Marzo 2010

Arturo Brachetti - A Wardrobe of Dreams

by John Fisher

Ten years ago, Jay Marshall and I were invited by Arturo Brachetti to attend a performance of his one-man show L'Homme aux Mille Visages in Paris, where he was breaking box-office records and had just become the proud recipient of the Moliere Award, the French equivalent of a Tony. That experience marked a significant watershed in my flag-waving for the illusion­ary arts. Until then I had always urged peo­ple - skeptics especially - that if there was one show they should see before they died it was that of Siegfried & Roy at the Mirage. No longer. Let me repeat, because my opin­ion has not changed in the past decade - if there is one show you must see before you die, it is that of Arturo Brachetti. The Great Jasper and I found it extraordinary that such a dazzling spectacle could be carried so effortlessly on the shoulders of one man in such a warm, engaging, life-enhancing way.
The title of the show translates as The Man of a Thousand Faces. It refers to Brachetti's undisputed position as our greatest living quick-change artist, in the tradition of vaude­ville headliners as various as R.A. Roberts, Owen McGiveney, and Charles T. Aldrich. While his core skill has roots in commedia dell'arte, Arturo's success is timely within a world where the concept of identity more than ever represents a conundrum at the very heart of existence. Today we live in a world of data processing, genetic fingerprinting, and Face­book. We should know who we are, but it is not that simple. While some will accept Bra­chetti's talent at the pleasurable level that is its purpose, others will discern beneath the sur­face a telling comment on a world where the lines that define race and nationality, faith and gender, fame and anonymity have never been more blurred. The question one may well be asking as one leaves the theater is, "Who am I?" That said, I was grateful for the opportu­nity provided by Arturo's recent three-month season at London's renowned Garrick The­atre to spend time with the performer in an attempt to find out a little more clearly, "Who is Arturo Brachetti?"
Onstage, Arturo projects the panache of a ringmaster, the elegance of Astaire, and the informality of the most popular boy on the playground, able to weave what the great Brit­ish variety performer Gracie Fields described as a silver thread between himself and his audi­ence. Offstage, he radiates a relaxed energy and natural friendliness, underpinned by a total commitment to the creative process and just a hint of rebellion - his personal red devil - to add spice to life. The immediate manifesta­tion of this is his trademark hairstyle - first acquired while playing Puck in Italy's National Theatre production of A Midsummer Night's Dream set in the subculture of a contemporary dance club - incorporating the waxed forelock that stands proud like a unicorn's horn on his close cropped head. Although his English is not perfect, his flair for colloquialism is astounding and his gift for making you understand both onstage and off instinctive. He is similarly fluent in French, German, and Spanish.
Arturo Brachetti was born on October 13, 1957 in Turin, in the north of Italy. In recent years the old capital of the Savoy kingdom has reclaimed much of its historical heritage, but Arturo remembers "a very sad town, like an industrial version of an Eastern European town of the communist period" that was in thrall to pollution and the motor industry. "My childhood was quite poor and quite gray. My parents were both working at the Fiat car factory." The eldest of four children, he found escape in a puppet theater requested as a present for his sixth Christmas. "I spent all my youth playing with that every day. I was fascinated by words like puppet, theater, scenery, trick all my life. Even on boring vis­its to friends and family I would head for the bookshelves and look up the words." Soon the cardboard proscenium boasted a revolv­ing stage improvised from a cake stand, while early Brachetti productions included a version of Cinderella with a ballroom scene decked out with little candles that gave his parents heart failure when they identified the fire risk.
Much discussion took place about his future, and at the age of eleven he was sent to a Roman Catholic seminary, an environment they hoped would cure his shyness and -- in the case of his father, a deeply religious man - lead to the priesthood. Arturo explains, "That would have been good for the family, but they didn't say, `You're going to be a priest forever.' They said, 'If you don't like it, okay.' When at the age of seventeen I felt it was not for me, they didn't make a fuss - but I think that if it had been a hundred years before, I may well have become a priest. You are easily conditioned by the peaceful atmo­sphere." The defining moment came in his thirteenth year when he was introduced to Father Silvio Mantelli. Thirteen years older than Arturo, he is better known today as Mago - or Wizard - Sales, who runs the acclaimed children's charity Fondazione Mago Sales which has as its goal the dis­armament of child soldiers in Third World countries and the disassociation of children from, violence of any kind, work in which he has the active support of Brachetti.
