LA PIETRA DEL PARAGONE (The Touchstone) concerns the Count Asdrubale who is wealthy and therefore of great interest to many women – notably Aspasia, Fulvia, and Clarice. Only Clarice, however, loves him for something other than his riches. There are also male hangers-on: the corrupt journalist Macrobio, the poetaster Pacuvio, and Giocondo, who is Asdrubale's true friend, but who has his own eyes on Clarice. To test his friends and would-be fiancées, Asdrubale pretends that he has been bankrupted. Sure enough, only Clarice and Giocondo stand by him, and when his fortune is "miraculously" saved, the three have the last laugh on everyone else... or do they? This production is set in what looks like the early 1960s. But the real innovation is the use of blue screen technology: using tiny cameras and sets, along gigantic screens hanging over the stage, a kind of video mixing makes the singers appear to inhabit any number of fanciful settings and perform a myriad of improbable actions.
One morning in Paris, rue de la Sante, Pierre, thirty-five years old, gets out of prison after five years of refusing any contact with his past. After a day of sleep in one of the rooms of his old friend's hotel, he is going to live his first night of freedom in solitary wanderings in the streets of Paris. He then decides to read the letters of his friend Sylvana. They will reveal past events that will influence his itinerary, his encounters, his moods.
