Cabaret Sacco & Vanzetti

with Raffaele Braia and Valerio Tambone
by Michele Santeramo
concept & direction Gianpiero Alighiero Borgia
Music by Papaceccio mmc and Roberta Carrieri
costume design Manuela Paladin Sabanovic
stage design Vincenzo Mascoli

Cabaret Sacco & Vanzetti Cabaret Sacco & Vanzetti tells the story of Nicola and Bartolomeo, Italian anarchists who migrated to the United States in the 1900s and passed through Ellis Island, the island off the shore of New York City that for migrants of those times was in many ways like Italy’s Lampedusa for today’s migrants. Sacco and Vanzetti were accused of murder and sentenced to death after a show trial in which the evidence, largely unfounded, was weighed against the political ideology and Italian origin of the pair.
Cabaret Sacco & Vanzetti is the story, which has become symbolic, of two oridinary migrants, two modern heroes who have become a universal symbol of the battle for the rights of equality and justice. Condemned to the electric chair for a crime they had not committed, victims of a judicial crime, Sacco and Vanzetti were also targeted because of the politics of terror against the ‘reds’ that America of the time conducted, bringing a special ferocity when it came to migrants.
The story told here of the relationship between Sacco and Vanzetti, which changes over the years until it becomes a great friendship, has the rhythm of a ballad, a continuous melody always present in the show where every day Nicola and Bartolomeo have to improvise their lives while maintaining their faith in a better, freer life, fighting a world where prejudice reigns.
Removed from the pitfalls of rhetoric and melodrama, thanks to the work of Gianpiero Borgia on the text by Michele Santeramo, Sacco and Vanzetti’s story is returned to the dimension of history through the weapon of theatre, the language of cabaret and the bodies of two tireless actors – Valerio Tambone and Raffaele Braia – who give it their all. Migration, ethnic prejudice, intolerance and justice are the themes that cross over the decades and shake the conscience of us all. In the process, TB renews its commitment on the civil art front, telling the story of these two Italian migrants, victims and universal symbols of discrimination and injustice.