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    Monica Bellucci Tries on the Dress, and Life, of Maria Callas

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    The film star embodies one of opera’s greatest divas in the solo show “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” coming to the Beacon Theater.There are opera stars, and then there is Maria Callas.Birgit Nilsson or Luciano Pavarotti may have been great, but they haven’t sung posthumously. Callas, on the other hand, has toured — as a hologram — decades after her death. Few have heard of the William Luce play “Bravo, Caruso!,” about that classic tenor, but Terrence McNally’s “Master Class,” which revolves around Callas’s exacting methods as a teacher, won a Tony Award in 1996 and is regularly revived.This soprano’s fans — the fiercest of whom the critic Anthony Tommasini affectionately dubbed “Callas crazoids” — will be kept busy this year, which marks the 100th anniversary of her birth. Early out of the gate, in New York, is the actress Monica Bellucci, who is bringing her solo show, “Maria Callas: Letters & Memoirs,” to the Beacon Theater on Friday.Bellucci, 58, has been performing the piece, in which she reads selections from Callas’s writings, on and off since 2019. Yet she still finds it hard to explain the peculiar, enduring hold that the soprano often referred to as La Divina still has on the collective imagination.“She had an aura,” Bellucci said during a recent visit to New York.Bellucci herself was regally resplendent that day, projecting the kind of smoky-voiced elegance often associated with marquee names of Golden Age Hollywood. But her résumé is less predictable than that reference might suggest: She has leapfrogged from intimate dramas to the James Bond movie “Spectre,” from Mary Magdalene in Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” to the victim of a brutal rape in the French “provoc-auteur” Gaspar Noé’s “Irréversible.” Her reputation as a symbol of European glamour and sophistication is so firmly established that she made fun of it in an episode of the series “Call My Agent!” (One crucial difference from that guest appearance: “I never had a relationship with my agent,” she clarified with a laugh.)Maria Callas, one of the most storied sopranos in opera, greeting fans at Carnegie Hall in 1974.: Larry C. Morris/The New York TimesStill, as open to new adventures as Bellucci has been, she had steered clear of theater. Undaunted, the director, writer and photographer Tom Volf, who had made the 2018 documentary “Maria by Callas,” trekked to her apartment to pitch a project based on his book “Maria Callas: Lettres & Mémoires.”“I remember we were in the living room, and she opened the book randomly and started reading out loud,” Volf, 37, said in a video interview. “That’s when I really saw the alchemy right away. Suddenly her physique, her attitude, her emotion were matching the one that I sensed was Callas’s, especially in some specific letters where you can see the woman and not the artist or the public figure.“I call it an alchemy; I think it’s beyond resemblance,” he continued. “I believe in destiny, like Callas did.” (Whenever Callas comes up, quasi-spiritual references to “aura” and “destiny” have a way of seeping into the conversation.)Equally bowled over, Bellucci forgot her longstanding reservations about appearing onstage. “The sense of beauty I felt was stronger than being scared,” she said. “I wanted to share what I felt with other people. It was through theater that I could get into that.”It’s hard to deny that a Callas-Bellucci pairing feels like it was predestined. Bellucci even played a Callas-like Italian opera star nicknamed La Fiamma in Season 3 of the series “Mozart in the Jungle.” Beyond their physical resemblance, Bellucci, an Italian-born Parisian, has led a border-crossing, multilingual international career, just like Callas, a Greek, New York-born singer decades earlier.Both had to navigate the specific tests that greet famous female celebrities. “I think that Monica can very instinctively and strongly relate to Callas as a woman,” Volf said. “Perhaps because she understands the duality between trying to lead a life as a woman and an artist with worldwide fame, and all the difficulties and the challenges that come with it.”The Callas mystique, beyond her acting and singing talent, was fed by an agitated, to put it mildly, personal life. She was rumored to have bitter rivalries with colleagues; was crushed by a torrid and unhappy affair with the Greek tycoon Aristotle Onassis; and had a conflicted relationship with her body. (She lost a considerable amount of weight in a crash diet, which some blame for her eventual vocal issues.)