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Lenconnect.com: Crocetto looking forward to ‘Tribute to the Women of Broadway’
“A Tribute to the Women of Broadway” is at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 16, at the Croswell Opera House. Tickets are $55/$45/$35 for adults, and $20 for youth and students with ID, and can be reserved online at croswell.org or by calling 517-264-7469.
Crocetto is still planning out the program for Saturday’s performance, for which she will be joined by music director Todd Schreiber, a band, and some special guests. Having things still a little up in the air at this point in the process is pretty par for the course, however.
“Changes happen,” she said. “I always keep it kind of fluid.”
But she does know that her concert will include musical tributes to several great Broadway actresses, such as Barbra Streisand, whom she called “the ultimate Broadway legend,” and Bernadette Peters, star of hits including “Annie Get Your Gun,” “The Goodbye Girl,” “Gypsy,” and a number of Stephen Sondheim’s best works such as “Sunday in the Park with George,” “A Little Night Music,” “Follies,” and of course “Into the Woods,” for which Peters originated the part of the Witch. Peters is also a frequent concert performer of Sondheim’s music.
Crocetto also plans to honor the late Marin Mazzie, who was the original Mother in “Ragtime” and the original Clara in Sondheim’s “Passion.” Mazzie died just this past September.
Women who made their names as composers are part of Saturday’s program as well, including Betty Comden, who with Adolph Green wrote some of the greatest Broadway and film hits of the mid-20th century such as “Singing in the Rain,” and Jeanine Tesori, composer of “Fun Home, “Shrek the Musical,” “Violet,” “Thoroughly Modern Millie,” and other works.
Crocetto, who last performed in Adrian in 2017 in a recital presented by the Adrian Symphony, said that her Croswell appearance is something that’s been in the works in some way, shape, or form for quite some time. Then, Croswell Artistic Director Jere Righter came to New York late last year to see Crocetto’s Carnegie Hall debut, and it was at that time that Righter suggested this concert.That performance at Carnegie Hall with accompanist Mark Markham, which earned Crocetto rave reviews from the New York media, was “surreal,” she said. “I was super nervous but it was so cool to be on the same stage where so many greats have been.”
It was just part of a busy season for her, ranging from “Il Trovatore” with the Seattle Opera to a concert performance of “Norma” with the North Carolina Opera to a trip to Melbourne, Australia, this April to sing the soprano solo role in Verdi’s “Requiem” with the Melbourne Symphony.
“I’ve never been to Australia before,” she said. “I’m so excited.”
Actually, Australia is one of only a handful of places that Crocetto hasn’t been to yet. Her operatic and concert career has taken her literally across the country and around the world, including making her Metropolitan Opera debut a few years ago as Liu in “Turandot” and getting to perform one of her true dream roles for the first time — Tosca, in a Pittsburgh Opera production — just last season.
Among her many other performances have been leading roles with the Seattle Opera, Oper Frankfurt, the Washington National Opera, the San Francisco Opera, and in the first U.S. performances of Donizetti’s “L’assedio di Calais” at the Glimmerglass Festival, plus concerts — in addition to that recent recital at Carnegie Hall — with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, at the Kennedy Center, and other major venues.
Finally getting to sing the part of Tosca was a major highlight of her recent career.
“It’s definitely my favorite role, and it’s just the perfect opera,” she said. “And it was so cool to have so many people from Adrian come to see it.”
The role of Susannah, in the American opera of that name by Carlisle Floyd, is still on her personal bucket list of roles she wants to sing someday. Currently, however, she’s working on three operas: Verdi’s “La Forza del Destino” and “Un Ballo in Maschera” and Giordano’s “Andrea Chenier.”
But before anything else comes her hometown concert, a performance which brings her back to the venue which gave her her theatrical start. Not only did she perform in musicals at the Croswell, but she was a 16-year-old chorus member in OPERA!Lenawee’s “Madame Butterfly” there.
“I’m really excited to be coming back to the stage where I did both my first musical and my first opera,” she said. “I can’t wait.”