The two main characters in the play by Neil Simon, rightly judged to be one of the greatest American writers of the last fifty years, are two elderly variety actors who have worked as a couple all their lives, creating a duo that became famous as “The Irresistible Boys”, and who, after separating due to irreconcilable misunderstandings, are called upon to reunite, eleven years later, on the occasion of a television program that wants them together, for one night only, to celebrate the history of the glorious American variety show. Onstage we see the two old actors with their different personalities trying to mend that rift that separated them for so many years in an attempt to revive a comic number that made them famous. Old misunderstandings reappear more entrenched and this difficult alchemy is the pretext for a play of brilliant comedy and deep melancholy. Certain exchanges of jokes and hilarious situations are a source not only of comedy but also of a look of profound tenderness for that world of the theater which, when it sees its protagonists set off on the avenue of decline, shows all its human fragility. Umberto Orsini and Franco Branciaroli come together again to revive this text, which in recent years has become a classic, in an attempt to capture everything that makes it closer to the theater of a Beckett (Finale di Partita) or even a Chekhov (Il Canto del Cigno) rather than a work of pure entertainment. In this homage to the world of actors, to their small and delightful foibles and tragic miseries, they are joined by the direction of Massimo Popolizio, who finds in the two protagonists those companions on the road with whom he has shared so many of the most intense and significant experiences of theater in recent years. Inspired by the lives of a famous pair of vaudeville performers, Joe Smith and Charles Dale, Neil Simon’s The Sunshine Boys debuted on Broadway in 1972 under the direction of Alan Arkin. Numerous and highly successful theatrical productions were staged worldwide in the following decades, and, with the author’s screenplay, an award-winning 1975 film version directed by Herbert Ross, starring Walter Matthau and George Burns. The 1995 adaptation for the U.S. small screen was entrusted to two A-list stars, Woody Allen and Peter Falk.

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