Saint Bernadette is now singing in Rome

After a successful run in the Marian city of Lourdes since 2019, followed by a tour of France, the musical “Bernadette de Lourdes” has launched an Italian version. The show is appearing in Rome as part of the Jubilee from January 16 to February 16, before touring the peninsula.

Over the last month, posters featuring the “storia straordinaria” (“extraordinary story”) of Bernadette of Lourdes popped up at bus stops all over Rome. They have brought a traditional figure back into the limelight in advertising spaces usually dedicated to luxury brands or banks.

But how can a 19th-century saint once again make her mark on contemporary culture? For the show's promoters and performers, who recently presented a few excerpts to the press, the challenge isn't just to reawaken Italians to the traditional devotion to the Virgin Mary. They want to reach new audiences through the story of Bernadette Soubirous, a 14-year-old girl from a poor background who experienced Marian apparitions that left her neighbors baffled.

“Bernadette isn't Britney Spears, but she's very much in tune with young people,” remarked the show's director, Serge Denoncourt, a Canadian artist known for his work with Cirque du Soleil, Eros Ramazzotti, and Tina Turner. “The show appeals to young people and teenagers, with a dimension of adolescent rebellion,” emphasized producer Roberto Ciurleo.

Singer Gaia di Fusco, who plays the role of Bernadette, said she was moved by the story of a scorned girl who faced jealousy within her own family. The troupe's youngest artist, Anna Bonnassi, pointed out Bernadette's story changed when people abandoned their skepticism and finally heard her message: “We young people need to be listened to,” she insisted.

More than the well-known pious image of the saint, the show aims to introduce audiences to a very human Bernadette, without offering a romanticized vision. While the songs express “the poetry and the spiritual dimension” of events, the spoken sequences are faithful to the historical archives — in particular, excerpts from Bernadette's letters are reproduced exactly as written.

The Italian translation of these texts therefore required a great deal of care. That was the work of translator and arranger Vincenzo Incenzo. “I had to work on the sounds to render the lyrical part, which is inseparable from the dimension of spirituality, of doubt, and of Bernadette's overwhelming effort to understand things that went beyond the problems of her times. It was a major effort to capture all these dimensions,” he explains.

The challenge was to “translate people's amazement at something greater than us. There's something divine in there, and we talk about it.” Even Bernadette's clumsiness of language was brought over, as far as possible, into the Italian script. “I tried to render 'grammatically incorrect' moments the dialogue, using a non-academic language,” explained Vincenzo Incenzo.

Auditions for the Italian cast were held in Milan and Rome. "In the end, I needed 20 fantastic actors, and I've got them!” enthused the show's director, Serge Denoncourt.

“My job is to tell stories that touch souls, to stage the complicated human world, with difficult stories,” Denoncourt further explained. When the performances in Rome conclude in February, the troupe will embark on a tour of Italy's main cities.

In presenting “uno spettacolo per tutti, credenti e non credenti” (“a show for all, believers and non-believers alike”), the troupe received the enthusiastic support of Pope Francis, who was able to greet each and every member of the team. In keeping with Bernadette's modest origins, the pre-premiere did not take place in front of the Roman elite, but before an audience of low income and the homeless people, accompanied by the Pope's chaplain, Cardinal Konrad Krajewski.