Now in its thirty-eighth edition, the Great Theater 2024/2025 proposes forty-eight performances over five months, from November 5th to March 30th, at the New Theater. The organization is from Municipality of Verona in collaboration with Teatro Stabile di Verona – Theater Production Center.
To prevail this year i great classics, reread in a contemporary key, starting from a double Goldoni with two symbolic titles such as “Arlecchino” and “La locandiera” and the presence of three extraordinary authors of the 20th century – Eduardo De Filippo, Tennessee Williams and Neil Simon). Finally, on the contemporary drama front, three other authors from different continents: Europe (Pablo Renòn), the United States (David Mamet) and Asia (Ferzan Ozpetek), with works that place the contradictions of the present in very distant from us, completing the concept of “New Classics” which characterizes the 24-25 program of the Nuovo.
Subscriptions may be renewed from July 15th to September 18th, while for the new ones the sale will start from September 18th.
The program
To inaugurate this year’s exhibition, from 5 to 10 November, CHARLATANS Of Pablo Remona hilarious comedy in which they star Silvio Orlando, Francesca Botti, Francesco Brandi and Blu Yoshimi, directed by Remón. A production Il Cardellino in co-production with Spoleto Festival dei Due Mondi / Teatro di Roma – Teatro Nazionale.
Anna is a stage actress whose career is in decline. Diego is an established director of commercial films. Both apparently represent the two extremes of the artistic profession: success and failure. Both are going through a personal crisis and their stories are connected by a common figure: the cult director of the 80s Eusebio Velasco, Anna’s father and Diego’s teacher, who disappeared and isolated from the world.
“Charlatans it is a comedy in which just four actors travel through dozens of characters, spaces and times. A satire on the world of theater and audiovisual, but also a reflection on success, failure and the roles we play, inside and outside fiction” says Remón who draws on an eminently theatrical narrative, but with a fictitious and cinematic aspiration , unfolds a play in chapters with a structure closer to a novel than to the theater.
The review continues, from 19 to 24 November with THE GREAT MAGIC Of Eduardo De Filippo, production of the Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Bellini, with Natalino Balasso, Michele Di Mauro and cast still being defined and directed by Gabriele Russo
The Great Magic is a complex text, it has the breadth and vision of the great theater and at the same time offers black shades of our humanity, psychological traits even expanded in our contemporary society compared to 1948, the year in which The Great Magic was staged for the first time arousing controversial and mostly negative reactions, since the text was not understood and appreciated. What makes this comedy even closer to our time is the obsessive feeling of Calogero Di Spelta, a man lost in a world that seems equally confused. A man who needs to cling to granite certainties at the cost of symbolically locking them up in a box. And in the box he is willing to believe that he is her wife in order not to doubt, in order not to see, in order to have her under control.
The third show on the bill, THE INNKEEPER Of Carlo Goldoni, is scheduled from 17 to 22 December. Produced by the Teatro Stabile dell’Umbria and directed by Antonio Latella, the show features on stage Sonia Bergamasco, Marta Cortellazzo Wiel, Ludovico Fededegni, Giovanni Franzoni, Francesco Manetti,
Gabriele Pestilli, Marta Pizzigallo and Valentino Villa. Mirandolina, played by Sonia Bergamasco, runs the inn inherited from her father together with her faithful Fabrizio, to whom she is linked by a promise of marriage made to her father before she died. In her inn, her clients, the Count of Albafiorita and the Marquis of Forlipopoli, both in love with her, compete for her attentions, using the weapons they have at her disposal: money and the noble title the other. The woman, however, manages to stem her courtship with intelligence and superiority, allowing herself to get some small gifts from time to time. Faced with the misogyny of the Knight of Riprafatta, another customer of the inn, Mirandolina implements a plan and manages to make him capitulate. But new misunderstandings and deceptions are on the way. Peace is established when Mirandolina agrees to marry Fabrizio, but as in other Goldoni works, the end of the intrigues brings with it a shadow of melancholy.
The fourth opera on the bill (the first in 2024) is THE GLASS ZOO absolute masterpiece of American dramaturgy Tennessee Williams, with Mariangela D’Abbraccio, Gabriele Anagni, Elisabetta Mirra and Pavel Zelinskiy, directed by Pier Luigi Pizzi, Best Live production / Teatro Stabile del Veneto – National Theatre. We are at the end of the 1930s and the story tells the story of the Wingfield family made up of the mother Amanda and her two children, Tom and Laura, a shy and limping girl. Abandoned by her husband, Amanda must face the difficulties, fears and anxieties that arise from her desire to ensure a peaceful future for her children with a behavior that oscillates between tender and excessive. Laura, made lame by an illness and therefore introverted and closed, is trapped in her own world of illusions and she spends all her time listening to old records, reading novels and above all looking after a collection of glass animals.
