After an “intense and resistant” season that has just ended, the curtain of Sala Umberto in Rome it will reopen at the end of September “with the awareness of the narrow escape”, to continue “to give the signal that we are alive, despite the fact that nothing seems to go towards the theater”. With these reflections, the artistic director of the Sala Umberto in Rome, Alessandro Longobardiillustrates the dense billboard that will see 17 companies on stage, which will probably go up to 19 in total, from 27 September to 7 May, with an absolute flagship: the direction of Peter Stein for ‘The Birthday’ by Harold Pinter, protagonist Maddalena Crippa.
But it is a bill of strong names that proposed to its public by the Umberto Hall, being able to count on Alessandro Gassmann for the direction of ‘One flew over the cuckoo’s nest’; the duo made up of Mariano Rigillo and Giorgio Colangeli for ‘The two Popes’ who obviously are Ratzinger still Benedict XVI, ‘in office’ and Bergoglio then cardinal and not yet Pope Francis. And then Peppe Barra with an unpublished version of the ‘Cantata dei pastori’; or the couple formed by Vittoria Belvedere and Enzo Iacchetti for ‘Blocked by the snow’; it’s still Cochi Ponzoni for ‘The wounds of the wind’, Joel Dix for ‘The race behind the wind’ based on the texts by Dino Buzzati, Gianmarco Tognazzi in ‘The honest ghost’ by Edoardo Erba.
A lot of waiting also for the homage of Andrea Mirò a Giorgio Gaber and Sandro Luporini and their song-theater with ‘Far pretending to be healthy’ in collaboration with the Gaber foundation; and for Giampiero Ingrassia in search of eternal youth, in the role of ‘Doctor Faust’. The opening show of the new season will be ‘Immaculate Conception’ by and with Federica Carruba Toscano. After ‘A che serve these quattrini’, Armando Curcio’s classic Neapolitan tradition, they arrive Giovanni Scifoni and Francesca Inaudi with ‘Beginning: Unexpected Love’. And for lovers of the great classical authors, the Russian atmosphere of the ‘Cherry Garden’ of Anton Cechov with Milvia Marigliano. “We are alive – underlines the director Longobardi – and we have the duty, as well as the need, to prove it”.
(from Enzo Bonaiuto)