entry Dec 2009
The Bellini
Theater
The
Bellini Theater in Naples has had a fate similar to
that of other theaters in the city and, indeed, in the
world at large. That is to say, it did very well when live
entertainment was not competing with films, then
television, and now the massively merchandised engines of
“home entertainment” such as DVDs and material downloaded
from the internet. That glorious period is now almost in
the mythical past (at least for those in whom all memory
is short term) —golly, gee, almost a hundred years or so.
After that period, many theaters suffered at the
box-office and had to struggle through any number of
permutations of closing, reopening as cinemas or
vaudeville houses, closing again, reopening again, being
torn down, being left to decay, etc. The old theaters in
Naples have been through much of that. The old Teatro dei Fiorentini
is now a bingo hall; the Teatro Nuovo is a cinema;the Mercadante has made a recent
comeback since WWII, as has the Trianon, and so
forth. The Bellini is one of those that has made a
come-back. [See also, First
Theaters in Naples.]
The
Bellini was built in 1864, shortly after the unification
of Italy, at the expense of Nicola Lacapra Sabelli and was
designed by the architect, Carlo Sorgente. It was part of
the general plan to modernize the urban area between the National Museum and the music conservatory along what had
once been the old west wall of the city. That
modernization happened in the late 1800s and, besides the
Bellini theater, included the new Galleria
Principe di Napoli and the Royal Academy of Art. The
Bellini held 1200 spectators and at first hosted a variety
of events, from circuses to musical comedy to an
occasional opera. A few years later, Sabelli's tastes went
upscale and he decided to have the theater rebuilt along
the lines of the Opéra-Comique
in Paris and make the theater primarily a venue for opera.
The theater reopened in the autumn of 1878 with a
presentation of I
Puritani by Vincenzo
Bellini, for whom the theater was named.
The
theater enjoyed a long period of success, missing the fate
of theaters that had either closed in the face of
competition from popular entertainment such as vaudeville
and cinema or had, themselves, converted to venues for
such entertainment. Decline set in after WWII and the
Bellini staged its final production in 1962. The next year
it was turned into a cinema and acquired a well-deserved
seedy reputation. In 1986 the Bellini was acquired by
Neapolitan actor Tato
Russo (b. 1947) as a venue for his own theatrical
troupe. They opened in 1988 with a staging of Brecht’s The Three-Penny Opera.
The company has since that time generally enjoyed success;
currently they are staging Pirandello’s Enrico IV [Henry IV].
Besides plays, the company also performs modern musicals
(using the English term "musical" to describe the works,
such as Russo's own work, Masaniello, based on the protagonist of
the 1647 revolution in
Naples.
There
is a common perception that fewer people go out to
see plays than used to. If that is so, then the causes
are probably a combination of changing tastes and
increasing competition from other types of
entertainment. To the extent that it is NOT so, it may
be because those who like to see live theater are not
going to be drawn away by a film, for example. They may
be two different audiences, at least to some degree. It
is hard to glean much useful knowledge from statistics.
For example, Italian statistics on entertainment
generally group together all “live box-office” events
and then break it down further. Thus, in a recent year
(2007) we find that there were 207,000 live events in
Italy—i.e. theater, opera, all concerts of every kind of
music, ballet, circuses, etc. All of them together sold
36 million tickets. (That number is actually up from 28
million in the year 2000). Of that, almost half of
ticket sales were for live theater, plays such as those
presented at the Bellini Theater. (By comparison, in the
year 2006 there were 105 million tickets sold for
cinema.) Yet, I have not seen a survey on how many
people don’t go to see a play because they go to see or
do something else. There does seem to be a regular
theater-going public in Naples, and the comeback of the
Bellini Theater (and a few others) demonstrates that.
True, the Bellini no longer puts on the kind of event it
was designed for —opera— but it has returned to the
world of fine live entertainment and has done well.
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