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Tony Amato

Updated Feb 11, 2024
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Tony Amato
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Tony Amato
Anthony Amato, Founder of Amato Opera, Is Dead at 91 By MARGALIT FOX DEC. 14, 2011 Anthony Amato, the founder and artistic director of the Amato Opera Theater, the scrappy, often threadbare and very rarely dull chamber operacompany on the Lower East Side of Manhattan that was a mainstay of New York’s cultural life for 61 years, died on Tuesday at his home on City Island, in the Bronx. Mr. Amato, who was also the company’s stage director, music director, prompter, vocal coach, diction coach, caterer, broom pusher and emergency tenor, among other things, was 91. The cause was cancer, said Rochelle Mancini, an editor and former principal singer with the company who helped Mr. Amato write a memoir, “The Smallest Grand Opera in the World,” published this year by iUniverse. Founded in 1948 by Mr. Amato and his wife, Sally, Amato Opera was long the brightest star in the constellation of semiprofessional opera companies spread over the city — the Off Broadway of the opera world. From its repertory of more than 60 productions, it staged half a dozen each season, including old reliables like Puccini’s “Bohème” and rarely heard works like “Lo Schiavo,” an 1889 opera by the Brazilian composer Carlos Gomes. Mrs. Amato died in 2000, at 82; Mr. Amato disbanded the company in 2009. In Amato’s first decades, when opera training programs were less ubiquitous, it was known as a proving ground for talented young singers. Many alumni went on to sing with major companies, including the Metropolitan Opera; among them are the tenors George Shirley and Neil Shicoff and the mezzo-soprano Mignon Dunn. Critics routinely praised Amato’s dramatic snap and sparkle, if not always its singing. But if the company’s later productions were often cast with singer-doctors, singer-lawyers and singer-dog groomers, that did nothing to dim the ardor of Amato’s perennially devoted audience. It was not only the ticket prices that drew them, though that was a consideration: Tickets cost $1.80 early on; in 2009, they were still only $35. (Nowadays, tickets for the Met normally cost $100 or more.) For the faithful, who returned year after year to the 107-seat theater at 319 Bowery, near Bond Street, a night at the Amato also offered the chance — a rare thing in this city — to witness grand opera as participatory democracy. Operagoers were greeted by Mrs. Amato, who, when not taking tickets, making costumes, running the lights or selling coffee and cookies at intermission, sang many of the company’s leading roles under her given name, Serafina Bellantone. Anthony Amato, the founder of Amato Opera Theater, in 1989.CreditRuby Washington/The New York Times On some nights the overture wafted through the theater on record, spun by Mr. Amato. (At first the orchestra pit had room for a piano or a pianist, but not both comfortably at once; it later accommodated a keyboard and a few woodwinds.) Costumes were rehabilitated until they fell to dust; many a wig began life as a mop. And if that wig sometimes became entangled with the scenery, the show went on. Onstage, snowstorms were accomplished with cascades of raw oatmeal, to the great satisfaction of the theater’s resident mice. Antonio Amato was born on July 21, 1920, in Minori, on the Amalfi Coast of Italy. At 7, he moved with his family to New Haven. He left high school amid the Depression to become a butcher, honest work that pleased his father. But young Mr. Amato, called Anthony or Tony, adored opera. He eventually prevailed, appearing as a tenor with regional companies and in summer stock. Mr. Amato met his wife in 1943 at the Paper Mill Playhouse in Millburn, N.J., where they were performing in Rudolf Friml’s operetta “The Vagabond King.” Every night onstage he knocked her down, as called for, and every night offstage he apologized so profusely that she took pity on him and married him, in 1945. Survivors include a brother, Albert. Afterward, Mr. Amato ran an opera workshop at the American Theater Wing in New York. Many of his students were returned servicemen, and he conceived Amato Opera to give them a place to perform. (Mr. Amato, who sang till the end of his life, was the company’s default understudy for all male roles.) The Amato’s first production, Rossini’s “Barber of Seville,” opened on Sept. 12, 1948, in the basement of Our Lady of Pompeii Church in Greenwich Village. For many years, singers were paid in meatballs, tenderly cooked by Mr. Amato and consumed family-style by the company. In later years singers got a stipend: $10 a performance. After playing in various spots around town — the church had commandeered its space for bingo — the company moved in 1964 to its Bowery home, near the punk-rock club CBGB. Reviewers often called the Amato’s theater “intimate,” but the word scarcely did justice to its confines. The stage was just 18 feet wide, with negligible wings. Singers sometimes had to exit through the theater’s back door, then re-enter by running through the parking lot, around the corner, through the front door, down the aisle and onto the stage. The parking-lot sprint entailed rubbing elbows with the neighborhood’s skid-row denizens. As one singer later recalled, he once made the dash costumed in tie and tails. Several men, thinking fortune had sent them a millionaire at last, touched him for money on his way through. Correction: December 16, 2011 An obituary on Thursday about Anthony Amato, the founder and artistic director of the Amato Opera Theater in Manhattan, misidentified, in some editions, the composer of the opera “The Barber of Seville,” which was the company’s first production in 1948. It was written by Rossini, not Mozart.
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For fifty years I have been a Document Examiner and that is how I earn my living. For over 50 years I have also been a publicist for actors, singers, writers, composers, artists, comedians, and many progressive non-profit organizations. I am a Librettist-Composer of a Broadway musical called, "Nellie Bly" and I am in the process of making small changes to it. In addition, I have written over 100 songs that would be considered "popular music" in the genre of THE AMERICAN SONGBOOK.
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