Arsenico and old lace opens the season of prose by subscription of the Cinema Teatro di Chiasso and two great ladies of the Italian theater go up on stage, Anna Maria Guarnieri and Rosalina Neri (who replaces Giulia Lazzarini, forced to give up the part due to health problems).
Comedy universally known also thanks to the direction of Mario Monicelli, to whom this staging is inspired. With this title the great Italian director ventured into his first theatrical direction in 1992. Equally famous, even among those not accustomed to the theater, is a film by Frank Capra, starring Gary Grant, an adaptation, in turn, of a great Broadway theatrical success by Joseph Kesselring. The New York Times called the comedy "so funny that no one will ever forget it" and indeed it was.
The plot
Brilliant right from the title, this dramaturgical text has a choral plot, in which one of the protagonists is Mortimer Brewster, a severe theater critic, who must have something to do with his family of murderers: two lovable, elderly spinster aunts, who kill roommates with an arsenic-corrected elderberry wine; an old uncle, convinced that he is Theodore Roosevelt, who tries to dig the Panama Canal in the cellar (where, among other things, the victims of his sisters are buried), a murderous brother, who in turn is in charge of a corpse from hide in the cellar ...
The show is made possible thanks to the Cultural Activities Department of the Municipality of Chiasso, with the support of the Republic and Canton of Ticino-Fondo Swisslos and AGE SA, in collaboration with the Amici del Cinema Teatro di Chiasso Association.
