In Scena is the column dedicated to live performances scheduled on stages across Italy: here is our selection for the week, from April 21st to April 27th.
Theater and Dance
Stabat Mater and Carmina Burana by Maribor Ballet
The Maribor Ballet, as part of Parma Danza, presents two choreographies by Edward Clug at the Teatro Regio on April 21st: Stabat Mater set to music by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, with sets and costumes by Jordi Roig, and Carmina Burana set to music by Carl Orff, with sets by Marko Japelj, costumes by Leo Kulaš, lighting by Tomaž Premzl, and sound design by Gregor Mendaš.
“The choreography of Stabat Mater has a strong allegorical connotation regarding traditional biblical imagery – explains Clug. However, the ironic context of everyday life transforms these representations into a new intimacy through the timelessness of dance, reflecting our personal understanding of the mother-child relationship.”
Orff’s work, a 20th-century masterpiece drawing on timeless human themes of hope, love, and destiny inspired by medieval verses, speaks to the enduring nature of human experience, with its opening section, O Fortuna, casting a menacing shadow over humanity’s uncertain fate.
The Very Legendary Story of Donald Trump
With Donald. A Very Legendary Story of a Golden Man, blending history and legend, Stefano Massini narrates another American epic: the irresistible rise of New York billionaire Donald J. Trump, culminating in his first election to the White House in 2016 (from April 22nd to 26th at the Teatro Bonci in Cesena).
In a relentless succession of plot twists, the adventurous existence of a man who transformed into an icon, brand, and spokesperson for his own success, constantly pushing beyond limits and what is permissible, in an tireless challenge that allows for no hypothesis of surrender, only the thrill of the relaunch. Until he donned the grotesque mask we all know, rewriting the rules of economics, finance, politics, and even civilization for himself.
The result is a revealing and, in many respects, chilling account. Donald is, in essence, the personification of our time, perfectly expressing the short-circuit between reality and reality TV, between fake and fiction, between person and character.
The Sleeping Beauty by Spellbound Contemporary
The premiere of The Sleeping Queen, the new work by Mauro Astolfi, will be staged on April 26th at the Teatro Comunale in Vicenza. This is a contemporary and symbolic reinterpretation of The Sleeping Beauty, transforming the fairy tale into a powerful reflection on power, alienation, and inner awakening. With a score that reworks suggestions by Pëtr Il’ič Čajkovskij in a contemporary key, the performance explores the fragility of authority and the possibility of rebirth founded on listening and awareness. The narrative heart develops around the theme of awakening. In the fairy tale, the prince’s kiss is an external, salvific act of love. Here, however, awakening is an internal process. The symbolic “kiss” is not a romantic gesture but a direct confrontation with the suffering, rebellion, or even hope of those around.
Romeo and Juliet in the Phlegraean Fields
GiuRo. Free Youth Banned by Time, with verses, songs, direction, and dramaturgy by Mimmo Borrelli, and original music performed live by Antonio Della Ragione (at the Teatro Bellini in Naples, until November 26th), arises from the encounter and work of Borrelli with the young actors of the Bellini Teatro Factory, now a Company. Observing their anxieties, fears, and contradictions, signs of a deep generational conflict concerning fathers and sons emerged, if not exploded. From these reflections, a retelling inspired by Romeo and Juliet takes shape, itself inspired by the Renaissance novella of Mariotto and Ganozza from Masuccio Salernitano’s Il Novellino.
The story shifts to a dystopian landscape in the Phlegraean Fields, where Shakespeare’s plague becomes a mega-earthquake that engulfs souls, spirits, and generations. In this world marked by violence, confusion, and a crisis of values, the love of the two young people becomes a fragile but necessary force. The performance thus transforms into a poetic and theatrical investigation into the relationship between generations, the responsibility and failure of fathers, and the destiny of children.
The Story of a Wild Boar. Something About Richard III
The multi-award-winning Uruguayan playwright and director Gabriel Calderón writes and directs The Story of a Wild Boar. Something About Richard III (at the Teatro India in Rome, April 22nd to 26th, a production by Piccolo Teatro di Milano, Carnezzeria), starring Francesco Montanari. This is the story of a King who had to eliminate all possible rivals to become one. A monologue that becomes a “variation on the theme” of Shakespeare’s Richard III, where the boundaries between epochs and identities blur, against the backdrop of the same reality of ambition, thirst for power, and repressed violence. An actor who has never had the satisfaction of playing a leading role, now that his moment has finally arrived, wants to make the most of the opportunity. Little by little, he notices an unsettling affinity between his life and that of the character: ambition, repressed anger, the thirst for redemption, opportunism. By interpreting the famous monologue, he rediscovers within himself the dark sides of the York sovereign.
