of shyness and doubt when, in Act Two, she sculpted the line in ‘I do not know one of my sex’ with exquisite finesse. Miranda is perhaps the opera’s most dynamic character, her embrace of womanhood amidst strife not unlike that of Puccini’s Cio-Cio San, and Kennedy enacted the character’s evolution with conviction and singing of uniform beauty.

In literature, in this opera, and in this production, Prospero is comprised of elements of Shakespeare, Summer, and Koroneos, and all of these guises were served by bass-baritone Daniel Klein, yet his Prospero remained his own man, the product of profound thought and feeling. The recalcitrant ruler ousted from his seat of power predominated in Act One, the timbre flinty and rugged, but when he sang ‘In few, they hurried us aboard’ to Miranda the father’s tenderness was palpable. Loathing both for Caliban and, more gnawingly, for his own choices boiled in ‘I have used thee, filth as thou art,’ rendering the very different attitudes in Prospero’s exchanges with Miranda and Ferdinand more pointed.

In Act Two, regret emerged touchingly from Klein’s singing of ‘If I have too austerely punish’d you’ and ‘Our revels now are ended,’ the vocalism tinted with autumnal hues. Though intonation intermittently wavered, the dignity of ‘I do forgive thy rankest fault’ was also movingly imparted through innate nobility of phrasing and superb mezza-voce singing. The calibre of Summer’s music for The Tempest reaches its zenith in ‘Now my charms are all o’rthrown,’ and Klein’s singing followed suit, closing the opera with gripping stillness. Not every note of his singing of Prospero’s daunting music was effortless, but every moment of his performance was heartfelt, disclosing the inner tumult that rages within Prospero.

The Tempest is a valedictory work, an ode to the foibles of men and letters in which one of theatre’s most penetrating minds ponders withdrawal and mortality. In Teatro Grattacielo’s momentous staging of this operatic homage, Prospero found elusive tranquility, Shakespeare astounded with undiminished poignancy, Stefanos Koroneos thrived in a world that welcomes him, and Joseph Summer inaugurated a new path for his sublime Tempest.