Dicapo in the News

"Street Scene"

By Charles Michener
New York Observer

For 12 years, the Dicapo Opera Theatre has provided the culturally deprived Upper East Side with a model of "alternative" opera. I attended a recent performance of Kurt Weill's "Street Scene" in the company's handsome, 204-seat auditorium in the basement of St. Jean Baptiste Church at Lexington Avenue and 76th Street, and was astonished by the intensity and purity of the enterprise. Handsomely staged on a multilevel set by Dicapo's general director, Michael Capasso, who founded the company in 1981, this 1946 adaptation of Elmer Rice's forerunner to A View from the Bridge and other bittersweet odes to New York grit was delivered with a strength of conviction that cut through the work's uneasy mixture of Weimar bite and Broadway mawkishness. Mr. Capasso (whose next production, Mascagni's L'Amico Fritz, opens in April) is a believer in the get-up-and-belt school of opera, and his irrepressible cast, led by Peter Gage Furlong and Amanda Winfield as the ill-starred young lovers Sam and Rose, delivered and then some. A note in the program read, "Please be advised that there will be gun shots heard in Act 2." If the warning was intended to discourage dozing­no one likes to be awakened by gunfire­it was unnecessary.

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