The Imaginary Invalid by Tindaro Granata
Sicilian actor Tindaro Granata and director Andrea Chiodi tackle one of Molière’s most successful texts, The Imaginary Invalid, a satire by the playwright against doctors, which testifies to his visceral hatred for this profession.
“Molière – writes the French scholar Giovanni Macchia – is a scientist of neuroses.” He is a sick man who fears death but also knows that laughing and making others laugh is a defense against his own ailments: jealousy, pain, anxiety, melancholy. Chiodi’s The Imaginary Invalid is dreamlike and irreverent, fun and contemporary in its staging of the family affairs of the hypochondriac Argan, surrounded by inept doctors and cunning pharmacists, all too happy to fuel his anxieties for personal gain. Like the greedy Harpagon, Argan is a victim of himself and a puppet of those around him, a prisoner of his own fear, an obsession – hypochondria – which in this new version becomes the main protagonist.
“The Imaginary Invalid,” by Molière, adaptation and translation by Angela Dematté, directed by Andrea Chiodi, starring Tindaro Granata and Francesca Porrini, Angelo Di Genio, Emanuele Arrigazzi, Alessia Spinelli, Nicola Ciaffoni, Emilia Tiburzi, Elisa Grilli, sets by Guido Buganza, costumes by Ilaria Ariemme, music by Daniele D’Angelo, lighting by Cesare Agoni. Production by Centro Teatrale Bresciano in co-production with LAC Lugano Arte e Cultura, Viola Produzioni Roma. In Milan, Piccolo Teatro Grassi, from April 20th to 26th.
Gran Bolero in Vicenza
For the Danza in Rete Festival, organized by the Fondazione Teatro Comunale di Vicenza, Gran Bolero, choreographed by Jesús Rubio Gamo, with music by José Pablo Polo based on Maurice Ravel’s Boléro, a production by En-Knap Productions & Zagreb Dance Company, will be performed at the Teatro Olimpico on April 21st. The company, a dual Slovenian and Croatian ensemble, will present one of the most intense re-elaborations of this 20th-century choreographic and musical masterpiece, a dual triumph of aesthetics and meaning, combining dance with the deep, vitalistic desire contained in the famous score, with its overwhelming and liberating finale.
Gran Bolero is a visceral choreography of poignant intensity, reinterpreting Ravel’s famous composition through a contemporary lens, a creation for twelve dancers that celebrates shared time and space.
A Dance Homage to Eleonora Duse
La Duse – Nessuna Opera (Duse – No Opera), a choreographic creation by Adriano Bolognino and Rosaria Di Maro for COB Compagnia Opus Ballet (on April 23rd and 24th, at the Teatro Umberto Giordano in Foggia), is an intense homage to the figure of Eleonora Duse and her deep connection with the female characters she portrayed. Inspired by her words and her vision of theater, the work unfolds as a “non-opera,” a choreographic journey that moves through two moments: a first part that is more constructed and artificial, and a second in which a mature, essential, and luminous Duse emerges. Nine dancers embody a complex and vibrant female universe on stage.
The production was awarded Best Italian Production – Middle Scale at the Danza&Danza Awards 2024.
Made4You’s Ten Years
Made4You 2026 celebrates the tenth anniversary of Eko Dance Project by Pompea Santoro, who invited one of the most influential choreographers of her career: Nacho Duato, a world-renowned artist with whom she shared the stage during her time at the Cullberg Ballet. For this occasion, Liberté, an excerpt from Rassemblement (created in 1990 for the Cullberg Ballet), will be presented.
Alongside him are two selected young choreographers: Salvatore De Simone with W.I.P., a creation developed in collaboration with Studio Wayne McGregor, an innovative fusion of contemporary choreographic languages; and Giovanni Insaudo with Unknown 2.0, a work focused on exploring and researching the impossible.
Finally, Paolo Mohovich, a long-time supporter of this valuable project, presents the new creation Roter Puls. At the Teatro Astra in Turin, on April 23rd and 24th, for Palcoscenico Danza.
The History of Breakdance with Pockemon Crew
From the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics to the Teatro Del Monaco in Treviso, a single performance on April 23rd of De la rue aux jeux Olympiques (From the Street to the Olympic Games) with the celebrated breakdance company Pockemon Crew. Under the direction of Riyad Fghani, the company brings to the stage the history of a discipline forged in and by the street.
The company has always sought to combine creation and competition, even though for a long time it was forced to choose to gain recognition. It then freed itself from these codes, sharing its own style for over twenty-five years, based on a high level of technical skill and guided by the strength and values of battles.
