|
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. |
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