Riding the wave of the important results achieved with the 2023|2024 seasons, the Donizetti Theater Foundation, with the City of Bergamo, announces the upcoming Prose Season and Other Paths, the backbone of the Theater Season whose full program schedule also includes Operetta and Opera&Concerts, as well as numerous educational projects in the pipeline. A rich and multifaceted program will run at Teatro Donizetti and Teatro Sociale over six months, from December 2024 to May 2025, with seven titles on the bill for the Prose Season, for eight performances of each show (Saturday through Sunday of the following week; Monday rest), and as many for Altri Percorsi, with two matinees. In introducing the upcoming Prose Season and Other Paths, Giorgio Berta, President of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, takes the opportunity to thank those who are working to make it a success: “As President of the Foundation, I cannot but express satisfaction with what has been done in recent years, with the difficult times now behind us. After the restoration work and the emergency period, the Donizetti Theater has indeed been reborn on new foundations, even more solid than before. And co-leading this rebirth are the City of Bergamo and the many institutional and private partners who support us, as well as all the staff, technical and administrative, of the Foundation, without whose professionalism it would be unthinkable to achieve certain goals of excellence that so many envy us. To everyone goes my personal thanks and those of the Foundation itself, whose role is increasingly proactive and aimed at stimulating broad segments of the public, with the intention of being a point of reference for younger generations as well.”
Massimo Boffelli, General Director of the Donizetti Theatre Foundation, takes his cue from the success of the 2023|2024 Season to turn his gaze to the future: “We present the new Season of Prose and Other Paths strong from the results we have just achieved: 52,672 were the total number of spectators for Prose, with an average of more than 1,000 per performance; 5,126 for Altri Percorsi. These are important numbers that in the immediate future will translate into an increase in the number of performances for Prose: eight for all seven titles on the bill. Numbers that, beyond their quantitative value, attest to the increasingly strong and deep bond between the public and the artistic proposals of our Foundation, of which the Prose Season and Altri Percorsi is one of the cornerstones, together with the Donizetti Opera festival, Bergamo Jazz, the new review Lezioni di Storia and Operetta. All this is an unmistakable sign of the attractive force that these varied proposals have toward the city and beyond. The Donizetti Theater, and with it the Teatro Sociale, is increasingly asserting itself as the home of culture for the people of Bergamo and also for those who come from afar.”
Maria Grazia Panigada foreshadows the new Season of Prose and Altri Percorsi, of which she is Artistic Director, “as a place where people go to take something: an emotion, an encounter, sometimes even an annoyance, but always looking for what can serve to raise questions, to share with others a time of listening and looking. A place where people with different stories, with different ages, with different thoughts, for the time of the performance, stay together. And every time something incredible happens, if we really (turn off our cell phones) get involved, time becomes suspended in other places and times and the story on stage offers itself to us, unique, unrepeatable, because the conditions in live performance can never be the same.” “Behind us we have a season in which the audience has further increased, in which thanks to educational projects we have expanded the involvement of the younger generation: the Donizetti Theater is a growing community that is more and more inclusive and welcoming. The companies we host tell us that ours is a theater where you can breathe the skills of the workers, the welcoming atmosphere of those who work there, but above all they are amazed by the audience: they feel, while they are performing, that they are in front of competent, respectful spectators who know how to listen,” Panigada concludes. Nadia Ghisalberti, Councillor for Culture of the Municipality of Bergamo, at the end of her administrative term offers her personal greetings: “The great success of the Prose Season and Other Paths is linked above all to the person who has been in charge of its programming all these years, Maria Grazia Panigada, whose bond with the audience is a solid and long-lasting union; an audience made up not only of adults, but also of many young students who are involved in training projects. I believe that few theaters in Italy can boast such a high audience fill and number of subscribers as the Donizetti, and this is due to the skills and sensitivity of the Artistic Direction, always able to choose wisely and carefully the proposals best suited to the taste of our demanding audience. A success, confirmed even after the pandemic, that pushed us to do something more: the first co-productions were born, such as Accabadora, from Michela Murgia’s novel, Ivan by Dostoevsky with Fausto Russo Alesi, up to the great staging for the Capital 2023 of theIliade with Alessio Boni. After ten years in office in the administration of Bergamo’s cultural policies, I can say that the solidity of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, the city’s theatrical vocation and the relationships woven by Panigada with national directors and producers, urge us to continue on the path of experimenting with new productions.” The Prose Season and Other Paths 2024|2025, is realized with the contribution of MIC – Italian Ministry of Culture, Lombardy Region, Bergamo Chamber of Commerce, Allianz (Main Partner of the Donizetti Theater Foundation), Intesa Sanpaolo, SIAD and an important number of private donors who have joined the Art Bonus campaign ‘Ambassadors of Donizetti’.
Giacomo Campora, CEO of Allianz S.p.A., comments, “Allianz will once again be Main Partner of the upcoming Prose Season and Other Paths of the Donizetti Theatre Foundation. Since 2020 we have been at the Foundation’s side to bring the Bergamo audience, and in particular the younger generations, ever closer to an artistic project of great national and international caliber.” Daniele Pastore, Intesa Sanpaolo Lombardy North Regional Director, says, “We confirm Intesa Sanpaolo’s presence at the new season of Prose and Other Paths of the Donizetti Theater Foundation, which is part of a broader commitment of our group to support the territories in which we are rooted by working alongside the entities involved in cultural initiatives. In fact, we believe that art and culture are strategic and identity resources for communities capable of triggering growth processes on a social, economic and employment level as well.”
