Concert for two for Puccini - A Teatro del Giglio di Lucca production in collaboration with Lucca Comics & Games
There are artists who have had a much less interesting life than their artistic production, or even whose limits and defects it is good not to know. There are artists, on the other hand, whose life is a work of art, as much as the masterpieces they have left to humanity. Giacomo Puccini is one of the latter: within the almost sixty-six years he has lived there is everything, intertwined with a wisdom that only to great demiurges.
His work tries to restore a complex portrait of the man and the artist, without simplifications and without falling into the stereotyped image: it is no coincidence that it has been entrusted to the pen of Francesco Niccolini, the Tuscan playwright who in his career has recounted many lives of illustrious men (Galileo Galilei, Carlo Gesualdo prince of Venosa, St. Joseph of Cupertino, Don Lorenzo Milani, Carlo Urbani, just to name a few) or unique and terrible events (the Vajont, Bhopal, the first landings from Albania in 1991). For some years he has begun a very important artistic partnership with Alessio Boni, the ideal protagonist of this monologue: already in the role of Puccini in 2009 for TV, Alessio Boni has given body and voice to many exemplary characters, both in cinema and television and in the theater. Right on the boards of the stage of the Teatro del Giglio Alessio Boni has already told – together with Niccolini – an exceptional life like that of Jean Baptiste Poquelin, known as Molière, a very successful show that saw them at work together with Alessandro Quarta, the great composer and violinist (his live performances together with Roberto Bolle are memorable) who will also be on stage together with Alessio Boni of this new work dedicated to Puccini.
The project, produced by the Teatro del Giglio in collaboration with Lucca Comics & Games, comes from afar and began in 2022 with a long writing, storytelling and active citizenship workshop, in which a dozen artists and citizens (from Lucca and beyond) delved into the history and figure of Puccini, in search of original stories and with the aim of overcoming the easiest clichés: the goal was at first to return to the city of Lucca a multifaceted and complex narrative of a unique character, and now to transform that narrative into an event first and then into a show that can bring the audience of Italian theater and that of new contemporary mythologies closer to Giacomo Puccini, represented in this work by the illustrations of Sensei Yoshitaka Amano, author of the three posters of Lucca Comics & Games 2024 in homage to Giacomo Puccini.