From Michael Jackson to Magritte’s man, through Neo from “Matrix” and Walter White from “Breaking Bad”, Cinderella, Pavarotti, Freddie Mercury, Beyoncé and Fonzie. Only one artist is able to gather all these celebrities on stage: Arturo Brachetti. “Solo” is the title of his latest show that, after opening to rave reviews in Paris and France, arrives tomorrow at the Arcimboldi, halfway through an Italian tour that has sold out most of its stages (in Milano too new encore performances have been added up to the 20th).

“Solo” because the “master of quick-change” is practically alone on stage, but also because Brachetti has no real rivals in his transformist shows. “With ‘Solo’ I’m back to the one man show. With me there is only Kevin Michael Moore, who is my shadow, a rational part of me that tries, in vain, to keep my feet on the ground” says with his usual verve Brachetti “in fact there are 15 people in the company and we turn with two 18-meters trucks because putting on such a show is really complicated! After all, it is designed and packaged for international audiences. After Italy we will be back on tour throughout Europe, but we are already planning China and more”.

Brachetti is the number one also because his shows are not limited to offering a series of eclectic transformations, but they also weave real stories that involve the public. The show (which does indeed feature some of his flagship acts, but is 80 percent new with as many as 60 characters) lasts 90 minutes, without intermissions and with continuous surprises “Perché, quando si entra nel mondo della fantasia, non si può interrompere il viaggio onirico” spiega sornione l’artista che nello spettacolo regala anche momenti di sand painting, ombre cinesi e spettacolari manipolazioni di luci laser. “Because when one enters the world of fantasy, one can not interrupt the oneiric journey,” explains the smirking artist who, during the show, also offers moments of sand painting, shadow puppetry and spectacular manipulations of laser lights. “The common thread is a lovely little house, the home of the heart, with many rooms, each one dedicated to a world: from childhood fairy tales to TV series to the world of music. Which gives me the opportunity to become Peter Pan, Aladdin, Snow White or Shrek, the Beatles, Elvis Presley or Edith Piaf and, again, Batman, Murder She Wrote, Baywatch, Spock and his crew.” Employing state-of-the-art videomapping, with music of Fabio Valdemarin, costumes by Zaira de Vincentiis, light design by Valerio Tiberi. In the story there’s also space for an ‘Italian wedding’, in which Brachetti plays all the characters by himself. “It is a tribute to Italy,” he concludes. “It is almost inevitable to go around the world and do something Italian.” This number, which lasts 5 minutes during which the 5-6 characters go through 25 changes of costume, takes place in a kitchen where there all the ingredients of the wedding are: it is all typical of an Italian comedy f the ’50s. After all, it the Italian settings that are more exportable, the one remembered abroad. And it is a number that, despite all the past years, no one still dares imitating!

(LA STAMPA – ORIGAMI – 22/02/2018 – RAFFAELLA SILIPO)

His shows are made of the stuff of which dreams are made, always bathed in the magical light of the Moon. Complicit, mysterious, smiling upon them. In his latest show ‘Solo’, currently touring through Europe, Arturo Brachetti holds Lady Moon by a thread, almost like a balloon that’s about to flee into the night sky. «The Moon is often on stage with me» explains the quick-change magician, with the cheerful and thoughtful eyes of a sixty-year-old boy. “It brings me luck, it’s an important presence, also because I live at night, like vampires. I often can not fall asleep. We are a race apart, us nocturnal animals, we find ourselves wandering the streets at three in the morning, imbued with a mysterious restlessness. That the full moon really influences me, on a physical level, I suddenly understood one night, in London: I could not sleep and I found myself driving around through less than safe parts of the city, thinking of Jack the Ripper. I looked up and saw her up there… pale, huge in the sky. I heard her speak to me. After all, it influences the tides of the vast oceans, how could it not affect humans?” And it is all the Moon’s fault, Shakespeare wrote in his in Othello, “when it gets too close to the earth it drives one crazy”. And, Brachetti assures, “even the audience is different on a full moon”. Luna, lady of illusions: “Yes, because its cold light is deceptive,” continues, dreamily, Brachetti. “It is much easier to orient yourself in the woods in total darkness than on full moon nights: thanks to its rays you can see, but in a distorted way: deceptive, skewed”. It is no coincidence that “almost all artists are lunatics, an astral conjunction that governs us most sensitive, with feet less on the ground than others. As the saying goes “when the wise man points to the Moon, the fool looks at his finger”. See, us artists we immediately learn to ignore the finger. Having my head through the clouds and fully into the Moon was my luck: I’m an eternal Peter Pan, flying back and forth from Neverland. Thinking it was time for me to change, to mature, I once went to a psychoanalyst, who told me: “Hold on tight to you dreams, to your slight immaturity, that’s your fortune”».

