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Rating: Bologna, a scorching hot July afternoon.
A long line of eccentric individuals under the sun transporting sets, panels, costumes, essentials.
There’s the lanky writer/director, the psychologist/utopian (founder of the company), a few delicate educators, two volunteer clowns, the lead actor who is elderly and disabled, the users/stars of the psychiatric service stage.
It’s quite a walk to get there on foot, the show’s location is far, unreachable by minibus or cars.
The lanky writer/director stops and looks at that long line, looks and looks again and tells himself that this is the show, not the tragicomedy that will soon take the stage for god knows what summer festival.
Because the joyful brigades, the unlikely congregations, the fantastic joining of fantastic individuals, touch him, and it seems they wrinkle, even if just for a moment, the anonymous, gray backdrop of things...
And so, against that backdrop, excited by the beauty of what he sees and heedless of the fatigue, the heat, and the passing people, he starts to sing, soon followed by the rest of the company...
After all, they know that song well since, more or less always, it’s the one they sing to warm up before rehearsals.
"I sing for those who have no luck, I sing for me..."
But, to tell you how I came to know of this "Angry Song," I have to start from the sound of the radio in Yorgos’ little shop...
Yorgos’ little shop was a little white house crammed with things... I used to buy my notebooks there, the beautiful blue notebooks of the Greek elementary school... but, as still happens today in certain village shops, you could find anything...
Yorgos was a tiny old man with very lively blue eyes and a cartoonish giggle, an ehh ehh ehhh where you could read a sort of sly and amused wisdom...
But Yorgos, most importantly, had a magic radio...
An object out of time from which emerged the little world orchestra, a sort of sound bric-a-brac fluttering between bouncing Balkan delights and soundtracks of improbable soul films...
It was listening to that radio that rock’n’roll began to lose importance for me..., with the derailing urgency of grated guitars, giving way to violins, small organs, bouzouki...
Ah, with those sounds gently coming out of the little shop and brushing against the olive tree branches, I no longer needed the welder goggles to protect myself from a million dark wave sparks...
They were oblivious sounds... and ubiquitous... because, without making a fuss, they were here and there, inside and outside...
And not making a fuss is the only way to give importance to everything else...
But now let’s move to Kostas, a very funny guy, hopelessly in love (of course) with my then dream girlfriend...
Owner of a white café with little blue windows lost in the island’s interior, amidst the lively scents of aromatic herbs and the road to the cliffs...
It was to my dream girlfriend, not to me, that good Kostas, with his elf-like glasses-clad air, offered little tunes suitable for the atmosphere we had back then...
In other words, a Merlin-and-Vivien-like aura, the wizard and the maiden who, holding hands, sang nonsensical ditties about absolute love...
Among those little tunes was this song, not the Anna Melato version, but that of an obscure Greek singer...
There, at first listening, the radio of Yorgos immediately came to mind...
Perhaps due to those unruly march tones, or the mix of chaos and melancholy, of disillusionment and pride... or for that childish and unreal orchestrina sound that sways and sways with toy instruments...
The only thing that didn’t quite fit with Yorgos’ radio were those unforgettable Italian words...
“I sing for those who have no luck, I sing for me. I sing in anger at this moon against you. I sing to that sun that will come, set, rise again, to illusions. to the anger that...”
Unforgettable words, yes... It is hard to better express anger and discomfort...
It must also be said that Melato's version is ten times more beautiful than the one Kostas let us hear...
Rough and jumping the music, rough and jumping is the voice...
Not to mention the passion...
Do you know the passion? Do you know what it means to unite it to words that seem definitive and to music that seems as if the instrument is your own heart?
Yes, I know you know it... I know it happens to you too.......
But we started with that strange and raggedy theater company... well, I don’t know if you’ve figured out that the lanky writer/director was (is) me...
That for work, when I’m lucky, I get to deal with such things... and so I want to close with another memory, this time much more recent...
It’s lunchtime at “Marameo” and a sentence resounds in the most absolute silence... uttered in a low voice by Giovanni, a disabled person with a helmet due to epileptic seizures... the sentence says, more or less, "the poet inside me is waking up"... and it comes from a play we are writing together...
Evidently, Giovanni is rehearsing his part...
Here, at lunchtime, in a very strange silence (because about fifteen disabled people eating create quite a mess) that sentence so incongruous... and so magical...
First, I wanted to laugh, then I was moved...
Maybe we’ll sing that “Angry Song” again....
(ah, the lyrics are by Lina Wertmuller and the music by Nino Rota, not exactly two nobodies)
Trallallà...
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