news

01. Cos’è per te il teatro
02. Perché il teatro continua a vivere
03. Il teatro è ancora una forma del sacro
04. Teatro / Spettacolo / Kitsch
05. Dalla parte del pubblico
06. Attenzione intermittente e libertà dello spettatore
07.  Spettacoli in fuga
08. Il luogo del teatro
09. La scenografia come puzzle
10. Il testo è la sua storia
11. L’interpretazione del testo
12. L’analisi del testo
13. Memoria ed emozione
14. Visione e conoscenza
15. In-coerenza dell’interpretazione
16. Il lavoro dell’attore su se stesso
17. Il personaggio e il carattere
18. La lingua
19. Il teatro come forma espressiva dei sentimenti
20. Innaturalezza del naturalismo
21. Un altro Gabbiano
22. Snodi
23. Strano Interludio
24. Quel pasticciaccio brutto de via Merulana
25. Lolita – Sceneggiatura
26. Ancora qualcosa da dire

THE LAST INTERVIEW

«Fare-la-festa, as the celebration of a passing, can also be a happy moment».
Luca Ronconi talks about Verdi’s «Falstaff»,
his last opera production – Florence, December 2014.
Born in Soussa (Tunisia) on March 8, 1933, Ronconi left us on February 21, 2015, in Milan.

Euripides’ The Bacchae, read anew and presented by two modern poets. The play concerns the dramatic conflict between eros and repression, and the victory of the vindictive god, Dionysus, over his enemy and persecutor, the young monotheistic King Pentheus of Thebes. The music for this drama is in the form of a four movement symphony. The action takes place in the courtyard of the royal palace in Thebes, and on Mount Cytheron.
Hans Werner Henze

Rome, Teatro Costanzi
November 27, 29, December 1, 3, 5, 10, 2014
In the original language, with Italian and English surtitles by Prescott Studio

The Bassarids, which today I understand to a far greater degree and hold much dearer than when I was composing the work – a hectic and extraordinarily brief period of less than a year, in a form of protest lacking sufficient theoretical basis and in a state of utter loneliness – today I consider this to be my most important music theatre work. It is interesting and modern and still relevant for us and specifically addresses questions associated with the years around 1968: what is freedom and what is bondage? What is repression, what is revolt and what is revolution? This is all in fact displayed, insinuated and suggested by Euripides. The multiplicity and richness of relationships, the tangible sensual relationships between the ancient civilisation of this Archaic period and our time is created in Auden’s text; Euripides is transposed into our time in a manner which could not have been better achieved with the best possible stage production of the original Greek play: through the constant manifestation of the distance to a different civilisation from a time long past.
Hans Werner Henze

Homer according to Robert Wilson. Having met with great success in April 2013, Odyssey returns to the Piccolo Teatro di Milano – the theatrical version of the poem by the ingenious American director. An emblematic work which formidably represents mankind’s irrepressible need to explore, and its endless journey in search of the roots of its own existence.

The play debuted in Athens for four months in 2012, the year in the Greek and European crisis, and in April 2013 played to full houses at the Piccolo. Its return to Milan coincides with a period of new questions and new considerations – both economical and non – on the future of Europe. Wilson establishes original links between the ancient and the modern, putting a new spin on the eternal theme of the journey, and the return.

Milan, Teatro Strehler
12 – 31 October, 2015
English and Italian surtitling by Prescott Studio and Montclair State University, NJ, USA, as part of the project

Translating Voices Across Continents.
Italian version supervised by Valentina Gilardi

Puppeteers: Eugenio Monti Colla, Franco Citterio, Maria Grazia Citterio, Piero Corbella, Camillo Cosulich, Debora Coviello, Cecilia Di Marco, Tiziano Marcolegio, Sheila Perego, Giovanni Schiavolin, Paolo Sette.

Marionette theatre, since the emergence of the post-romantic world, has respectfully stood still. Themes that are too important and suffered for the wooden heads and their mechanical and repetitive expressiveness. Thus the world of Puccini has always been preserved from all incursions, but how to resist the explosive charm and the countless difficulties of Turandot? The fable laced with cruelty and death has an irresistible air. Desperate unrequited love, a Prince held prisoner by the blind egoism of his passion and a haughty Princess who denies herself the joys of love. Above all a score full of light and shadow, obsessive, rich with colour, tormenting and heavy with mystery. How to resist the desire to see how the world of marionettes can stage such a work with respect and enthusiastic faith?

