ARTS & CULTURE
St. Petersburg Opera The colorful opera company is anything but old school PHOTOS/JIM SWALLOW
BY MARCIA BIGGS Artistic Director Mark Sforzini In the basement of the Iberian Rooster restaurant one evening in May, a crowd of mostly middle-age people fills the room. It’s a subterranean cave of coolness, with living room furniture and folding chairs and tables scattered about and a bar on one side. A small stage lies empty, but at 6 pm promptly the lights go down and Mark Sforzini, artistic director and maestro of the St. Petersburg Opera, jumps on stage in a red plaid suit and a smile to beat the band. “How many of you are afraid of opera?” He asks for a show of hands. “Don’t be embarrassed, many people are. That’s why we are here tonight, to show you that opera is nothing to be afraid of!” Cocktails With the Maestro takes off with two hours of drama, singing, fun, and learning as cast members perform 10-minute snippets from the next opera production. Seated in the audience with his score on a stand and baton in hand, Sforzini thoughtfully describes each scene, the characters and the music. He sips a
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martini, he cracks jokes, the room fills with laughter. The evening is intimate, engaging, and educational, to boot. If this is opera, sign me up. Mark Sforzini has been around to see the cultural arts in the city develop – and to make change happen. As a classically trained musician working with the Florida Orchestra in the 1990s, he embarked on a challenge: produce a single opera production for St. Petersburg. He grabbed it and ran. “My first opera was Madama Butterfly in 2005 at the Palladium,” he recalls during an interview in his office at Opera Central in the city’s Grand Central District. Just weeks before, his latest production of Madama Butterfly filled the Palladium, a sweet coincidence. “ Two performances sold out so they asked me to do an opera the following summer. Again we had full houses. I produced Die Fledermaus six months later and it was very well attended which