Prose Season at the Donizetti Theater
The Prose Season 2024|2025 at the Donizetti Theater opens from December 7 to 15, 2024, picking up the baton from the previous one under the sign of the presence of Massimo Popolizio, this time in the role of director: the inaugural performance, I Ragazzi irresistibili, a text by the American Neil Simon also brought to success on the big screen, in fact bears his signature, along with the acting signatures of two great protagonists of Italian theater, Umberto Orsini e Franco Branciaroli, on this occasion playing the roles of two elderly variety actors who meet again after years, giving rise, amid misunderstandings that have never subsided, to a difficult alchemy that is the pretext for a play of brilliant comedy and deep melancholy. From Jan. 25 to Feb. 2, 2025, it will be the turn of another actor of absolute value, Alessandro Haber, main performer of the La Coscienza di Zeno, based on the famous novel by Italo Svevo, directed by Paolo Valerio. From February 8 to 16, the following will be staged. L’avaro by Molière, with the surprising performance of Ugo Dighero, an actor best known as a comedian, but with a solid acting background who in this show reveals himself in all his abilities.
Silvio Orlando will bring the latest show produced by his company to Bergamo from Feb. 22 to March 2, Ciarlatani, a story whose characters are linked to the world of cinema and theater, written and directed by the Spaniard Pablo Rémon, while, from March 8 to 16, Fausto Russo Alesi will propose, also in the directorial role, Eduardo De Filippo’s most Pirandellian text, L’arte della commedia, a choral work that captivates between disquiet and farce. Another foreign signature will be that of Argentine Claudio Tolcachir, who has been present on Italian stages for some time, author and director of Edificio 3, a comedy about five characters who share the confined space of an office and whose personal stories intertwine, with moments of emotion, grotesque effects and comedy (April 5 to 13). The Prose Season 2024|2025 will conclude, from May 10 to 18, with Ticino-born Daniele Finzi Pasca, a much-loved artist in Bergamo, a city among the first in Italy to have brought circus-theater to a prose season. His company will present
Titizé. A Venetian dream , show that features music by Maria Bonzanigo, sets by Hugo Gargiulo and costumes by Giovanna Buzzi, valuable resources of Compagnia Finzi Pasca.
Altri Percorsi
With six of the seven titles on the bill scheduled at the Teatro Sociale in Upper Town, Altri Percorsi, which has always been a showcase of different ways of doing theatrical research using multiple means and expressive languages, will be under the banner of young actors. Particularly so are the shows that open and close the review where a great choral force emerges. Re Lear è morto a Mosca (Thursday, Dec. 19, 2024) is a valuable show from a theatrical point of view and with great civic reflection: eight young artists, led by Argentine director César Brie, tell the story of the Jewish Goset Theater founded in Moscow in 1919 by director Aleksandr Granovsky and painter-scenographer Marc Chagall. A theater admired by Gordon Craig, which Stalin destroyed by assassinating the actor-directors who led it, Solomon Michoels and Veniamin Zuskin. Quite a different register that chosen by Veronica Cruciani for the twelve young students of the Scuola Filodrammatici in the staging of The Trials by Englishwoman Dawn King: here we find ourselves in the near future, in which young people, little more than teenagers, are called upon to take an active part in the trials of adults who are accused of having committed crimes against sustainability (Thursday, April 3, 2025 with matinee on the 4th). Reality comes powerfully into the review with a lunge at the theme of justice, thanks to the play
Nell’occhio del labirinto. Apology of Enzo Tortora, a debut play by playwright Chicco Dossinel, staged by Teatro della Cooperativa with the performance of talented young actor Simone Tudda (Thursday, Jan. 16, 2025). Present for the first time in Altri Percorsi is the Menoventi company, whose style is irony and the unraveling of the planes of representation, to take the spectator into labyrinths of meaning: in Odradek, a contemporary fairy tale inspired by Gunther Anders and Franz Kafka, one enters the home of an ordinary woman who finds herself enveloped in a spiral of online orders and wishes that are fulfilled even before they are requested (Thursday, Feb. 6). A welcome return will be that of Teatro La Ribalta, which returns to Bergamo after the special event of Othello Circus. Ne The Queen’s Mirror we will find Jason Mattia De Majo, Maria Magdolna Johannes, and Rocco Ventura on stage again, directed by Antonio Viganò: a reflection on the beauty that is contained in the diversity of each person (Thursday, Feb. 20).
The next edition of Altri Percorsi will also have a window on classical theater with Amphitryon, a show by Teatro Kismet already scheduled in 2020 and then canceled due to the pandemic (Thursday, March 27 and matinee on the 28th).
The theme of the double, fundamental in Plautus’ text, is set by director Teresa Ludovico in an underworld territory in which six actors and a musician, in a continuous movement, draw double worlds: divine and human, above and below, light and shadows.
Finally, on Thursday, March 6 at the Donizetti Theater, will be staged Amore by Pippo Delbono, a show that asks nothing except to sit back and let yourself be taken by the hand by the world of fado, with its rhythm, its dance, its song, accompanied by the dreamlike and emotional visions of its creator.
Meetings around the shows
Surrounding some of the shows in the 2024-2025 Prose Season will be meetings open to the public and students in which actors and directors will be asked to talk about themselves and answer questions from viewers. The schedule of meetings is being finalized.
