Rodolfo Nieto still revels in rattling off names of cheeses but he is no longer ringing up chicken-avocado BLTs.
The lyric bass has been building a rep onstage playing strong characters and, recently, instruments, through performances with the Minnesota Opera (“Cruzar la Cara de la Luna”) and Theater Latté Da (“Assassins,” “Man of La Mancha.”)
Nieto, 41, also developed a fan base from behind the counter at Minneapolis’ Surdyk’s, where for seven years he worked as a garrulous cheese monger, cashier and Jack-of-all-deli trades.
“Both [venues] require a kind of performance, and people were always impressed by the fact that I could pronounce all the cheeses in German, French, Spanish, Italian or whatever,” said Nieto, who credits his facility with language to his musical training at Luther College and Northwestern University, where he earned his graduate degree.
It is that vocal training that brought him to the Twin Cities in 2009 as a Minnesota Opera resident artist. Now Nieto is acting opposite Sheena Janson Kelley’s Maria as Capt. Georg von Trapp in “The Sound of Music,” which begins previews Thursday in Bloomington in a production that marks the directorial debut of Max Wojtanowicz.
The Captain’s emotional complexity mirrors his own, Nieto said in an interview last week, even as the role offers a welcome escape from his own life.
Q: How are your lives similar?
A: One of the biggest things that hit me about the Captain is that he’s still grieving the death of his wife. In real life, she had died four years prior to him meeting [postulant] Maria Rainer. For me, unresolved grief is the world I live in. Since 2019, my main nonperforming job has been as a caregiver for my wife, Clare, who has an acute form of pancreatitis.. The short of it is she can’t eat food anymore and has been using a feeding tube. It’s been a terrible nightmare but we’ve pushed through it.
