From January 23 to February 14

Concrete walls, a sea delicately painted in filigree, a ‘room of memory’ where “various apparitions take place, recapitulations of traumatic events from a past that manifests itself through epiphanies”. With these words, director, baritone, and actor Luca Micheletti describes his new production of Simon Boccanegra, Verdi’s masterpiece, which he tackles for the first time (after having interpreted nine Verdian roles as a singer). The opera will be staged at Teatro La Fenice in Venice from January 23 to February 14. The set design is by Leila Fteita, costumes by Anna Biagiotti, and lighting design by Giuseppe Di Iorio. The new production is conducted by Renato Palumbo. The leading roles feature Luca Salsi and Simone Piazzola alternating as Simon Boccanegra, Francesca Dotto as Maria Boccanegra, Alex Esposito as Jacopo Fiesco, Francesco Meli as Gabriele Adorno, and Simone Alberghini and Alberto Comes as Paolo Albiani and Pietro, respectively.

“In this Simon Boccanegra, everything will be at once concrete and metaphysical, the director Luca Micheletti continues. I imagine a nearly ‘Ibsenian’ Simone, a nineteenth-century political-bourgeois and symbolist drama, in which revolutions of power are determined by the private lives of those who wield it or aspire to obtain it. All of this is immersed in a world populated by ‘specters,’ understood both as ghosts of the past and as ‘skeletons in the closet'”.

Luca Micheletti began his career in spoken theatre, directing ‘I Guitti’ of Brescia and collaborating with the major Italian theatres and festivals. He has received the most prestigious awards in the field, including the Premio Ubu (2011), the Pirandello Prize (2015), and the Premio Enriquez (2024). Alongside his work on spoken stages, he made his debut as an opera baritone, appearing both as director and singer in the world’s leading opera houses (from La Scala to Covent Garden, from the Met to the Teatro Real, from Tokyo to Sydney), and collaborating with conductors such as Riccardo Muti, Zubin Mehta, Myung-Whun Chung, Daniele Gatti, Fabio Luisi, and Daniel Harding, among others. As a director, he has signed around sixty productions in spoken theatre; in opera he has directed Carmen by Bizet, Scenes from Faust by Schumann, and Histoire du soldat by Stravinsky (Ravenna Festival 2019–2021), the Pergolesi/Bernstein double bill La serva padrona / Trouble in Tahiti and The Merry Widow by Lehár at Teatro Carlo Felice in Genoa (2021–22), and the world premiere of L’ultimo viaggio di Sindbad by Colasanti at the Rome Opera (2024). He also directed a film of La traviata shot at the Teatro Olimpico in Sabbioneta (2022). Among his upcoming engagements as a singer are the title roles in Macbeth at Teatro Regio di Torino and Don Giovanni in Tokyo, both conducted by Muti.

Info: https://www.teatrolafenice.it/event/stagione-25-26-simon-boccanegra/

Photo credits: Luca Micheletti © Fabio Anselmini