Parma – Stebos, scholar/artist

La Traviata (from Giuseppe Verdi and Alexandre Dumas)

February 1, 2001January 9, 2021Stebos

Teatro del Tempo, Parma, Italy

For this dinner theatre show, I combined scenes from Verdi’s opera and Dumas’s Camille (La Dame aux camélias), with music played by an ensemble directed by Alessandro Nidi (Parma Conservatory). Two sets of performers, four actors and three singers, led the audience into the depths of passion as seen through the different conventions of spoken and musical theatre. The show had a lot of coverage in the newspapers and on TV since it was held during the year of the celebrations for the first centenary of Verdi’s death.

Read a series of articles published by the newspaper Gazzetta di Parma including a glowing review by Valeria Ottolenghi here. (in Italian, translations coming soon…)

Here is an 11 minute promotional video of the show:

The Two Gentlemen of Verona (from Shakespeare)

December 14, 2000June 5, 2021Stebos

I was called by Numeriprimi who wanted to stage a Shakespearean play in an imaginative way at the Teatro del Tempo in Parma, Italy. For this company of young actors, who had just graduated from a professional course supported by the European Union, I chose The Two Gentlemen of Verona.

In addition to providing an original translation, I dramaturged the script in several directions:

I substituted several scenes with speechless actions to take advantage of opportunities for physical theatre;
to better employ one of Numeriprimi’s performers, I substituted the clown character with a winged Cupid on roller skates who recited aphorisms from the humorous Murphy’s Law of Love, a prominent theme in the play;
finally, I added several songs, each in fact a Shakespearean sonnet, translated into Italian and set to original music by Marco Caronna.

With the tunes played by Luca Savazzi and sung by a gifted vocalist and company member, the show came to resemble a musical.

Below you find both an 8 minute promo video and the two parts of the full show:

Promo

Part 1

Part 2

The Giants of the Mountain by Luigi Pirandello

October 23, 2000June 1, 2021Stebos

Teatro del Tempo, Parma, Italy.

With members of the Numeriprimi Company I organized a public lecture about Pirandello’s The Giants of the Mountain (I giganti della montagna) for the students of the Italian Lit course at the University of Parma (Prof. Marzio Pieri). It included a dramatized reading, with actors working vocally to portray the many roles each of them was called to play. While stage directions were read aloud, a visual artist drew each character on a series of large sheets, building up to the impressive final scene where each of them was visible simultaneously around the theatre.

Read an article published by the Gazzetta di Parma (in Italian):