Giacomo Puccini’s operas — “Manon Lescaut,” “Madama Butterfly” and “Tosca,” among them — are nothing if not melodramatic, and his personal life was every bit as lurid.
So there’s no faulting the man or his music for the fact that the Dicapo Opera’s “Puccini’s Passion,” a biographical drama with music, failed to enthrall.
According to the piece that opened Thursday, the maestro’s love life crossed the fine line between “ladies’ man” and “horndog”: After stealing another man’s wife, he cheated on her with a string of other women.
In “Passion,” we meet the elderly Puccini on the way to Brussels for cancer surgery. His many affairs, he explains, inspired him to create the heroines of his operas — as illustrated by a group of singers who appear intermittently to perform the composer’s greatest hits.
About half of the show’s two-hour running time is given over to musical selections ranging from the obscure early “Le Villi” to “Turandot,” which the composer was still writing when he died after that Brussels surgery in 1924.
Dicapo’s capo, Michael Capasso, does double duty, co-writing the piece and playing Puccini. Frankly, the show needs either a better script or a better actor. The dialogue is stilted and overstuffed with factoids, and the stiff Capasso’s Long Guyland twang hardly suggested a suave playboy composer.
Better, if overlong, is the singing, accompanied by Pacien Mazzagatti from an upstage grand piano. Soprano Elana Gleason flaunted pinpoint finesse on high B’s and C’s in arias from “La Boheme” and “La Rondine,” while tenor Alex Richardson sweetly voiced the amorous heroes of “Boheme” and “Butterfly.”
Not so successful is the leathery tenor Vincenzo Scuderi, who growled numbers from “Tosca” and “La Fanciulla del West” before closing the show with an ear-splitting “Nessun Dorma.”
Don’t get me wrong: I still have a passion for Puccini — but only for the music, not this gossipy play.