Mantelli had a room full of magic appara­tus -- much of it provided by the Silesian com­munity - with which he would illustrate and augment his sermons. "After a while he would give me the key to this room and I spent all my time until I was seventeen just playing with the props and reading the magic books that he had. As I began to perform, I soon found the magic was a social revenge for the humiliation that I felt in school - I was bad at football, at gymnastics, at running. They would put me in rubbish bins for fun, but now I had a kind of weapon that the others didn't." Arturo was fifteen when he conceived the idea of present­ing individual tricks in different costumes. It helped that the seminary also had an extensive wardrobe for its dramatic activities. Gradually he worked out for himself the elementary prin­ciples of quick-change: "For part of my first act, I played a witch with a floating apple. She drank a glass of poisoned liquid and became a beautiful woman doing silk tricks. Then putting on a cape she became a man doing manipulation, and so on."
That the most famous practitioner of this lost art had been a fellow countryman was unknown to Arturo until, at a semi­nary concert, an audience member drew to his attention the name of Leopoldo Fregoli (1867-1936) and suggested he read the auto­biography of the performer who had been an international celebrity in the early years of the twentieth century. Arturo devoured the book as soon as he could locate a copy. Fregoli rac­contato da Fregoli did not provide working methods, but did provide the compass course for the career the young aspirant saw ahead of him, as well as entertaining him with anecdotes that he has retold with relish many times since: "Fregoli wrote of the practical joke he played on his father, approaching him in the make-up and costume of a young girl, who complained that she was pregnant by his son. As the father expressed his anger, Fregoli turned and in a blink became his normal self. Also, when producers complained that he was an expensive act, Fregoli took them aside and explained, `But do you really think I am alone onstage?' When they discovered the size of the team Fregoli employed backstage, they were more understanding. I spent almost all my adolescence dreaming about this man."
On leaving the seminary, Brachetti worked in a hotel to fund his study of the fine arts. Soon he had an act polished and original enough to enter the competition of the Saint ­Vincent magic convention. The details of his routine remain etched in his memory as if it were yesterday: "I began as a Valkyrian opera singer, who became Eliza Doolittle from My Fair Lady with the parasol trick, who became a '20s flapper performing the floating of a Pierrot head. Then she became a circus direc­tor, who surprises himself when he produces a giant fish from his top hat. He metamor­phosed into a black-tailed man-about-town producing an endless stream of cotton yarn and coloured flags from his mouth. On the production of a giant flag, I changed under cover of that to a white suit." The audience went berserk and before the prize was for­mally announced he was given a place in the next day's Gala Show alongside heroes like Silvan, Fred Kaps, and Alberto Sitta in his stage persona of Chun Chin Fu.
After Mantelli, Sitta is credited by Arturo as being his biggest hands-on influence in those early years and much of the magical repertoire that Arturo still features emanated from his generosity. "He was a very quiet, very kind man and, I tell you, so generous, especially towards people who were young or poor. He would give for free tricks or books to poor magicians just because he would not have the courage to ask for money. In fact, in that sense, he never became rich him­self - he was helping too many people." In both preparation and performance Sitta was a perfectionist, and this rubbed off on the impressionable young recruit: "He didn't hide from me when he was preparing - that was his way to teach. He would say, `Can you help me doing this?' and I would. I learned things from him, like the Snowstorm - how to make the package, and so on. That was his way." The prop Brachetti most cherishes is an original Okito silk lotus flower given to him by Sitta. So special is this item that Arturo had it replicated at great cost before including it in his act. The unique original stays safely at home, awaiting pride of place in the museum of magic Arturo wishes to establish one day in Turin. Brachetti's presen­tation of Sitta's most famous origination, the ubiquitous Spotted or Leopard Silk, is almost certainly the only one in the world performed in loving homage to its inventor.
