As usual, Leonard was game, if understandably low-key at the end of a long day. “I was in the theater at 8 o’clock this morning, until 2 o’clock,” she said, referring to a rehearsal at the Met. “It is intense.”
Audience members — a remarkably young and varied bunch, perhaps thanks to tickets that started at $10 — reached the seating area via an alley lined with sponsors’ tables like that of Pantalones, the tequila brand Camila and Matthew McConaughey founded. For its part, the Met had set up a kind of altar known as an “ofrenda,” where the visiting souls of the departed are honored on the Day of the Dead in Mexico. Festooned with the traditional marigolds, it held portraits of Kahlo and Rivera, along with candles and decorative skulls.
The opera’s creators, Frank and Cruz, were onstage pretty much the entire time, discussing their working collaboration, research and inspiration, and teeing up the various excerpts. The pair, who have been sharing an apartment while working on the Met production, have a warm, funny rapport, and seemed to win over the crowd.
After snacking on sandwiches in the modern chapel, the other “Frida y Diego” emissaries — who in addition to Leonard included Álvarez, the countertenor Nils Wanderer, looking like a rock star in Siouxsie Sioux eyeliner, and the soprano Vanessa Isiguen — headed to the stage via the cemetery’s Tranquility Garden Columbarium. Leonard and Isiguen (the cover for the role of Catrina, the keeper of the dead) sang an excerpt from “El llamado,” then Leonard performed an excerpt from the Frida aria “El Mundo.”
The singer, who wore a simple black ensemble adorned with a white scarf, said that for these snippets, she did not focus on getting inside Frida’s head. “For me, it’s more about singing the music and just communicating it and making that as accessible as possible in the moment to the audience,” she said. “I don’t worry too much about whether I feel like I am so deep into the character at the moment or not. It’s also about preserving your energy and things like that.”
