Formatting Colorbox Captions

I am using the Colorbox module to display artwork, and I really need to have the ability to format the image captions. Specifically, I need to be able to italicize titles of artwork, but not the complete caption, which will include dates, mediums and other info (this rules out using css on the "#cbox_title" ). Is there anyway currently that this can be done?

Ideally, it would be nice to have a simple wysiwyg editor integrated with a caption field, but I would be happy to use html tags. I tried using Image Caption Formatter, which seems to provide this ability, but I have had no success with that. (issue posted here: http://drupal.org/node/1985568)

I have separate captions on the thumbnails then the large Colorbox images (just numerals there), and strangely, even without using the Image Caption Formatter, and just the image title or alt tag, I can get italics with html tags to work there. Unfortunately, I do not it there.

The issue I am describing was previously initiated here.
http://drupal.org/node/1904298, but closed due to inactivity.

Is there currently any way to format these captions under the main Colorbox images? I'm not really sure if this is a support issue or a feature request. Any help is very appreciated.

My site is currently not public, but I can send a link if it would help. Thanks you so much for any help with this issue.