“I was completely scandalized, but I thought it was fantastic,” Nettles said. “As the story goes, when we were leaving my aunt Courtney said, ‘So, Jennifer, what did you think? Did you like it?’ And I turned around and looked at the marquee, and I said, ‘I’ll be back.’”
Though a longtime musical theater fan, she didn’t initially intend to write both the musical’s book and songs, but she found that the collaborators she was working with weren’t getting the tone she was going for. “I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t campy,” she said. “It would have been so easy to get it wrong. It would have been so easy to do ‘A little pinch of this and a little dash of that’ — Oh, God, save us.”
Eventually, Nettles was introduced to Mary Zimmerman, a theater and opera director who won a Tony Award in 2002 for her Broadway adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and has been honored with a MacArthur fellowship. Zimmerman was impressed by the “density” of the musical’s plot and by how fully realized Nettles’s draft was. “There wasn’t a bad song,” she said, “and she has a real sense of the rhythm of the scenes.”
Together, the writer and director led a trip to Palermo last October with some of the creative team. Beyond just connecting with Giulia via the location — her “dry, hot world,” Nettles said — it also gave a sense of the city’s polyglot history.
“Sicily was tossed around for hundreds of years in terms of who occupied it, who owned it,” she said. “All that is in the architecture, it’s in the food, it’s such a mélange. Seeing the place gave more permission to explore the darkness of it, all of the textures. And musically, this piece is very much anachronistic — obviously, it’s set in 17th-century Sicily, but it’s not that music, it’s pop music. I call it a pop-eretta.”