“She’s someone who had the courage to follow her heart, so that’s why when people say she had a tragic life. …” Bellucci said, trailing off. “She had a brave life. She wanted to divorce in a moment when, in Italy, divorce was forbidden. She’s still inspiring today because she had everybody against her and she was a fighter.”Callas’s physical reinvention can be also be seen as a sign of autonomy rather than of weakness. “She created what she wanted to be, like many, many, many people in the business,” Bellucci said sympathetically. “Marilyn Monroe wasn’t the blonde bombshell when she started. We call this ‘les femmes du spectacle’: They know how to create illusion. An artist uses her own body as a transmitter, as a way to show themselves. The body becomes an instrument.”At the Beacon, Bellucci’s instrument will be sheathed in one of Callas’s actual dresses, a black Saint Laurent number that Volf borrowed from a private collection in Milan. The couch that plays a central role, however, is only a replica of one Callas had at her apartment on Avenue Georges-Mandel in Paris.“The idea was a ghost of Callas is coming back to her house,” Bellucci said. “So I move to different places on the sofa, as if it represents this circuit of her life, from when she’s young, full of excitement, and then when she was more mature, finding a balance between work and private life. And then the end, when she was in her sadness and melancholy, but so elegant in that.”Because this is not a biographical show per se, but rather a peek into the singer’s more intimate side, in conversation Bellucci and Volf often differentiated between Callas and Maria, as a way to separate her public and private personas. They also pointed out that “Master Class,” for example, focused on a very specific element of her life: “This was the hard part of her,” Bellucci said. “People used to say that she had a temper. Actually, she was uncompromising and completely dedicated to her work with her soul, her heart.“But the more intimate part of her,” Bellucci continued, “the one that nobody knows, was so fragile and sensitive. And this sensitivity was also the base of her talent: She had the capacity to perceive things like a child. But nobody protected this child — not her mother, not her family. No men protected this child. So the child gets destroyed, and the artist as well.”As rich as her experience with “Letters & Memoirs” has been, Bellucci is not sure she will stick with theater. She said she had turned down, at least for now, an offer to play Medea — not coincidentally, perhaps, the role that gave Callas her sole movie experience, under the direction of Pier Paolo Pasolini.“I think maybe Callas did the one film, and I’m going to do one experience in theater,” Bellucci said. “I’m very thankful for the experience, and I’m going away like I came.” More

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      Tedeschi Trucks Band Brings Something New to the Beacon: A Four-Part LP

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      “I Am the Moon,” inspired by the 12th century Persian poem “Layla and Majnun,” gave the roots rockers focus, perspective and a host of new songs to play at their New York residency.In August 2019, Tedeschi Trucks Band performed “Layla and Other Assorted Love Songs” — the 1970 double album by Eric Clapton’s group Derek and the Dominos — in its entirety at the Lockn’ Festival in Virginia.The record is particularly meaningful to the married couple at the heart of Tedeschi Trucks: Derek Trucks (whose name was inspired by the Dominos) had played much of the material as a member of Clapton’s touring band; the second lead guitarist on the recordings was Duane Allman, founder of the Allman Brothers Band, in which Trucks played for 15 years with his uncle, Butch, on drums. Susan Tedeschi, meanwhile, was born on the very day the album was released.When the pandemic struck seven months later, the 12 members of the hard-touring Tedeschi Trucks Band were scattered and stuck at home for an indefinite future, so the guitarist and vocalist Mike Mattison suggested they all read something together and see what ideas or inspiration it might spark. The text he proposed was the 12th century Persian poem “Layla and Majnun,” which gave the beloved album its title and central theme of unrequited love. Clapton likened the epic narrative to his own infatuation with Pattie Boyd, the wife of his best friend, George Harrison.The group, which blends Americana, roots- and blues-rock, had never used this kind of writing prompt, never tried to write in such a directed fashion. But as the lockdown dragged on, the exercise unleashed a wild creative outburst, eventually leading to 24 new songs, which were released over the summer as a series of four albums titled “I Am the Moon,” each with its own companion film. The final installment, subtitled “Farewell,” came out earlier this month, along with a boxed set that encompasses the entire project.