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With New York City Opera struggling to reinvent itself, Manhattan’s “third” opera company—the indefatigable Dicapo Opera—is very much ascendant. Like the NYCO of old, Dicapo specializes in seasons that blend bread-and-butter operas like Pagliacci and Lucia di Lammermoor with more obscure material, original works and even musicals. All eyes will be on Dicapo this week for its world-premiere production of The Martyrs. What makes this a special event is the work’s operatic pedigree: The score is by leading American composer Thomas Pasatieri (The Seagull, Black Widow, The Trial of Mary Lincoln), the star is revered soprano Catherine Malfitano, and the libretto is by Malfitano’s daughter, the director Daphne Malfitano. The three successfully collaborated last year on another opera, The Family Room, at the McCarter Theatre in Princeton.
The Martyrs is a double bill of one-act monodramas linked by the theme of imprisonment. “Percy” features baritone Zeffin Quinn Hollis as a death-row inmate; “Marianne” sees Catherine Malfitano as a woman who visits her lover in prison and finds herself falling hard for one of the guards. “Both pieces are about martyrs,” says Daphne Malfitano, “but in very different ways.”
One thing is certain: for Catherine Malfitano, one of the leading singing actresses of our time, this will be the kind of role she can tear into. And now that she is closing in on 65, The Martyrs marks one of the increasingly rare opportunities to see her onstage.—Eric Myers