The new “Aida” is the perfect symbol of our unfortunate contemporaneity

Apart from the national sovereign opening grand soirée in universovisione, the exhibition of Sophia Loren, the blunders of Milly Carlucci, the tricolor choir, the Frecce ditto and long live Italy more oleographic and banal, only the parmesan cheese was missing, this new “Aida” of the Arena di Verona branded in toto Stefano Poda (direction, sets, costumes, lights, choreography) says little about “Aida” but a lot about our world. Meanwhile, compared to the live TV model “everything and more”, there is luckily less. A bit of scenography is missing, it is not known whether it is due to a welcome minimalist rethinking or due to the well-known assembly and disassembly problems in the very crowded Arena billboard. The fact is that, finally, the bleachers behind the stage remain empty, and there will never be an equally beautiful background; and that on stage there are, essentially, only the notorious self-propelled “big hand” and a couple of pyramids-ine-ine that Zeffirelli would have used as a paperweight. Poda was never an opera director, in the sense that he has never posed the problem of tackling a dramaturgy, much less of solving it. If anything, he is an installer (or a decorator, depending on how you prefer the glass), a creator of images that have a completely hypothetical link with the story they are supposed to tell, even if they are spiced up by the fluvial interviews with which Poda, affectionately renamed “er Fuffa”, talks a lot to say nothing, and so we also have the true and worthy heir of the late Arnaldo Forlani. Here his fluffiness is expressed in remarkable transhumances of masses, beautiful plays of light, laser beams that are always popular, an Eighties disco XXL size mirrorball suspended above, a certain unusual (for the Arena) precision of movements, a non-existent and glittering costumes: memorable, in particular, the glittery bolero sported by Radamès in Trionfo, which would have been considered too much even by Wanda Osiris. It could be any workand not because “there is no ancient Egypt”, as Zorro Veronesi would say, but because the story of Aida & co. is simply not toldand let alone think about it to understand what can make it interesting today.