The show is the result of a fusion between the company’s history and the broader history of breakdance, which has reached the most prestigious theaters and the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
An Ode to the Days by Claudia Catarzi
On a small horizontal and inclined platform, the performance by choreographer and dancer Claudia Catarzi, 14.610, is an ode to every single day of life. A reflection on the dignity and value of human existence in the present time: constantly on the brink. The praise for every part of oneself, for every day of life, becomes an act of recognition and respect for our irreducible personal value. Uniqueness reveals itself with its mysteries and beauties, the wonder of being unrepeatable. Yet, at the same time, are we not as unique as we are humanly the same substance at the origin? The dedication to these days of life is an ode to days of infinite existences.
In Piacenza, Chiostro del Collegio Morigi, on April 26th, for dAS, de Arte Saltandi.
The Prodigious Life of Isidoro Sifflotin
45 years after the Irpinia earthquake, ten years after the release of the successful novel The Prodigious Life of Isidoro Sifflotin, Enrico Ianniello stages the prodigious story of little Isidoro, a happy child in 1970s Irpinia. Thanks to a very special gift that makes him unique, the ability to whistle with his voice, Isidoro, along with Quirino Raggiola – the sweet unionist and poet father who locks himself in the bathroom to write love letters – creates a “whistle-dictionary” necessary to teach a new language to the downtrodden, to defend themselves from an arrogant world that wants to offend them. Unfortunately, however, that terrible November 23rd is just around the corner. And with it, the childhood and the voice of the prodigious Isidoro will be gone forever.
At the Teatro Biondo in Palermo, from April 24th to 26th.
The Grapes of Wrath According to Massimo Popolizio
Interpreted and conceived by Massimo Popolizio, The Grapes of Wrath, based on the masterpiece by John Steinbeck, with an adaptation by Emanuele Trevi, becomes a living narrative on the stage of the Teatro Giuditta Pasta in Saronno, on April 23rd. Published in 1939 and winner of the Pulitzer Prize, The Grapes of Wrath is one of the most incisive works of the 20th century: an epic and documented account of the American Great Depression, also born from John Steinbeck’s direct experience among migrant workers. At its center is the exodus of farmers from Oklahoma and Arkansas to California, in a story that intertwines historical dimension with human destiny, material misery with moral tension.
The Body of Giacomo Matteotti
In the ideal wake of the Liberation Day celebration, the performance The Body of Matteotti, written and directed by Andrea Baldoffei, who also performs alongside Riccardo Milani (on April 25th and 26th at the Teatro Argot in Rome, for Green Days – in the time that resists, the Under 35 theater festival curated, organized, and conceived by Dominio Pubblico), gives body and voice back to a symbolic figure of opposition to the regime, transforming theater into a space of active resistance and memory. Not a commemoration but an exploration: because it is precisely in that suspended moment – when Matteotti’s body is hidden and the truth is attempted to be buried – that the necessity, still today, of choosing sides is revealed with greater force.
The Body of Matteotti stands out as a necessary civil act, a scenic device that does not recount the crime, but what remains afterward: the weight of violence, individual responsibility, the silence that follows horror.
Biographical Trajectories of Marco D’Agostin and Marta Ciappina
There is a moment in artistic experience when words cease to be simple vehicles and become living matter, an passage, a shared space. It is on this threshold – fragile and fertile together – that Vite fatte d’arte (Lives Made of Art), the live podcast conceived and curated by Maria Genovese for ATCL / Spazio Rossellini, is born. On April 20th, it will inhabit the spaces of Spazio Rossellini in Rome with the fourth appointment of the series, hosting Marco D’Agostin and Marta Ciappina.
Not a format but a device: a place where the biographical trajectories of artists offer themselves as a field of resonance, where thought is constructed in the real-time of voice and listening, restoring to the word its most necessary dimension – that of a gesture that happens, that exposes, that relates.
Measuring the Leap of the Frogs
The final stop of the tour for Measuring the Leap of the Frogs, by Carrozzeria Orfeo, the latest creation from the pen of Gabriele Di Luca and directed by the playwright along with Massimiliano Setti, Noemi Apuzzo, Elsa Bossi, and Chiara Stoppa. Measuring the Leap of the Frogs is a dark comedy set in a small fishing village between the 1980s and 1990s. The protagonists are three women from different generations united by a tragic loss that occurred twenty years prior and is still shrouded in an aura of mystery. The village emerges as a forgotten fragment, surrounded by a vast lake and a menacing swamp that isolates it from the outside world, a microcosm suspended between archaism and everyday life, where a small community persists, anchored to outdated customs.
In Milan, Teatro dell’Elfo, from April 21st to 26th.