Following his competition success, Arturo found an admirer in French television magi­cian Gerard Majax, who arranged for him to go to Paris to audition for Jean-Marie Riviere, legendary producer and star of the famed Paradis Latin nightclub. Perhaps not as famous as the Lido and the Moulin Rouge, nevertheless it enjoyed a reputation as the venue most frequented by Parisians them­selves away from the touristic conveyor belt and as such could take artistic risks while never compromising the opulence and kitsch elements, for which Riviere was famous. It was a lonely and intimidating beginning: "There I am, the Italian country boy in my sad winter coat with my little suitcase and my six costumes and thirty pounds arriving in Paris thrown into the world of fantasy - the last sparkle of French music hall - to perform for this famous man. He was a very big star in the revue world. When Bob Fosse formulated the role of the emcee in the film of Cabaret he had Riviere in mind. The first thing he asked me was how long does it take to change from one character to another. Back then I was slow, so I said about four to five seconds. All he replied was, `Mmmmm."' Arturo interpreted his suspicion as evidence that somebody in Paris was working quick­change faster than himself. However, after the audition things became clearer: "Riviere said, `I never saw something like this - I've only heard about quick-change before.' They took me straightaway, not because I was the best, but because I was the only one."
On that day, Arturo embarked upon an apprenticeship that entailed working as a stagehand by day, as an extra onstage at night, and rehearsing his act in the early hours when the audience had left. "The act was completely redirected - the music, the choreography, the decor - the designer, Pierre Simonini created a set for me that placed me like a magic figure in a Magritte painting." After two months, Arturo plucked up the courage to tell Riviere that he thought the act was ready for the show. At six o'clock one Saturday afternoon he performed his revised sequence for the producer and the waiters preparing the tables for that night. "The act was tight and effective and every­body went crazy and Riviere said, `Can you start tonight?' I said, `You don't give me any more advice?' and he said, `No, no, no. You understand everything. You start tonight.' It was the Saturday before Easter Day in 1979, so the day after I went to Notre Dame to light a candle." He stayed at the Paradis Latin for two-and-a-half years.
On the wave of success, he bought himself a car - the stylized Citroen Avant - straight out of a French gangster movie. "I felt I was living a dream. In fact, I became one of the night creatures. I had a very wild life, but wild
in a good sense. I had blue hair and make­ up like Adam and the Ants. My life changed completely because I was not shy anymore." He became the performer Riviere always relied upon in emergencies: "When someone went sick they would put me in his place, but sometimes with only one hour's notice. Riviere would say, `Oh, what does he do? Oh, I know, ask Arturo.' So I would be rehearsing the part onstage only minutes before curtain. Even female roles, a member of the chorus. It was always, 'Arturo!' He would throw you on stage and you had little time to adapt and improvise. We had this parody of Carmen and after two months he suddenly announced he wanted a better transition from the death of Carmen to take us back from the world of opera to the world of variety. With minutes to spare I improvised a Groucho Marx impres­sion that was quite incongruous but stayed in the show for six months."
At the end of 1981, he traveled to Vienna at the invitation of poet and theater direc­tor Andre Heller to star as the emcee in Flic Flac. Somehow Heller, a respected intel­ectual, had acquired subsidy from the city Of Vienna to create a festival of fantasy. He introduced Arturo to the world of surreal­ism and instilled in him an understanding of the use of metaphor. Arturo explains how he would introduce a sequence featuring a ver­sion of the Spider Woman sideshow illusion: "I would say, `Ladies and gentlemen, learn to look because sometimes what you see is not the truth.' I had a stick and I would say, `This stick is a flower - this flower is a silk - this silk is a dove.' And all the time they would change one into the other and then `this dove is a silk - this silk is a stick' and we would go back to the beginning. `So you see, noth­ing happens. It is all in your eyes. Learn to see."' It certainly helped if audiences followed his advice. The show featured some of the weirdest acts and was nothing if not unpre­dictable: "In one scene we had the Alps and it starts to snow and the stage is full of peasants in Tyrolean costume and then eighteen live crocodiles advanced from the wings. It was an orgy of fantasy, for real. It was bizarre." A production conceived for three weeks eventu­ally toured Germany for a year.
