For his first role in a musical, Roberto Alagna will be Al Capone at the Folies Bergère

The Franco-Italian tenor Roberto Alagna, 58, one of the stars of lyrical art, will camp in Paris from January 2023 Al Capone, one of the most famous gangsters in the world, in a musical comedy dedicated to the kingpin of the 1920s in Chicago, during American prohibition.

It is the first time that Roberto Alagna, who has performed on the greatest operatic stages and in the main roles of the repertoire, will take part in a musical. On the Folies Bergère stage, he will share the poster foral Capone with singer Bruno Pelletier (Notre Dame of Paris) in the role of Eliot Ness, the American Treasury agent who, at the head of the “Incorruptibles”, waged a merciless war on the famous mafia boss.

The singer Anggun will play the mistress of the gangster in this fictionalized adaptation. On a libretto and music by Jean-Félix Lalanne, the story will notably stage an idyll between Eliot Ness and a sister of Al Capone.

Al Capone was one of the most feared mob bosses during the Prohibition era of the 1920s, when all production or sale of alcohol was officially banned in the United States. “Godfather” of the Outfit gang in Chicago, the one nicknamed “Scarface” (“the scarred one”) caused terror to reign with his network of racketeering and his very violent methods, such as the “massacre of St. Valentin”, during which he had seven members of a rival gang executed in 1929.

Despite all the police on his trail, the gangster was never prosecuted for his violent crimes, but for tax evasion, which earned him a sentence of eleven years in prison and a stint on the island-penitentiary of Alcatraz, San Francisco Bay. Released on bail in 1939, Al Capone died in January 1947 of pneumonia. With a budget of 5 million euros, the musical al Caponeis produced by Jean-Marc Dumontet.