Theater New in Assisi, Francesco, a play
By ROBERT BLAIR KAISER
Assisi, Italy
All summer long, pilgrims to Assisi
have been treated to something more dazzling than the usual tours around the
hilltop citys churches and grottos where Ss. Francis and Clare of Assisi
hung out together, praying and talking to the animals.
The tourists have been flocking to an American-style musical
called Francesco, which its producer, Richard C. Leach of Dallas,
has premiered in the hometown of St. Francis during the Jubilee Year.
Leach, the Catholic publisher best-known for sponsoring Barney,
the purple dinosaur, hopes to bring Francesco to the United States
next year on a national tour.
The play is tender and fierce, filled with the kind of songs that
you expect from an Andrew Lloyd Webber. It had a slick, Broadway quality.
It should. Leach hired the best talent his money could buy in
Europe. He brought in a famous French composer, Benoit Jutras, to do the
music.
Jutras is the author of Cirque du Soleil, a dramatic
mix of circus arts, street entertainment and high technology that has been
touring the world for a more than a decade.
Leach engaged an Oscar-winning designer, Gabriella Pescucci, to
execute the elaborate costumes -- there are 325 costume changes in the show --
and enlisted Dante Ferretti, a six-time Academy Award nominee, to create the
elaborate sets. Vincenzo Cerami, the man who co-wrote Life Is
Beautiful with Roberto Benigni, did the script.
Cerami broke away from a raw chronology and told the story of the
poverello through a young, raw-boned postulant, Leonardo, who comes to
Francis wanting to know more about the Franciscan way. He learns when Francis
takes him on a rollicking, tuneful trip that begins with the future
saints early life as a party animal. Leonardo learns more as Francis
takes off for the Crusades, fights in a war with Perugia, chooses a life of
poverty, is disinherited by his father and founds an order that helped change
the face of the Catholic church forever.
Thinking big
Leonard is all aglow. He wants to do great things. Francis starts
him off by saying, See if you can spin this top. He cannot do it,
of course, and learns that before he can do great things, he must do small
things. In a word, in order to follow St. Francis, he must learn humility.
The postulant Leonardo isnt the only one who has had to
learn humility, because, so far, Leach has invested $14 million in
Francesco. Leach is a Texan from Dallas. He thinks big, and
theres no reason why he cant think big, because he has made
millions on Barney, the purple dinosaur, a staple of kid TV in the United
States, and he reaps additional revenue by marketing a host of Barney products:
Barney T-shirts, Barney dolls, Barney toys, Barney hats, sheets and bedspreads.
Leach is thoroughly familiar with less lucrative enterprises. He has long been
involved in Catholic publishing, where some of his efforts have been more
successful than others.
But dropping $14 million -- $6 million on the show and $8 million
to build a 1,000-seat theater in Assisi -- is something he didnt count
on. In fact, with a cast of 33 and a huge stage crew, the show is running in
the red, and will continue to run a deficit while Leach figures out how to make
something work in a country where nothing really works the way an American
assumes it will.
The play opened on May 28, and Leach was assured that his people
in Italy had sold 140,000 seats (at an average price of $30) for the
spring-summer tourist season. After the exhilaration of opening night, Leach
sat down with his Italian producers and learned that they hadnt sold a
single seat. I was working with Italians for the first time, he
said. I found that my words and their words didnt always mean the
same thing.
On the face of it, Francesco looked like a sure thing:
a great play about St. Francis in a town that gets 6 million visitors a year,
just to pay homage to St. Francis. If Francesco could draw even a
tiny percentage of those folks, the show could break even. Most weeks this
summer, however, Francesco was drawing a mere 4,000 (in eight
performances). Leach demanded to know why they couldnt get bigger crowds.
If you say that 6 million people come to Assisi every year,
most of them in the summertime
Leach was told that only 1 million of those 6 million pilgrims
stay in the city overnight. The tour operators bring people in for a
three-hour-shot at Assisi, reported Leach, and then they are out of
there.
Keeping tourists in town
Leach intends to change that pattern by giving them a good reason
to stay for the night: Its called entertainment. What we have to do
is sell the big travel and tour operators, operators like Globus and American
Express, and get them to keep people in town overnight. Up till now,
Leach explained, three hours looking at shrines and relics seemed like
enough for most people. But now, we have a musical play that is full of life,
one that makes people feel good.
And how will Leach convince the tour people? He is confident
enough to think that if they see Francesco, they will like it, and
make their moves accordingly. So he plans to bring Francesco to
them on film. For the last two weeks of September, he will have
Francesco videotaped, with eight cameras and a top television
director in charge. He will show the film at the big international travel-tour
meetings in London and New York -- and also play it in Assisis Lyrick
Theatre through the winter, when the stage is dark.
Once the top decision-makers in the travel industry see the
film, said Leach with confidence, theyll be sold on
Francesco.
As for the U.S. tour, Leach said that will have to wait until he
gets his problems ironed out in Assisi. He is working with his Italian
co-producers, Fabrizio Celestini and Andrea Maia, to that end. Since their plan
has the enthusiastic support of Assisis hotelkeepers, not to mention the
town itself, which will get the theater when the Francesco lease is
up in 28 years, they figure it is only a matter of time.
The play will become an institution in Assisi, said
Celestini as he showed me around the Lyrick Theatre. Leach believes that
Francesco will become a worldwide institution -- and that it must
do so because, he said, This play can help change the world. Its a
world that seems headed for self-destruction. Thats why it needs to stand
back, take stock and start doing what St. Francis did: reverence the world and
everything in it.
The show is not a memorial to St. Francis, not a tribute.
Its a pointer to the future of the planet if we will only take time out
to ponder.
Francesco will make it, but I am not so sure it will
for the reasons Leach gives. Francesco is the kind of entertainment
that leaves an audience breathless and full of hope, mainly because the Francis
message it puts forth is delivered by a cast of 33 young men and women who come
across like the fresh-faced kids in Up With People. Their director,
Claudio Insegno, little more than a kid himself, told me, We love this
work. If Mr. Leach didnt pay us, wed pay him.
Francesco, is performed in Italian. An English
translation is flashed onto a large screen above the stage.
Robert Kaiser lives in Rome, where he is working on a book on
the future of the Catholic church. His e-mail address is
rkaiser@attglobal.net
National Catholic Reporter, September 22,
2000
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