Backstage at Gianni Schicchi

Dear friends,

On 26 and 27 September the curtain goes up at KE Auditorium, CHRIST University, Bengaluru, on Puccini’s Gianni Schicchi. From 28 August until opening night, every two days, we are going to write to you — not about the show, but about the people making it.

There are more than thirty of them. Sixteen walk onto the stage. The rest never do, and without them there would be no evening at all.

The work started more than a year ago. Some of the people who began as students have graduated since then; some are working now, some have moved on to other things. Nobody was obliged to stay. They still turn up to rehearsals.

In the spring we performed an excerpt from Gianni Schicchi at the Aesthetica international conference. It went well enough that we decided to attempt the whole opera.

Nobody was obliged to stay. They still turn up to rehearsals.

Tickets for 26 & 27 September →

We are not starting with the title role, and not with the director. We are starting with the répétiteur — the rehearsal pianist — someone you will never see, although you will hear her throughout the performance.

Over the coming month you will find out:

• why a living man lies on our stage with not a single note to sing, and comes to every rehearsal anyway;

• what a soprano is doing in the role of the doctor;

• how an actress whose last part was a grandmother ended up playing a boy;

• why we sing this in English and not in Italian;

• what moved the action out of Florence in 1299 and into a house you would recognise;

• why an opera in which Puccini wrote no dancing at all needs four dancers;

• why almost everyone at the centre of this story is lying, bargaining or stealing, and why that is exactly the point;

• and how a show that runs under an hour has taken us more than a year.

An article written to answer someone else’s question is always more alive than one written to answer your own.

We have a request, too. We are collecting questions for the cast on our Instagram. Ask them anything — about the role, about the voice, about whether the stage frightens them. We will put your questions to them and publish their answers. An article written to answer someone else’s question is always more alive than one written to answer your own.

To keep up with the series, subscribe to the Journal — the form is at the bottom of every page. We promise exactly one thing: we will send you no advertising, only new writing from the Journal.

The production already exists — in the score, in the rehearsal room, in the heads of the people making it. What does not exist yet is the hour when all of it comes together in front of you. That hour is the evening of 26 September. Then it is gone, and what stays are these thirty-odd people and what a year has made of them.