Brachetti made his London debut in Y - a spectacular collaboration with Riviere - at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1983. Transplant­ing the spirit of Parisian cabaret across the cultural divide of the English Channel was a controversial risk, but again the produc­tion ran for a year during which Robert De Him, Shirley Bassey, Omar Sharif, and the Monty Python team were all converted into Brachetti fans and Arturo was invited to appear before the Queen in the Christmas Gala at Covent Garden Royal Opera House, a signal honor for a variety artist. His char­acters in Y included the ghost of Casanova in an underwater Venice, Dracula sacrificing his victim to a talking moon, and an angel that soared around the stage long before more conventional magicians featured what became universally known as "the flying." For the greater part of the next fifteen years Arturo's career veered between being a much­in-demand variety attraction and the chal­lenges of more unlikely venues. On the one hand, he soon became a household word through the medium of television in his home country, as well as costarring in all my Best of Magic spe­cials, Disney's Night of Magic, and much more in the UK. On the other, for fifteen years he held a prestigious position as actor and director within Italy's National The­atre Company, playing the most beautiful the­aters and opera houses throughout the land.
The National Theatre had the sense to recognize the special skills that Arturo could bring before an intellectually demanding public. The play I Massibilli - an untranslat­able title which he also directed - depicted a group of actors rehearsing a French farce. They soon realize there are not enough actors to play all the roles, so the director cajoles the prompter, played by Arturo, to stand in. Gradually he appropriates more and more parts until he is playing 33 differ­ent characters and becomes the star of the
show. Another French vehicle was II Mistero dei Bastardi Assassini or The Mystery o f the Bastard Assassins, the plot of which calls for eight siblings to murder each other in order to obtain an inheritance. In Arturo's version, each brother or sister was played by himself, each death achieved in an increasingly gro­tesque manner drawing on Grand Guignol and stage illusion, including death by poison that leads to bloating, arrow piercing, and decapitation. These are multiple parts that Alec Guinness or Peter Sellers would have made their own in the cinema; only Arturo had both the talent and the technique to make them work live on stage.
Other projects included a one-man version of Stravinsky's The Soldier's Tale; the role of the Chi­nese spy in M. Butterfly opposite Italian acting legend Ugo Tognazzi (one of the original stars of the film version of La Cage aux Folles); a musi­cal based on the life of Fregoli; and Brachetti in Technicolor, a two-hour musical tribute to Hollywood.
The Brachetti career acquired another dimension when, in the summer of 1997, Arturo accepted the first of several invita­tions to appear in Montreal at the just for Laughs comedy festival. The reception he received with his fifty-minute routine inspired Festival founder Gilbert Rozon to create a full one-man show anthologizing the best of Arturo's career. He enlisted the services of the noted stage director Serge Denoncourt. The Man of a Thousand Faces opened in Montreal two years later, played for three sell-out months, and then moved to Paris at the beginning of 2000. Arturo tells of a wonderful incident that took place soon after the opening of the show in Paris: "We opened on January 20. After a week, a very old French comedian, Bernard Haller, came to see me and said that he had a poster that he wanted me to see. He unfolded it and it said 'Fregoli in Paris, opening night 20th January, 1900' - exactly one hundred years before. Fregoli had been the best-selling attraction in Paris that year. We were to achieve the same." The Man of a Thousand Faces was eventually seen by over 1,250,000 spectators over 1,200 performances in the French capital alone, filling the vast Moga­dor Theatre for five months, before return­ing to similar business at the historic Casino de Paris for nine. The production, with various modifications to take into account the culture of its audience, has since toured extensively throughout France, Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Belgium, China, Canada, and Midwest America.