Like Brachetti, the Moon transforms, it changes according to its phases. “And like every quick-change artist it loves to hide: that other side of the Moon… we do not know it, we saw it only through the astonished eyes of the astronauts and the prophetic ones of Jules Verne in his “From Earth to the Moon””. Verne, another eclectic soul bewitched by the night… it would be impossible to quote them all, the lunar literature has no boundaries, “on the other hand it’s a powerful symbol of mystery, magic, the absolute protagonist of fairy tales and legends. Every satanic ritual, every esoteric evocation requires its presence. I like to think about how much Federico Fellini loved the Moon: heoften drew it, he dedicated beautiful things to her, such as his “Voce della luna”. And let’s not forget George Meliès, the father of cinema, a master of illusionism. In his most famous and iconic, now viral, creation, the Moon looks at us looking at it. The perfect illusion» The Moon is also mistress of the romantics “and I am, a romantic. Well, truth be told I like to turn myself romantic, to paint myself romantic, to create romantic situations. Because romanticism must be helped, it must be built. Torn by everyday life we become cynical, disillusioned, we do not notice the simple and unattainable beauty of the Moon in the sky. Instead you have to revert to a childlike state of wonder, bring your beloved on a full moon night to the Sacra di San Michele, gaze from the windows overlooking the valley, with the right background music. Or in Bologna, look out from a window on the roofs of the old town and be able to tell the woman by your side: “See, I rented the moon for you tonight”». Magic, romance, illusions. Yet there are the technological inventions that have allowed us to reach the Moon. «Of course, technology is a very amusing toy and I use it as an artist and as a man. But, at the end of the day, there must be real emotion: love, poetry, madness. Those remain. In my show and in life”.

(TEATRO.IT – 01/12/2016 – MARIA LUISA ABATE)

“In the beginning was the magic” From the black and white screen of an old transistor TV, Silvan as engaged in prestidigitation; then the magnetic eyes of Mandrake followed, the dangerous games of Houdini and a succession of illusionists. A prodigious and fascinating world, escaping from the house where the thoughts of a child who once grew up there still reside. The spirit and the heart of Arturo Brachetti embody the myth of the forever young, like Peter Pan, while his art knows no respite in the growth process. There was a lot of autobiographical elements in the “Solo” show, which saw the showman interacting with a camera (Kevin Michael Moore, trusty assistant on stage) intent on rummaging inside a doll’s house (by Matteo Piedi, Zero Studiooutside of time and space. A model whose recesses have been projected onto the backdrop: the optic has been turned upside down, the interior has turned into exterior, making the dreams of the eternal boy apparent, his mental fusion between reality and imaginary coming alive before the audience.

The “World Master of quick change” has interacted with the set design (Rinaldo Rinaldi) in and out of a projected filmed environment (videomapping by video artist and visual designer Riccardo Antonino, with the students of the Politecnico di Torinozapping between real and surreal characters. Brachetti does not make art: he is his own art, which he embodies in the very act of giving her life. The phantasmagoria of lightning, acrobatics, disguises confirms the creative and practical mastery that, once again, leaves us amazed, even for the multiplicity of mastered techniques.

Eccentric music stars, a bestiary born of shadow play, heroes and heroines of fairy tales immersed in their naive candor, they all have conversed with characters and masks of a revived Commedia dell’Arte or presenting the rowdy genuine energy of Italian Comedies, masterfully painting a cross-section of our era. A chameleonic interpreter was what the audience expected and he did not disappoint in the slightest, although the interactions with the spectators were perhaps a tad superfluous, disturbing the spell crafted on stage.

Drawing on the roots and grafting on the new, the show, slowly, almost subliminally, took a new direction, projected forward to start from the personification of the four seasons, with learned musical quotes and pictorial ones, reinterpreted with originality. In the last half hour, the decided change of course steered the show towards the impalpability of poetry, guided by the evanescence of light.

It turned out that the secret room of the house contained nothingness, that is, a universe where thoughts flew and chased each other in a violent whirlwind, similar to what drove Dorothy into the magical world of Oz. The tornado wrapped the domestic objects in its twists, a compendium of the scenic tale that has been catapulted into the vastness of infinity. Beautiful, dense laser beams, jousting, have surrounded the protagonist of blue and the antagonist of red, as a single dichotomous personality unable to split. Representation of the two halves that make up the human being: reasoning and imagination. The latter carried Brachetti up to touch the stars, rained in his arms until they were intertwined, making his inner essence bright and, at the end of the planetary formation process, materializing it again on the earth, in a trickle of sand that the omniscient hands have shaped on a light board.

The storyboard went back to the house and then the face was drawn upon it, with its unmistakable trademark tuft, the face of the traveler pindaric. Through the eyes of Arturo, transformist par excellence, the world, its people… all things are seen in continuous evolution, in a randomized sequence of dissolution and rebirth.

In the theatrical poster the head of Brachetti is split open and another Brachetti comes out of it. A ‘russian doll’ whose thoughts are able to replicate themselves on the path of rediscovering fantasy, an unstable, symbolic element like a handful of dust that, with a simple breath, can take on new form or be forever erased. A secular mandala that represents the artist’s cosmos and that ability to dream that we should all learn to cherish as a treasure, giving value to the preciousness of the ephemeral.