Auditorium Giovanni Agnelli - Lingotto / at 08:00 PM

Toni Servillo
Puccini, Puccini, what do you want from me?

One of the stars of this show is a character who considers the music of Giacomo Puccini a primordial form of Muzak. The truth is, his familiarity with Puccini is fragmentary at best. Then, as luck would have it, he falls in love with a lady who absolutely adores Puccini, and he winds up letting her drag him to a performance of some of Puccini’s music. There appears to be no end to the poor fellow’s consternation, however. His sweetheart also goes in for deep, nuanced poets like Rainer Maria Rilke and Georg Trakl, besides radical 20th-century composers like Arnold Schönberg and Anton Webern, not to mention the non-music of John Cage. And she likes all those rappers he’s never even heard of – maybe just because she’s younger than he is. True, she is a Bob Dylan fan, which is the only common ground her lovesick suitor can seem to find. But Puccini? “Gimme a break!”