The version that arrived in London in October 2009 is entitled simply Change, but the single identifying motif of the Denoncourt concept remains at the hub of the entertain­ment. This is best referred to as "The Box," the scenic device that contains Arturo's world, opening, closing, twisting in turn. A giant revolving cube, it exudes a strange majesty and rivets the attention at a more emotional level than its superficial similar­ity to a monochrome Rubik's Cube might suggest. Arturo explains, "You are never bored by it, always curious what it will open to reveal. The box became a metaphor for the box of the costumes, the box of my life, and each one of our lives. We all have our box of souvenirs and then we all revert to a box at death." The whole show is a virtual kaleidoscope of color and spectacle, relying upon sophisticated lighting projections that transform the cube into a pirate ship, the Manhattan skyline, an Austrian hillside, a firework display, a Dali-esque world in liquid meltdown, and beyond, the device echoing the chameleon skills of the star.
A fringe benefit of Arturo's London sea­son was an unexpected invitation to observe him at work from inside the cube. Without divulging too much, I can hint that the box is capable of revolving in more ways than one - and I don't mean clockwise and coun­terclockwise. After two hours, my lack of orientation left me in even greater admiration for the coordination that exists between the star and the key members of his team. From this viewpoint Arturo's physical agility is even better appreciated. One thinks wistfully back to the golden era of Britain's pantomimes with their harlequinades, sequences of split­second acrobatics between the leading players as they ducked and dived sinuously around the Scenery. Brachetti with his spare physique and his commedia dell'arte heritage was born for stardom at Sadler's Wells or Drury Lane in the nineteenth century as much as he represents the face of illusion in Europe for the new Millennium. His own assessment of what he audience does not see comes close to flippancy: "Although it looks simple, it is quite neurotic behind the scenes." Hemingway coined the phrase "grace under pres­sure''; Arturo epitomizes the ideal.
In Change, the pace is set from the begin­ning with a succession of characters that transform from one to another with the speed of a broadband connection, includ­ing guardsman on parade, a punk rocker, the Queen, a Pearly Queen, a bowler-hatted businessman, and Britannia in all her pomp. Tribute is paid to Fregoli himself with a revival of his Jack in the Box act culminat­ing in a "flags of all nations" finale that produces what may be the most striking cos­tume in the show. The second half is domi­nated by a Hollywood segment in which, amongst others, Nosferatu, Frankenstein's monster, King Kong, Carmen Miranda, Gene Kelly, Darth Vader, Harry Potter, Spider­Man, Scarlett O'Hara, and Bogart and Berg­man in Casablanca live again. The sequence is not only spectacular - both theatrically and from a quick-change aspect - it is also hilarious: "It is supposed to be - when you see Moses parting the Red Sea and suddenly it's Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, wearing the wrong ruby slippers, who gets knifed in silhouette Hitchcock-style by Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz, who sud­denly becomes Liza Minnelli in Cabaret, who happens to be the daughter of Judy Garland. And so on. And the audience goes, `Aaahh!"' Arturo then surpasses himself with his haunting homage to Italian film director Federico Fellini, in which the iconic images from his movies are brought to life with an affection that is moving even to those unfamiliar with the maestro's work.
The cinematic motif is significant. The production is woven around a continuing demonstration of the "Film to Life" concept, popularized by Horace Goldin many years ago and played out in Change between the young Brachetti and a gray­haired version of his older self. It reso­nates with Arturo that Fregoli, a friend of the Lumiere Brothers, introduced the phenomenon of the cinema to Italian audi­ences. The third part of Fregoli's one-man­show - entitled the Fregoligraph! - was devoted to a series of short films of himself performing, often with Fregoli positioned behind the screen dubbing his voice live to the sketch being projected. Far from being anticlimactic, the technological miracle trumped the extreme physical skill he had demonstrated in person on the same stage only minutes beforehand.
Arturo takes pains to explain how today's preconception of quick-change has been mod­ified by our exposure to the cinema. In Frego­li's heyday, audiences were not acclimatized to the fast-cutting techniques that we now accept unthinkingly from film. This made it easier for the quick-change performer: "Back then everything was done very naively and not so quickly, because there was no cinema to compare. People had no concept of edit­ing or montage, so you would never imagine it was possible to close a door and open it and be dressed differently immediately. They could relate to the fact that a lady could take twenty minutes to emerge from her boudoir because she has a corset to struggle with - so when she took twenty seconds it appeared like lightning speed. But now in a movie one character can morph into another in one second and I have to keep up." In all, he portrays sixty new characters in the London show, but the number of changes is far greater since he repeatedly veers back and forth between one character and another.
