Dicapo in the News

He Knows His Opera: He Dug the Pit

Ralph Blumenthal
New York Times
December 21, 1996

Oh my gosh, isn't that ...? It can't be! Yes, it's them! It's the Three Tenors, onstage at - the Dicapo Opera Theatre in a Manhattan church? Singing: "You deserve a break today, at McDonalds," and "Double your pleasure, double your fun."

Oops, it's not the Three Tenors. It's three singers in black tie made up to look like Luciano Pavarotti, Placido Domingo and Jose Carreras, singing commercial jingles in "Die Fledermaus."

Score another operatic first for Michael Capasso. As director of the small but ambitious Dicapo Opera in St. Jean Baptiste Roman Catholic Church at 184 East 76th Street, Mr. Capasso - perhaps the opera world's only contractor-impresario has been staging opera lite and opera heavy, opera modern and opera funny, to favorable reviews, while also minding his construction business.

He's probably also the first opera director who rescued an opera company by selling a race horse.

"It's a very Rudolf Bing type of situation, the way I run the company," said the owlish, 36-year-old Mr. Capasso, puffing cigarettes in his theatre office while arias by auditioning artists wafted up from the stage.

The Dicapo Opera, founded in 1981 by Mr. Capasso, then 21, with his former Great Neck High School music teacher and soprano, Diane Martindale, (hence the hybrid name), calls itself, after the Met and City Opera, the only professional ensemble in the city with a regular home, subscription series, paid cast and complete orchestra performing an annual opera season.

Quartered in a superbly equipped 204-seat theater, which Mr. Capasso helped construct in the lower church two years ago, the company opened this season in October with Oftenbach's "Tales of Hoffmann" in French. With tonight's sold-out performance of "Die Fledermaus," it concludes its run of Johann Strauss's bubbly Hapsburg farce transposed from Vienna to Bel Air and Malibu, Calif., circa 1996, with an interlude by the tenor-trio look-alikes. In February and April the season continues with Benjamin Britten's "Turn of the Screw" and Puccini's "Madame Butterfly."

As Mr. Capasso tells it, he fell in love with opera as a child when he saw Mario Lanza in "The Great Caruso." He studied voice at the Mannes College of Music in Manhattan and sang in amateur choruses and musicals. But starting with his great-grandfather, his family had always been in the construcion business so, Mr. Capasso said, he went to work for his uncle.

Through it all, Michael Capasso pursued his opera interest, applying his construction skills to stagecraft. "I wasn't afraid of scenery," he said. "We're always moving dirt and lumber."

"Diane could play the piano," he recalled. "I directed. It worked out O.K. We did it with spit and scotch tape."

They put on live music performances at Gimbels and Saks and at the Cincorp atrium. "We did madrigals," Mr. Capasso said. "We did the Easter bunny. We did 'The Messiah' with eight singers."

When a parishioner of St. Jean Baptiste suggested the church as a locale, the pastor agreed to a staging of the first act of "Tosca," which actually opens in a church. "When we asked where we could change, they brought me down to the lower church, 40,000 square feet with columns and five altars," Mr. Capasso recalled. "I said, 'Well, I know what to do with this space: make it a theater.'"

For Christmas 1991, he built a makeshift stage and bleachers and put on Menotti's "Amahl and the Night Visitors," complete with the requisite sheep, goats, dogs and parrots. A restaging of "Amahl" the following Christmas 'was a washout, literally, when a fierce rainstorm kept the audience home. Facing ruin, Mr. Capasso said he raised $7,500 by selling his share in a thoroughbred race horse named Gaza that had been Winning races at Belmont, Aqueduct and the Meadowlands. "The horse was very good to me," he said.

There were other scares, including a staging of Puccini's "Suor Angelica" on the night of the 1993 blizzard. But the company scored with Donizetti's "'Elisir d'Amore," set in Allied-occupied World War II Italy.

In 1995 it presented Carlisle Floyd's "Susannah," a 1950's tale of a rural Tennessee woman brought low by a preacher and hardhearted townsfolk, which James R. Oestreich of The New York Times praised for "sheer visceral wallop" and for Mr. Capasso's "canny direction." It also presented "Opera Senza Rancor," written by Mr. Capasso and Bill Van Horn, a kind of operatic "Forbidden ~ Broadway" with Puccini's "Turandot" conceived as a quiz show, and Wagner's "Ring" cycle crammed into 10 minutes.

That year Mr. Capasso raised close to $300,000 in donations and construction supplies and built a permanent theatre in the church in I00 days of furious labor. "I called in every favor," he said. "I cut every extra dollar. I used people and vendors who owed me." He even dug the orchestra pit himself.

The stage is 40 feet deep, bigger than those in many Broadway theatres, and the seats are upholstered in rich scarlet plush. There are seven small dressing rooms, rehearsal and construction space and a costume shop presided over by Alicia Muggetti, a designer with her own boutiques on Madison Avenue and in SoHo. "The scarfs are $750 in her store; forget about it," Mr. Capasso said.

In the coming year Dicapo plans two world premieres: "Lilith," commissioned with the 92d Street Y, which is about mythical progenitor whom God created before Eve, with music by Deborah Drattell and a libretto by David Cohen; and "Sacco and Vanzetti" by Anton Copolla, commissioned with the Orlando Opera in Florida.

About 60 percent of the seats are sold by subscription: $75 for four operas. Individual tickets are $25. The company has an annual budget of about $300,000 and shares about $20,000 of its proceeds with the church.

The latest offering, "Die Fledermaus," adapted by the Capasso-Van Horn team with libretto by Gene Scheer, is in keeping with the work's tradition of zany adaptations. It turns Strauss's aristocratic Gabriel von Eisenstein into Gabe Eisenstein (James Werner), a Hollywood film producer who before going to jail for assault slips off to the beach house party of an Arab sheik (David Jackson), leaving his wife, Rosalinda (Karen Bogan), to take up with her pool boy, Alfredo (Arturo Spinetti.) In the end, of course, Gabe is reunited with Rosalinda, declaring, "She loves me, yeah, yeah yeah." To which Rosalinda replies: "I did something wrong· Now I long for yesterday." No, there's no Fledermaus, or bat. Don't ask.

Mr. Capasso, meanwhile, is working on a film biography of Caruso for the A&E cable network and keeping his sights fixed on the future. "As long as I can remember, there's only one job I wanted," he said. "To run the Met." Joseph Volpe, the Metropolitan's general manager, shows no sign of leaving, Mr. Capasso acknowledged. But next, he predicted, would come Placido Domingo. "It's Volpe, Placido and me," he said. "I can see it coming a mile away."

Copyright © The New York Times

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