In the production Magic People Show of 2007, Giuseppe Montesano brought to the stage the TV dependant, the global consumer, the perfect average man and the slave to advertising, all set to a dizzying rhythm of black comedy. These were joined by the saviours of the national economy, those selling beaches and air to breathe, and the sellers and buyers of souls. Ten years later, a new version of that comical, vicious and colourful pop curtain-raiser comes to the stage, in a crescendo which blends comical opera with drama, made up of ridiculous monsters drugged by the dream of money, prisoners who believe themselves to be free, and hedonists who have buried love and passion. A new chapter of the tragicomic theatrical tale of the sickly Italy of recent times.
“What we want - explains Montesano - is to present that sense of neurotic overcrowding of the global condominium, the comical teeming of characters set to stew in a single pot under extreme pressure, with their lives no longer protected by the intimacy of home, but permanently visible to all, and with a rhythm which attempts to combine the Simpsons with Aristophanes, Eduardo and Woody Allen, the Sopranos, and the Commedia dell’Arte, Quevedo and the Avanspettacolo, Totò and Godot”. How is this combination brought to the stage? “One must let Lallo and Gegè, Mrs. Torza and her daughter, the obscene lawyer Morfo and the new arrival, Doctor G. all take to the stage, and leave them to babble freely, allow these little horrors to express themselves in all their ridiculous and disgusting misery, to see that which all too often is hidden by habit and by the idea that as everyone behaves like this, it must be normal. This is not the case: becoming barbaric cretins, slaves, the living dead, this is not normal, and not everyone does it: what is normal is to be human, gentle and kind, and free, and poetic, and alive.”