I sang Cherubino [an adolescent boy, usually performed by a mezzo-soprano] when I was 17. Through the sheer effort of singing in Italian, which I hadn’t learned yet, I internalized the whole thing. I would walk around the house singing everyone’s part. Twenty years later, I was doing a show called Only an Octave Apart, with my friend the cabaret artist Justin Vivian Bond, and I performed the duet between the Count and Susanna, “Crudel! Perchè Finora.”

I figured out how to switch between baritone and soprano registers, and the audience found it funny and bizarre. So when Zack Winokur [the artistic director at Little Island] called to say, “We’re thinking of doing an opera, something everyone knows but nobody has heard,” I knew exactly what to propose. I loved the idea that even if I was the only person singing, there would be actors lip-syncing so there would be this transference between voice and appearance.