\u201cI was completely scandalized, but I thought it was fantastic,\u201d Nettles said. \u201cAs the story goes, when we were leaving my aunt Cora Lee said, \u2018So, Jennifer, what did you think? Did you like it?\u2019 And I turned around and looked at the marquee, and I said, \u2018I\u2019ll be back.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n
Though a longtime musical theater fan, she didn\u2019t initially intend to write both the musical\u2019s book and songs, but she found that the collaborators she was working with weren\u2019t getting the tone she was going for. \u201cI wanted to make sure that it wasn\u2019t campy,\u201d she said. \u201cIt would have been so easy to get it wrong. It would have been so easy to do \u2018A little pinch of this and a little dash of that\u2019 \u2014 Oh, God, save us.\u201d<\/p>\n
Eventually, Nettles was introduced to Mary Zimmerman, a theater and opera director who won a Tony Award in 2002 for her Broadway adaptation of Ovid\u2019s \u201cMetamorphoses\u201d and has been honored with a MacArthur fellowship. Zimmerman was impressed by the \u201cdensity\u201d of the musical\u2019s plot and by how fully realized Nettles\u2019s draft was. \u201cThere wasn\u2019t a bad song,\u201d she said, \u201cand she has a real sense of the rhythm of the scenes.\u201d<\/p>\n
Together, the writer and director led a trip to Palermo last October with some of the creative team. Beyond just connecting with Giulia via the location \u2014 her \u201cdry, hot world,\u201d Nettles said \u2014 it also gave a sense of the city\u2019s polyglot history.<\/p>\n
\u201cSicily was tossed around for hundreds of years in terms of who occupied it, who owned it,\u201d she said. \u201cAll that is in the architecture, it\u2019s in the food, it\u2019s such a m\u00e9lange. Seeing the place gave more permission to explore the darkness of it, all of the textures. And musically, this piece is very much anachronistic \u2014 obviously, it\u2019s set in 17th-century Sicily, but it\u2019s not that music, it\u2019s pop music. I call it a pop-eretta.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI was completely scandalized, but I thought it was fantastic,\u201d Nettles said. \u201cAs the story goes, when we…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":283107,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[174,108560,31331,108559,9,24,63,108557,44020,122,124,123,108558,905,85499],"class_list":["post-283106","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-content-type-personal-profile","tag-giulia-the-poison-queen-of-palermo-play","tag-jennifer","tag-nettles","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-perelman","tag-performing-arts-center","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news","tag-ronald-o","tag-theater","tag-theater-off-broadway"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283106","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=283106"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/283106\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/283107"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=283106"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=283106"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=283106"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}