Straight plays, grand opera—it’s all theater, right? To a point, yes, and directors cross back and forth all the time. For the gang onstage, it’s a different story. In plays, imagination, empathy, and a sixth sense for subtext will see an actor of genius through any part. The singing actors in opera do well to use that tool kit, too—but their sine qua non is the voice.
Luca Micheletti, 40, has been playacting since his father, an actor, took him out there at age four in Giovanni Verga’s morose, verismo epic I Vinti (The Defeated). “We are heirs of a long tradition,” he says of his family, touching on their four-generation history in the theater, “but no one is carrying it forward.” His grandfather still barnstormed the countryside like the strolling players in Leoncavallo’s Pagliacci, not to forget Shakespeare’s Hamlet. But his father settled down in “a proper theater, with walls.”