All the conventional magic in the show is incidental to the characters and the spec­tacle that embraces them. Mention must be made of his handling of de Kolta's seemingly inexhaustible flower production from a paper cone and, at a separate point, the production of two giant bouquets of sunflowers in the climax to a Van Gogh scena, the whole stage magically transformed into a representation of the famous painting. That gasps greet both effects underlines the potency of the older methods when they are imbued with Arturo's sense of wonder. No layman considers for one moment that those blooms are fabricated from feathers, paper, or wire. It was also rewarding to see a nifty version of the Danc­ing Cane performed by Mephistopheles with his devil's fork, a Snowstorm from the hands that was beguiling and not overpowering, and a floating violin that satisfies without encroaching upon the Nielsen classic. A van­ishing gun in the James Bond segment fools me every time.
One telling aspect of Change is that a show so spectacular can be so intimate and vice-versa. Arturo knows exactly when to switch to a minor key, relying on little more than his comedic charm and intimate knowledge of magic's allied skills. He wittily deploys the imaginative use of puppetry throughout. He evokes the legend of Felicien Trewey with his hand-shadow routine as dogs and rabbits, elephants and crocodiles scamper across his improvised screen, and of Tabarin, and Trewey again, with his demonstration of chapeaugra­phy. To Brachetti the challenge of recreating the hat routine resided in the knowledge that four cen­turies ago the chapeau "became almost like a live creature" in Tabarin's hands. Not only did he appear to pay no attention to the ring of felt as he twisted it in his fingers - "if not, it's not surpris­ing anymore" - but he had the advantage, one that remained for Trewey two-and-a-half centuries later, of living in an age when every trade and profession had its own instantly recognizable head­piece. "The doctor had a hat, the judge had a hat, the priest had a hat, and so on. It was part of the social uniform, whereas now you have to explain it more fully, and it doesn't mean anything if you don't provide a little story around it. So my story is that when I was little I found an old hat of my grandmother in my attic; I cut it and I play with it. In Change it is used by the young man to show that he's able to do more characters than the older one in a short time - twenty characters in two minutes - which is not quite true because it takes three-and-a-half! But you have to provide a little journey, a little parable. You cannot just go, `And now I will do the nun, and now I will do Mickey Mouse,' and so on."
The need for a strong narrative is played out on a larger scale in the show as a whole. Brachetti is selling more than a one-man fancy dress parade and a virtuoso display of variety skills. When asked why a straightforward vaudeville format is, for him, not enough, he explains, "When you start a journey in the theater, it has to have a beginning, middle, and end. You cannot take the audience on a voyage and they don't know where it starts or where it finishes. You have to ensure that people stay attentive for two hours. Television is different. It's like reading a magazine. You can dip in and out. But it is impor­tant that a theatrical show is structured. You cannot do a two-hour show giving the audience one surprise after another. That just becomes monotonous. Laughter, melancholy, nostalgia, sadness are all as important as surprise." He sets great store by the Shakespearian structure: "One has to consider where is the action, who are the characters, what is their problem, and how is it to be resolved. This is the basis of all long-lasting drama, from the ancient Greeks to Agatha Christie's Mousetrap." Although he has great affection and respect for the Sudarchikovi, the Russian originators of the short-duration quick­ change double act that has been copied indiscriminately in recent years, he admits,
"Once you do this for seven minutes, that's it. There is no meaning behind it. It is only surprise." For Arturo - and for the theater managements who underwrite his services - there has to be more. The first version of the current show used the narrative of his own life as the backbone to which he fused his various routines, the most recent the dialogue between Brachetti as an old man and his younger self, who inspires his alter ego to face life's realities, not least the "final transformation" of death itself. The phrase derives from Fregoli's tombstone, the process enacted onstage in a combination of levi­tation and disappearance that is moving beyond belief with its evocation of a soul being set free into another level of existence. Arturo elaborates, "The moral of the story is that change is not the end, but a beginning. We need to do this in order to survive."
