Maria Todaro
Born into a family of singers, Maria Todaro was, at a very young age, surrounded by music and arts.
A versatile artist and art entrepreneur, Maria is not simply a stage director, but a fight choreographer, stunt artist, writer and conductor. She is also training a new generation of singers and serves as general director of The Phoenicia International Festival of Voice after being one of its founder in 2010.
Maria just realized the unrealizable by presenting the 1st live performance drive in style in the US in this Covid-19 environment, fully social distanced, sci-fi Tosca in Kingston NY. for FofV.
Todaro is specializing in virtual reality directing (Volumetrics, VR, AR).
The 2019 season had her back at NJFO for Tosca , her Spanish Civil War Carmen in Fargo, and a ground breaking production of Elixir of Love set in Ghana with an exclusive African American cast at FofV , August 2019.
Maria Todaro made her US stage directing debut in 2015 with Cavalleria Rusticana for the Westfield Symphony Orchestra under the baton of British maestro David Wroe and was immediately invited back to direct La Boheme the next season. In past seasons she was an assistant director with Michigan Opera theater assisting Ron Daniels on Carmen and serving as fight choreographer and was assistant director to Bernard Uzan on Cyrano de Bergerac.
In 2017, she staged Don Giovanni for the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra, La Boheme for NJFO and in August 2017 adapted her modern version of La Boheme for the Phoenicia Int. Festival of the Voice with a prestigious cast of the Metropolitan Opera (John Osborn, Lucas Meachem, Richard Bernstein, Mireille Asselin). The 2018 season brought her to the University of Miami to assist Jeffery Buchman on a new production of Cendrillon and saw her own, stunning Madama Butterfly at New Jersey Festival Orchestra. Maria then scored a huge success at the Phoenicia Int. Festival of the Voice with her unique production of Carmen starring Ginger Costa-Jackson in the title role.
A personal endeavor of Todaro was the creation of the opera Les Trois Mousquetaires inspired by Alexandre Dumas’s novel- she is the librettist and the music is by composer Mitchell Bach.
Maria Todaro is one of the co-founders of The Phoenicia International Festival of The Voice, which was created in August 2010 in upstate New York in the Hamlet of Phoenicia in the beautiful Catskills mountains.
