Maria caputo is a composer, singer, pianist, piano tuner, and music director in the New York tri-state area.

 

Working in fields as diverse as musical theatre, classical voice, jazz, choral work, and instruction, Maria bills herself as a jack of all trades, master of fun. She is equally at home with the music of Sondheim, Schubert, Strayhorn, and Sánchez de Fuentes.

Her empathy, keen musical ear and flexibility find their way into all aspects of her work, whether it be in collaborating with a lyricist to marry words and melody, fine-tuning a vocal line, breaking down a fully orchestrated number and repurposing it for piano-vocal use, playing a song by ear at the keyboard, or developing a young musician's sightreading confidence.



Currently, Maria is the keyboard player for the first Off-Broadway run of The Trouble with Dead Boyfriends: [tickets available for the June 15-July 16, 2023 run].

Maria was invited to present a song at the BMI Workshop Spotlight in May 2023.

In spring 2023, Maria Caputo & Joe Zaydon’s short musical The Missing Cow! had its stage debut at Brooklyn Children’s Theatre. (Its online Zoom debut was in 2020.)

In fall 2022 and 2023, Maria was music director for two projects at CAP21/Molloy College: a 90-minute devised musical and a musical theatre dance revue.

Maria served as music associate and co-music director for two developmental readings of musicals in the summer of 2022.


Maria released a [music video] for her first single, “Curious”. You can now purchase or listen on [all streaming services] and [Bandcamp].

Maria is 1/3 of Classy Dame, a Brooklyn-based trio that meets at the intersection of musical theatre, Ben Folds, and Tune-Yards. In February 2022, Classy Dame released their first EP, “Shut Your Mouth So The Bees Don’t Get In”. It is available on all platforms, including Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and Bandcamp.


In the spring of 2021, Maria completed her second year as a composer at the BMI Lehman Engel Musical Theatre Writing Workshop. She and lyricist Allison Light presented four songs for their second-year final project: a musical adaptation of Stardust (2007). The Stardust project earned Maria an invitation to the Advanced Workshop at BMI. She was also recognized for her advocacy and assistance with writing captions for videos during the pandemic, earning the inscrutably titled “Do You Read the People Sing Award”.

Maria is a proud member of MAESTRA. You can view her profile here: https://maestramusic.org/profile/maria-caputo

Maria tunes pianos in Connecticut and New York. She also serves as a church and session musician and occasional vocal arranger around the tri-state area.


In 2019, Maria began working with Brooklyn Children’s Theatre (BCT) as a teaching artist. She has written and music-directed several short musicals with BCT.

She also played keys and sang with Lily Desmond's project Lily and the Goddamns, a full-band treatment of Lily's genre-bending violin-led tunes.

In 2018, Maria joined the Floating Piano Factory as an apprentice piano technician in New York City. With this group of experts and apprentices, she tunes pianos and expands her knowledge of piano maintenance.

In 2017 and 2018, she played piano and sang in house bands on Norwegian Cruise Line, performing a mixture of jazz, contemporary commercial music (rock and pop), and musical theatre.

Maria teaches piano and voice privately in Connecticut and New York, and works as an ensemble teaching artist around several boroughs of New York City.


She served for two summers as the music director and instructor for the Columbia Gorge School of Theatre in Portland, Oregon, where she taught daily music classes in addition to music-directing and accompanying the musical theatre productions.

While attending Sarah Lawrence College, Maria received the Presser Foundation's Undergraduate Scholar Award.