Nothing, however, should disguise the fact that his skill at quick-change is the motor that drives the machine. Although he is justifiably protective of his methods and obliges all those working onstage with him to sign a confidentiality agreement, he is open about the fact that his is not a solo operation. "I have two assistants working with me throughout the show. One is involved in helping me put on the costumes, while the other takes the items and col­lects them and prepares for the next one." The redoubtable Massimo has worked with him in the first role for twenty years: "In fact,
there is insurance coverage for both him and me, because if he's sick there is no show. They say that Mr. Hymack stopped per­forming his act when his wife died and she was no longer there to assist him with his costumes. I believe it absolutely." Backstage there is not a wasted movement. "As soon as my hand is in the wings, it's already on its way into another costume."
Arturo currently has around 350 cos­tumes stored in his warehouse. Each is the result of several prototypes at a cost of around 3,000 dollars before they can be debuted onstage. "They have to last for a long time and they have to be light, so there is research on materials. All this costs a fortune, without counting the work of the seamstresses. When I do new costumes, I provide the basic design. Architectural tailoring, I call it. Then I go with Massimo to the workshop. He knows what I want and stays there. Every two days I go for a fitting. It can be very boring. And if things don't work, we try again. It may be too slow or too noisy. Eventually the costume is finished. But that is just the beginning. We may have to change a popper here or a fastener there and if you were to look you would see that I am full of bruises. Sometimes I have to put on a piece of plaster to protect my skin." He points to his neck, a vulnerable area for recalcitrant hooks and magnets. "I have bruises every week and I don't even know when during the show it happens, but who cares?" Arturo is keen to stress, however, that not all the changes are trick ones: "Sometimes when you see me running offstage and I am half naked - as Gollum, say, from The Lord of the Rings - I have to put back trousers and jacket and everything and that's down to perfect organization in the wings with my assistants. Without tricks I can be dressed completely in eight seconds, which is very fast."
Arturo is adamant that the hardest part of his job has nothing to do with the logis­tics of the changes themselves. The most difficult thing is adjusting the energy level between characters: "Imagine you are per­forming as Pierrot, then you go backstage and rush like hell to prepare as the next character and then have to behave calm again the moment you come back on as somebody else. This takes years of expe­rience - it's not something that you can buy. I have mastered the technique of being able to project a character using, say, 24 volts, going offstage to do the change at 220, and then returning at 16. And when you appear again, there must be nothing that informs the audience of the panic of the last few seconds - the adrenaline written in the eyes, the sweat on the brow, the vein on the forehead - and that's difficult, because it's acting." His ability to make each costume repre­sent an identifiable character with a life and credibility of its own provides a fit­ting riposte to skeptics who question how anyone can sustain a two-hour show with quick-change.
He regrets never meeting Fellini, the film director who influenced him so much, but he is happy that his work was endorsed by the master. "I was working in the theater in 1989 with an old actress who was a good friend of Fellini and she would tell him, `Oh, I'm working with Mr. Brachetti,' and Fellini said, `Oh I see him on television - I like him - egli e l'ultimo clown.' That was a lovely thing for him to say. `He is the last clown.' For Fellini, clown was a very wide word, incorporating mime, fantasy, illusion, poetry, and I was flattered by that." When asked what a young magician today might learn from Fellini, Arturo's bright, dark eyes become especially animated: "They can learn a lot not only from Fellini, but from Salvador Dali, Magritte, Tim Burton, Kurosawa, Peter Greenaway - all the directors and artists who deal with imagi­nary things. If you want to portray magic, fantasy, imagination to the audience - you should at least absorb this background of what has been done by them. Magritte is my favorite painter and just knowing his world frees my mind every time I have to invent a costume or a character that is not human. And so I become a tree, a suitcase, a flower, a television." He worries that true imagination is lacking from the acts of most young performers with easy access to the homogenized magic on offer today and becomes evangelistic in begging them to expand their creative horizons. "Cul­ture always rewards in the end. If you just perform the trick, they will remember the trick. Give them something more and they will remember you."
