Introduction

This chapter is structured so as to introduce the reader to the peculiarities of this particular form of musical theatre before offering an analysis based on Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the ‘refrain’. An ethnographic introduction to the modern Bruscello is given at the hand of the 2001 performance of Giulietta e Romeo. As this is a well-known play internationally, the different local rendition is easier to highlight. This is followed by reflections on my own experience of the play before moving to exploration of different aspects of this form of theatre, such as its role in its agrarian past, how meter and verse serve to identify characters and a charting of changes in this practice from the 1940s to recent times. Some of the peculiarities of the musical interpretation, where tune is fixed for each character for the duration of the play are outlined, moving to comment on actors and a brief history of the company responsible for the theatre. The fluidity that emerges from these and other aspects, such as the most popular themes, suggests that a different understanding and analysis is required than the one offered by attempts at classification of this ‘genre’, therefore elements encountered in earlier sections are then viewed in terms of fluidity and structure.