HOLLYWOOD

'Broadway' to 'Hollywood' without skipping a beat

David Wiegand, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007

Franc D'Ambrosio doesn't know the meaning of the word rest. When he has time off from performing, he goes to Italy -- not to unwind, but to lecture at the music academy in Lucca.

He was hoping to put his feet up for a while after the premiere of his new show at the Plush Room next week, but his agent just called to tell him he'd been booked into Atlantic City with his old show. It doesn't faze him.

Arriving midday at the York Hotel last week in a perfectly pressed gray suit over an open-collared purple shirt, D'Ambrosio, 44, matter-of-factly details his recent and future schedules, ticking off dates, cities and even a country or two the way a businessman might recite a list of the day's meetings.

Music and performing are D'Ambrosio's business, but when he tells you he's happier onstage than anywhere else, you know his heart is in his work as well.

For the past three years, D'Ambrosio, best known to Bay Area audiences for his title role in most of the five-year run of "Phantom of the Opera," has been on the road with his one-man show, "Franc D'Ambrosio's Broadway," which made a stop at the New Conservatory Theater Center here last spring. D'Ambrosio told his audiences about his life, about growing up in a large, extended Italian clan over the family bakery in the Bronx, and, of course, about his career. The patter never felt a bit like patter, but rather like a guy from the Bronx telling you about himself. Oh, and, accompanied by pianist Chuck Larkin, he punctuated the story with great songs from Broadway shows.

Now, there's a new show -- perhaps inevitably, "Franc D'Ambrosio's Hollywood" -- that will continue the story. "We're visiting the Bronx again," he says, but with great movie songs to add another dimension or two to the story of a guy who grew up over a bakery in a big Italian family.

"When my former record label put together the first tour," he says, "I said I don't think anyone needs another evening of a concert-style musical theater. I'd like to work with a director and a writer that believes in the storyline, and then allow the music to support the storyline, as opposed to the other way around, which is more cabaret. Let me find a compelling storyline."

As the Hollywood show developed, D'Ambrosio decided he wanted it to premiere in San Francisco, which he considers his "adopted home" as much as any place could be called home to a guy who lives out of a suitcase. D'Ambrosio's peripatetic lifestyle today is ironic for someone who hadn't even been to the West Coast until he came to Los Angeles to audition for the role of Al Pacino's opera-singing son in "Godfather III."

Although D'Ambrosio's immediate family was small in number -- one brother, one sister -- his extended family was something else.

"There were aunts, uncles and cousins, all in a small apartment," he recalls. "I had 20 cousins and three mothers and three fathers and a matriarch and a patriarch. None of our doors were ever locked."

Although he displayed vocal talent early on, D'Ambrosio wasn't one of those scary precocious child prodigies, auditioning for every role in school with a stage mother screaming "sing out, Franc" from the wings. But along the way, he did decide he wanted to be an actor, and the best way to do that, he thought, was through singing -- "If you could sing, you had more options."

While his first exposure to the New York theater scene was thrilling and instantly convinced him he had to be a part of it, he felt he had to learn more first.

"A friend of mine was going to musical conservatory," he says. "I didn't even know what that was. You can go to school to learn how to sing and dance? That's literally how ignorant I was."

He learned an opera aria, was admitted to Hartford's Hartt College of Music and studied with Eileen Farrell. Although he was an opera major, D'Ambrosio was in his second year of college before he saw his first production, a "Ring" Cycle at the Met. And it would take him a while longer -- when he was studying at the vocal academy at Lucca -- to fully appreciate and understand his vocal gifts. That, he says, was when "I came to that understanding that I should learn to appreciate opera and that world."

Two years before he took over the lead role in "Phantom," D'Ambrosio got a call from Hollywood to audition for a film called "Secret Journal 2." He would be playing the role of a young Italian American opera singer and was concerned about how to develop the character. So he asked his pal Davis Gaines for advice.

"Don't do anything," Gaines advised. "Just be yourself."

Obviously, it was good advice and led D'Ambrosio to the role in that movie, which was eventually titled "Godfather III" by director Francis Ford Coppola. Two years later, D'Ambrosio was signed for the title role in the San Francisco production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's "Phantom of the Opera" at the Curran. He still holds the record for the longest run in the show, with more than 2,600 "Music of the Nights."

Soon after "Phantom" closed, D'Ambrosio starred in the touring production of Barry Manilow's "Copacabana." Along the way, he's done several TV ice skating specials with pal Brian Boitano, the Olympic skater who knows a thing or two about keeping busy as well.

Having done "Phantom" for four years and, more recently, three years with his Broadway show, how does D'Ambrosio keep it fresh?

The question gives him momentary pause, because, he says, he can't think of a time when he didn't give it everything he's got.

"I'm more of the philosophy that actions will always follow intentions," he says. "I can't imagine not giving -- It's not in my DNA, not giving 100 percent. And that's in life too. If you ask me to, say, feed the dog, I'll not only make sure the dog is fed, I'll comb his hair, too."

Throughout his life and career, D'Ambrosio has shown himself to be a guy who takes responsibility seriously. It probably comes from his close-knit family, which has recently become even larger than it was back in those Bronx bakery days.

Four years ago, D'Ambrosio got a call from his grandmother, telling him he had a half-brother he hadn't known about. D'Ambrosio was raised by his mother and step-father. His biological father had disappeared from the picture when Franc was very young and had gone on to other relationships before he died, one of which resulted in a boy who was in a foster home in the South. The kid's social workers were working to find out if he had any living relatives.

Shortly after that call, D'Ambrosio was walking in New York with his business manager. He asked how the man's mother was doing and was told she had moved out of New York and was a social worker in the South. Turns out, of course, one of her charges was D'Ambrosio's 14-year-old half brother.

"She told me all about him," he says. "He's very anxious and shakes all the time -- his anxiety was that he's going to turn 18 and he's going to age out of the system."

Soon, they made telephone contact and D'Ambrosio told him not only that he had a brother but that the teenager who felt so alone in the world was actually part of a very large family. Six weeks later, D'Ambrosio got custody and brought his brother to New York to meet the rest of the family.

The young man turned 18 a couple of weeks ago, no longer worried that he'd age out of the system. He doesn't shake anymore, has a girlfriend and is on the honor roll at high school.

"Now I'm raising the child of the father who abandoned me," D'Ambrosio says, his eyes glistening. "Sometimes the angels work overtime."

That from a guy who knows overtime.

E-mail David Wiegand at dwiegand@sfchronicle.com