Arturo's success has not been without personal sacrifice. He dedicates his whole life to his work, embracing a regimen of physical fitness and dietary restraint that would be remarkable in an athlete half his age: "In order to do the show, I don't smoke, I don't drink, I don't take drugs. Sometimes I make a joke that I'm left only with sex and chocolate!" His producer claims that he is the most ascetic performer he knows, an observation that ricochets back to Arturo's formative years in the seminary: "The priest who taught me magic said to me that it's not important that you have a religious vocation, the most impor­tant thing in life is to have a vocation. So if that vocation is to make people dream, make people smile, follow that purpose. At the age of seventeen I had that fixed in my mind. I live my life like a priest - and you cannot be a priest only eight hours a day. If you are a priest, or a doctor, it is for 24 hours a day. If you are called in the middle of the night, you have to go." Every day he entertains the crowds on his walk to the theater, resplendent in black cape and top hat. As he explains, "People have to see me like this because it's what they imagine I am - so I don't want to spoil their image of me. If I can give a little something back to the public in this way, the energy circulates and it is good." His commitment has seen him perform onstage with a broken arm, a fractured toe, a severed tendon in his right hand, and two days after knee surgery, when he should have rested for three weeks.
His talent and dedication aside, his most inspiring quality remains his child-like zest both on and offstage. His philoso­phy is simple: "If you don't want to grow old, you should keep your inner child for all your life." While it is reassuring that Arturo Brachetti will never age in attitude, he has to concede that his body will not permit him to continue at his current work rate for an unlimited time span: "If I have to grow old, I hope always to keep the eagerness to create something new and to be able to project my dreams on others." This is a reference to his already established parallel career as a stage director. In Europe, his creative association with the top comedy team Aldo, Giovanni, and Giacomo, is renowned. He still nurses an ambition to take a version of his present show to Broadway, for which Woody Allen, one of his many famous fans, has agreed to lend his support. "He saw the show in Paris and said, 'I am not going to produce, because I don't have the skill, but I would be proud to be your godfather.'" And while in London, Arturo's mind has been much preoccupied with a new project entitled Gran Varieta, an ensemble show celebrating the spirit of Vari­ety in which he shares the stage with several guest performers. It promises to showcase his versatility more dramatically than anything he has done before. The show successfully toured Italy for seven months in 2009, once again confirming Arturo as his country's biggest theatrical box office attraction. For the moment he still considers it a work in progress: "Every time we have a chance to go onstage with a new show, we have a wonderful opportunity to cut, to adjust, to fine-tune, because for me it is never perfect. It can always be done better." Gran Varieta demonstrates once again his unfaltering com­mitment to push himself to the limit with new concepts and ideas, in the process revealing the limitless possibilities of the power of the­ater. It is hard to believe that it will not even­tually follow a similar trajectory as the show that took Paris by storm in 2000.
The enhanced success of the last decade has changed his life, enabling Arturo to provide security for his family and to buy the home of his dreams, a converted wing, no less, of the Royal Palace of Turin. "I was given permission to install wonderful things like moving walls, secret rooms, revolving bookshelves, and luminous water from the taps. It's a fairground full of surprises, where noth­ing is as it seems." And in the unlikely event that at any time ahead his talents will not be required by the world's stages, his eyes light up at an opportunity.
"What I'm going to do when I'm old, I think, is teatime with Arturo Brachetti. Six people at a time - you show them round the house, you take a cup of tea - and sell the ticket for maybe twenty euros - no tax to pay because it's your house. It should be enough to live on for an old man if every day you do that!"
When I look back upon all the fine per­formers in and around magic with whom I have worked, I can think of no one more accomplished in so many fields, nor one more gracious and cooperative in the part­nership that exists between performer and producer. I prefer to imagine him in his final years as a sprightly Prospero, having ruled over his realm with genuine benevolence and breathtaking skill, able to rest secure that his achievements will not be forgotten once the time finally comes to close the wardrobe of his dreams.