Tom works in a shoe factory to support Laura and Amanda, but the boring and banal life he leads (as well as the morbid presence of his mother) makes him irascible. The boy tries unsuccessfully to become a poet, and seeks comfort by going to the cinema at all hours of the night to experience adventures at least in his imagination. This triggers Amanda’s anxiety, who fears her son is an alcoholic like her father. Sometimes the roles change and it is a mother who has certain demands but the desires do not change, very different and not reciprocated. Dreams, fears, feelings, remorse, oppression, illusions, it is a text that touches the soul and reminds us what it means to pursue one’s vocation.
The review continues – from January 28th to February 2nd – with HARLEQUIN?written and directed by Marco Baliani
with Andrea Pennacchi, Marco Artusi, Federica Girardello, Miguel Gobbo Diaz, Margherita Mannino, Valerio Mazzuccato and Anna Tringali. Music performed live by Giorgio Gobbo and Riccardo Nicolin production Gli Ipocriti Melina Balsamo in co-production with Teatro Stabile del Veneto – Teatro Nazionale
L’Harlequin That Andrea Pennacchi brings on stage will perhaps startle many Harlequins who over time have made this commedia dell’arte mask great. He tries in every way to live up to the role, but he doesn’t get anything right, he is clumsy, overweight, completely unlikely, but he is in good company: the other actors, who, like him, were hired, with miserable wages, from the entrepreneur Pantsthey are, like Harlequin, overflowing, out of time, catastrophically inadequate. Yet all these deviations, these departures from the scene and escapes from the script, which have also emerged in today’s contemporaneity, all these bundled words, all these gestures, are precisely remaking the miracle of Goldoni’s great comedy, in an unexpected form, a disruptive, alienating comedy that reconstructs tradition after intelligently betraying it.
The sixth appointment of the Grande Teatro is from 11 to 16 February with THE IRRESISTIBLE BOYSOf Neil Simon with Umberto Orsini, Franco Branciaroli, Flavio Francucci, Chiara Stoppa, Eros Pascale and Emanuela Saccardi, directed by Massimo Popolizio – A Teatro production of Gli Incamminati / Compagnia Orsini / Teatro Biondo of Palermo. The two protagonists of the comedy are two elderly variety actors who have worked as a couple for their entire lives, giving life to a duo that has become famous as “The irresistible boys” and who, after having separated due to irreconcilable misunderstandings, are called to reunite, eleven years later, on the occasion of a television program that wants them together, for just one evening, to celebrate the history of the glorious American variety show. On stage we see the two old actors who, with their different personalities, try to mend the rift that separated them for many years in an attempt to revive a comic number that made them famous. Ancient misunderstandings reappear more deeply rooted and this difficult alchemy is the pretext for a game of brilliant comedy and profound melancholy.
Scheduled from March 11th to 16th the penultimate appointment of the event is BOSTON MARRIAGEby David Mamet, with Maria Paiato, Mariangela Granelli and Ludovica D’Auria, regia Giorgio Sangati. A Bresciano Theater Center / Teatro Biondo production in Palermo. United States, late nineteenth century, a living room, two ladies and a maid. Everything would suggest a conventional plot, a meeting between somewhat affected friends, but the form does not correspond to the substance: vulgarity abounds in the conversation with its sophisticated vocabulary and we learn that the two ladies were once a very close-knit couple. After the separation, Anna, the protagonist and landlady, has found a rich man who supports her and would now like to take advantage of his protection to take Claire back with her, who has just arrived on a visit. But Claire isn’t there for that; she has returned for very different reasons and the reconquest of her will prove to be much more complicated than expected, with daring twists that will also involve the young waitress, pacing the opera and giving it a hilarious, almost farce-like façade. It is a test for great actresses, true tightrope walkers of the word, such as the extraordinary Maria Paiato and an intense Mariangela Granelli together with Ludovica D’Auria.
To close Il Grande Teatro from March 25th to 30th And MAGNIFICENT PRESENCEa show by Ferzan Ozpetek with Serra Yilmaz, Tosca D’Aquino, Federico Cesari, Toni Fornari, Luciano Scarpa, Tina Agrippino, Sara Bosi and Erik Tonelli. A Nuovo Teatro production directed by Marco Balsamo in co-production with Teatro della Toscana.
Ferzan Ozpetek returns to the theater with the new stage adaptation of one of his cinematographic successes, Magnificent Presence. The director, one of the most beloved of our cinema, thus continues the path inaugurated with Loose Cannons, and revives one of his cult films in the theater, bringing with him into this adventure a company of explosive actors who will be the great protagonists of this comedy between illusion and reality, dream and truth, love and cynicism, cinema, theater and enchantment.
On show Thursdays, at 6 pm, the actors will meet the audience.
The Great Theatre, the history
The Grande Teatro, founded in 1986 by the will of the Department of Culture to give continuity to the city’s theatrical programming, which until then was predominantly summer, over the years has made our city one of the main Italian “places” for quality productions.