“It was a hard reset for us,” Trucks said in a recent telephone call from the home that he, Tedeschi, and their two children share in Jacksonville, Fla. “Between that music being so important to us personally and the amount of isolation and madness in the story, it seemed to resonate with us and with the whole world in a lot of ways.”In a separate call, Tedeschi pointed to the parallels between the scope of the poem and the past few years. “Here’s all of us in isolation, at home, contemplating everything that’s going on,” she said. “And you have Layla and Majnun, who are separated, and he’s out in the desert by himself, going mad and losing his mental health. She’s locked away in a tower and can’t be with the person she wants to be with. And her dad and these other men basically tell her what she can do — we haven’t really come that far since the 12th century. So it seemed like we could go in a hundred different directions, but still be coming from that same source.”Starting this Thursday, the material from “I Am the Moon” — much of it being played live for the first time — will be the centerpiece of a seven-show stand by Tedeschi Trucks Band at the Beacon Theater, the 11th time in their career that the group will perform a multiple-night run at the Upper West Side landmark. (The Oct. 3 show will mark their 50th appearance at the venue.) It’s an extension of a tradition started by the Allman Brothers, who played more than 230 shows at the Beacon over 25 years, a familiar setting for the freewheeling, Grammy-winning ensemble to settle in and stretch out.Trucks, 43, has influences that extend far beyond American roots music into Indian and Eastern styles and avant-garde jazz (two installments of the “I Am the Moon” series have subtitles, “Crescent” and “Ascension,” borrowed from John Coltrane album titles). He joined the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame Allman Brothers Band in 1999, before turning 20.Tedeschi, 51, came up in Boston as more of a straight-ahead blues player. She has six Grammy nominations of her own, and as a solo act, opened for the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan. The couple were married in 2001 and, after touring together as the Soul Stew Revival, they merged their groups into Tedeschi Trucks Band in 2010.“Susan and Derek both always seem to go to the place you want to go when playing music, and the whole band is with them at every step,” Norah Jones wrote in an email. “It’s that magical space above the norm that only can exist when one is open to a true musical exchange onstage. Everyone appreciates what everyone else is doing and it’s obvious. And the way Susan’s voice slices through the huge sound of the band and just soars is unreal.”There’s often been a sense, though, that the band’s recordings haven’t matched what they’re capable of onstage. “That’s kind of been the rap on our group,” Mattison said, “that we’re a great touring band and a great live band and when it comes time to do an album, we kind of go, ‘Oh, what are we going to do?’ The creative part, generating songs and things, has always kind of been an afterthought, but this time it was really intentional. At first, we didn’t quite know how to do it, but it took it on its own logic and started fueling itself.”Tesechi and Trucks agreed that diving into the themes of “Layla and Majnun” had an impact beyond the music, forcing them to think harder about their own marriage and relationships. “It actually made us stronger, and made us better listeners to each other,” Tedeschi said. “It made us incredibly thankful for our band, and for each other and our kids, but at the same time, it made you see the weaknesses and the strengths, and start working on the things that you have to work on. I think it was a healing thing for all of us.”“The Beacon is home turf in a lot of ways, but it’s always a little bit intimidating because there’s so much history there,” Trucks said.Anna Ottum for The New York TimesTrucks went further. “I think it kind of saved the band,” he said, pausing for the screeching sound of a hawk fight happening overhead. “I’m not really sure what we would have done if we had come out of the pandemic without new material and a new outlook. I’m not sure how long we would have just plugged away, business as usual.”Bringing the “I Am the Moon” material and this re-energized attitude to the Beacon residency comes with both excitement and a certain degree of pressure. “The Beacon is home turf in a lot of ways, but it’s always a little bit intimidating because there’s so much history there,” Trucks said.“Every one of those dressing rooms I have memories in, whether it’s our son, Charlie, being there when he was 10 or 12 days old or introducing Gregg and Butch to our kids,” he added, referring to Allman and his uncle. “There’s not many corners I can turn in the Beacon where some image doesn’t come to mind of important moments in my life — and lately, a lot of times that’s with people that aren’t here anymore, so you feel those ghosts.”Extended stays in one city (the band also does annual shows at the Chicago Theater) often lead to surprise guests or unexpected song choices. “I don’t know exactly what’s going to happen,” Tedeschi said, “but that’s kind of the fun of it. I’m going to call up some of my friends and see who shows up.”Trucks notes, however, that even before adding any other elements to the Beacon shows, the dozen or so songs from “I Am the Moon” that they still needed to rehearse would make things unpredictable enough. “When you’re doing seven nights, it forces you to dig deep,” he said. “But this year, we have so much new material, there’s already a built-in to-do list. We’re already on the high wire.” More