Milan, Teatro Grassi
26, 27, 28 June, 3, 4, 5, 10, 11, 12, 17, 18, 19 July 2015
English and Italian surtitling, from the Italian original,
by Prescott Studio and Montclair State University, NJ, USA, as part of the project
Translating Voices Across the Continents

Eugenio Monti Colla interviewed by the WebTV of the Piccolo Teatro di Milano
© 2015

e saga of the Lehman brothers is at the same time an extract of the American Dream: the country which offers everything to anyone who demonstrates talent, inventiveness and self-sacrifice, can, in the blink of an eye, turn fortunes and destinies upside down. The Lehmans risk failure more than once, with the War of Succession, two World Wars, and the 1929 crisis, always managing to pick themselves up. Until the final blow: on 15 September 2008 Lehman Brothers became the biggest bankruptcy in world bank history.

«This piece», underlines Luca Ronconi, «immediately struck me with its variety of linguistic registers: essay, novel, dreamlike tale – they alternate, following the layout of a screenplay. Without once giving in to news-like banal contemporaneity, Massini, like Edward Bond, whose The Company of Men I have staged, does not intend to present audiences with a pre-packaged truth. Rather he leads them through a voyage of knowledge. Lehman Trilogy is of an ‘adult dramaturgy’ which, freeing itself from traditional narrative and all moral examination, gives us a key with which to open a door on the episode. An episode which, whether we like it or not, has deeply influenced the lives of all of us».

Milan, Teatro Grassi
12 – 31 May, 2015
English surtitling by Prescott Studio and Montclair State University, NJ, USA, as part of the project
Translating Voices Across Continents

A co-production
Piccolo Teatro di Milano
Italian Cultural Institutes Abroad

«Theatre makes you live», says Toni Servillo, «it allows you to touch life with your own hands. In theatre you have this outrageous feeling of the body, you breath at the same pace [as the audience], you share the same time. [Theatre] is never the same as the day before, it will never be the same as the day after. The uniqueness of theatre is the moment. And since the moment belongs to life, because life is made up of moments, theatre is exactly life itself».

Toni Servillo interviewed by Massimo Gramellini, 11 January 2025, La7, «In altre parole» (In other words).

Conductor Markus Stenz
Chorus master Lorenzo Fratini
Director Daniele Menghini
Set design Davide Signorini
Costumes Nika Campisi
Lighting Gianni Bertoli
Choreography Sofia Nappi
Orchestra and Chorus of Maggio Musicale Fiorentino
Children’s Chorus of Accademia del Maggio Musicale Fiorentino

87th Maggio Musicale Fiorentino 2025
First performance in Italy in the original language
Surtitles in Italian and English by Prescott Studio

Florence, Teatro del Maggio
17, 21, 23, 25, 28, 31 May

*

Der junge Lord (The Young Lord), staged to great fuss at the Deutsche Oper Berlin in 1965, is an opera with a constantly redifining centre of gravity which, while firmly embracing a recognizable musical and scenic narrative, constantly ambushes the audience and performers, resorting to a skilful and original stylistic play of masks where, in the end, a bitter surrender to hypocrisy prevails.

The conductor of this production, Markus Stenz, one of the most accomplished and inspiring interpreters of Henze’s music, considers Der junge Lord already a ‘classic’, «a masterpiece of the past century; in this score, everything makes sense – on an instinctive, textual and theatrical level». And the response from the Maggio Orchestra is of of thrilling enthusiasm, according to Mr. Stenz.

This is how the director, Daniele Menghini, comments on his approach to this title, absent from Italian scene. «It is a great joy to work on such a ‘clandestine’ title […]. We need to find a connection with Henze, with his urgency to tell the story of a world that is changing, emerging from the Second World War and reconfiguring itself. This society is coming to terms with its fears: the new, the different, some horizons. This is condensed in Henze’s music, [to the point of making it] dangerous, sharp, cutting – and you have to [know how to] seek [this] taste of the grotesque […]. Here we are faced with a choral work […]. The cast carries the drama forward, but always together with the masses, the actors, the acrobats, the circus […]. Every element […] of the stage design is dramaturgy. So it is not enough […] to focus on the protagonists because there are no protagonists here».