Gabriele Russo: “The mirror of the city of Naples”.
On Tuesday 6 February at 21 pm (repeats until 11 February) Annibale Ruccello's “Le cinque rose di Jennifer” will debut in the Sala Strehler of the Teatro Biondo in Palermo, in a production directed by Gabriele Russo and produced by the Fondazione Teatro di Napoli – Teatro Bellini.
The protagonist, in the role of Jennifer, is Daniele Russo, alongside Sergio Del Prete. The sets are by Lucia Imperato, the costumes by Chiara Aversano, the lights by Salvatore Palladino and the sound project by Alessio Foglia.
Jennifer's Five Roses is the work that in 1980 brought Jennifer's talent to the attention of the public and critics. Annibale Ruccello, actor, director, playwright who has been able to capture the most authentic and contrasting soul of the city of Naples. Jennifer is a transvestite, dreamer and romantic, who lives in a working-class neighborhood of Naples in the 80s. Shut in his house, he waits for a phone call from Franco, the engineer from Genoa with whom he is in love and to whom he continually dedicates the song Se perdo te by Patty Pravo, broadcast by a radio station that in the meantime continuously launches updates on a serial killer who kills the transvestites of the neighborhood.
An unpublished Russo, flanked on stage by Sergio Del Prete, restores all the melancholy of the text without sacrificing its irresistible humor. Gabriele Russo, who tackles a text by Ruccello for the first time, announces a staging with a powerful aesthetic, faithful to the text and, therefore, to the author's intentions: “We adhere to the strict rules and precise indications that Ruccello himself gives us – explains the director – trying to go through, analyze, understand night after night, performance after performance, a text that is structurally perfect, which outlines a character so full of life that he seems to rebel against the hand of a director who wants to bend him to his own very personal vision. It is not a text to overwrite but to dig into, to bring out subtexts, possibilities, suggestions, doubts”.
For Russo, Ruccello's text is a mirror of the city of Naples.
Article published by Federica Annunziata on February 2, 2024, at 11:28 PM
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