Angela Hill / Eyewitness News
NEW ORLEANS – For a man who has performed around the world, Anthony Laciura knows the toughest stage is the one at home.
Singing the national anthem in the Superdome at the BCS championship game on Jan. 9 is a long way from the 3rd Ward, where he grew up.
And it is also many decades removed from the moment when a little boy at the Municipal Auditorium, watching his first opera, turned to his father and made an announcement.
“‘I think that's what I want to do, Dad, for the rest of my life,’ and he said, ‘That’s all right with me, son,’” Laciura remembered.
It was his family’s unwavering support and his mentors at Loyola University and Tulane University who gave him the courage to make the leap to New York and an audition at the Metropolitan Opera.
“No one else that I knew up until that time when I went to New York were blessed with coming from a community that supported its own, that were proud, who would accept you when you came back if things didn't work out. We love you.”
Things did work out.
“The next day they called me and offered me a contract and I managed to stay there for 27 years,” he said.
During his 10th year at the Met, Laciura came home to visit and was a guest on the “Angela” talk show, singing the very song that won him the job.
The Met became his second home.
“My son had his first, second and third birthdays backstage at the Metropolitan Opera, with the greatest singers in the world,” he said.
After almost three decades, Laciura retired from the Met and started teaching voice and directing opera at a New Jersey university.
Out of the blue came a phone call from a former agent who said someone wanted him to try out for a new HBO series – not to sing, but to act, in Martin Scorsese’s Boardwalk Empire. He went to that audition prepared.
“I am a little bit nervous because I am going to calm down because Mr. Scorsese is the biggest director since Lina Wertmüller,” he joked.
“And she said, ‘Mr. Laciura, what part of Germany are you from?’ And I said, ‘I’m from the south Bronx,’ and they laughed. ‘We thought you were from Germany,’ they said. ‘Well, I thought if I could fool you, I could fool billions.’”
Two days after meeting Martin Scorsese, he got the call and the role of Eddie Kessler. Anthony Laciura said he started to cry.
“I said I knew as the years were waning, in a sense, with opera, that there was something else, that God had another plan. I just didn’t know what it was,” he said.
He is now starting his third season with “Boardwalk Empire” and has also done his first, full-length movie, “The Longest Week,” with Jason Bateman, which is scheduled to be released in the fall.
On “Boardwalk Empire,” Eddie Kessler is the loyal employee and friend to the lead character. Laciura understands loyalty. He feels it here, in the city where his roots run deep, where he was encouraged and inspired, where the floor of the Superdome is as important as any stage in the world.
