The Pazzi Lazzi troupe has the power to transport the audience to a 16th century Italian piazza. The skits have the commedia dell'arte's traditional bright comedy without leaving out references to the modern world. With great stage presence, charisma, and comedic timing, the actors create an absolutely unique and fun performance. They use biting wit and notable mimicry. From Arlecchino to Pantalone, to Colombina and Pulcinella, you are in for a bunch of laughs!
- Stefano Marchese, Musician and Educator
About Us
Chiara Durazzini
Chiara Durazzini is a native of Florence, Italy, and is Pazzi Lazzi artistic director. After performing both in Italy and in the U.S., in 2013, with her long time actor friend Emanuele Capoano, she co-founded the troupe for which she performs, teaches and directs. She is also the aristic director -along with Eleonora Francesca Cordovani- of the affiliated Italian theatre company All’italiana – Boston Italian Theatre Company which involves Italian speakers in staging shows by Italian playwrights. With these two companies, Chiara has acted and directed original shows like “Aria di Commedia” (2014) and “Isabella Unmasked – The Legacy of an Italian Renaissance Woman” (2017) and “Pinocchio – A Commedia Adventure” (2020), and renowned plays like “Questi Fantasmi” (2018) by Eduardo De Filippo e “La Giara” (2019) by Luigi Pirandello.
Some of her other American credits include Tinker Bell in "Pan" (Company One), Carmen in "The Balcony" (Boston Directors' Lab) and the Virgin Mary in "Anger Box" (Apollinaire Theatre). She had also previously appeared in numerous Italian productions, including plays by Moliere, Goldoni and Pirandello. She has trained with the actors of Odin Teatret and studied extensively Commedia dell'Arte with Master Claudia Contin Arlecchino in Pordenone, Italy.
Additionally, she works as an Italian voice-over talent: she was one of the first GPS voices for Bose, and has been one the Italian hosts at News in Slow Italian since 2016.
She obtained her Master's degree in Art, Music and Theatre from the
University of Bologna, Italy. These days, she is also enjoying dancing with the modern dance company Salmadanse directed by renown choeographer Joanie Block.
Emanuele Capoano
Emanuele Capoano is one of the co-founders of the Commedia dell’Arte troupe Pazzi Lazzi, and after directing and performing for the company since 2013, he is now producing podcasts and reading audiobooks. Some of his other credits include "Daniel The Brave" by Starina Jonhnson and directed by Chiara Durazzini and played with Mariagrazia LaFauci for the short comedy festival Women in Comedy, organized by Kairos Italy Theater. He is an actor from Calabria, Italy, and has over 10 years of theatre experience, both in Italy and in Boston. He has done extensive radio work as a host in comedy show L’Italia Chiamò, and voiceover works for News in Slow Italian, a program for Italian language learners. Emanuele studied Theatre at Officina Teatrale ‘O in Florence, Italy and has trained in several acting workshops in Italy, including one lead by Yves Lebreton. He lives and works in New York City... but he doesn't live in Brooklyn!
Eleonora Francesca Cordovani
Eleonora Francesca Cordovani is originally from Tuscany, Italy, where she started studying theater in College and with the Isole Comprese Teatro Company, focusing on Theatre Therapy. She then worked as an acting teacher, director and actress. She continued her studies with Mamadou Dioume in Trieste and Bethany Caputo in NY, among others.
In 2012 Eleonora moved to the US where she decided to spice up her career graduating as a yoga teacher. Finding a deep connection between yoga and theatre, she likes to use her theater skills when she teaches yoga and vice versa.
Eleonora is also very involved in social justice, all her classes are inclusive to everyone regardless of their background and abilities, and her performances often delve into social topics.
She is currently the Artistic Co-director of All'italiana - Boston Italian Theatre Company together with Chiara Durazzini, and she is studying to become a Yoga Therapist.
Melissa Fernandez
Melissa Fernandez is a local clown and improvisor. Beginning in the open mic sphere, she has organized several DIY sketch comedy shows in the greater Boston area over the past five years. She is currently one of the organizers of Somerville’s own Weird Local Film Festival. Her performance is inspired and influenced by vaudeville, comedic timing in the golden age of American animation, and a deep appreciation for the natural world.
Amanda Gann
Amanda Gann is an actress, translator, and scholar in French and Theatre Studies. Trained in the US, France, and the UK, she collaborates with multilingual, interdisciplinary, and transnational companies such as the Poets’ Theatre, with whom she originated a bilingual production of Samuel Beckett’s Not I/Pas moi (MAC, Belfast, NI). Now a doctoral student at Harvard University, she is writing a thesis on the interwar repertoire of the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol and the possibility of contemporary bodies to reinvest historical research. She has recently performed in a bilingual production of Jean-René Lemoine's Adoration / L'Adoration based on her own translation (dir. Sylvaine Guyot, La Maison Française, NYC). She is also a member of a transatlantic working group on research and performance in partnership with SACRe-Université PSL, for which she created two original works, Here, After, and An Apology for Wet Materials, in 2019-2020.
Jesse Garlick
Jesse Garlick is a Boston based actor and theatre educator.Selected Regional credits: A Christmas Carol, Journey to theWest, Arcadia (Central Square Theatre) Good, Assassins(New Repertory Theatre) A Story Beyond, Yellow BirdChase, Who Would be King (Liars&Believers) Hamlet, AsYou Like It (Brown Box Theatre Project). New York credits:Good (PTP/NYC), Who Would Be King (ArsNova/Liars&Believers). International Credits: Yellow BirdChase (Assembly/Liars&Believers). Jesse is also theEducation Director of Liars&Believers in addition to being afaculty member at Boston Ballet’s Education and CommunityInitiative Department and a drama teacher at numerous highschools around Boston and the surrounding area. MFA:ASDS. BFA: BU.
Rossella Mancullo
Rossella moved from Naples to Boston in 2016, after finishing her high school diploma. She is currently attending Bunker Hill Community College and completing her associate degree in Liberal Arts. To finish her bachelor degree, she plans to move to a theatre major in a four-year college. During High school she helped in a theatrical production of Eduardo De Filippo’s play “Sogno di una Notte di Mezza Sbornia”, with an amateur troupe of actors, writers and directors. During the Summer of 2017, for five months, she worked as a Hotel entertainer with the Swiss Animation company Life Tourism & Entertainment in Rhodes, Greece, performing on stage every night. Both in 2018 and 2019 she participated to different events and was part of few shows with Pazzi Lazzi troupe. In 2019 she took three classes of Improvisation at the Improv Boston School, in Cambridge (MA). As of 2020 she appeared in “The Oil Jar” a play by Pirandello with the Impronati theater company and is now working as an actress in the production of a radio play.
Carmen Marsico
Award-winning Italian vocalist, composer, lyricist, and dancer Carmen Marsico hails from the mountainous and wild region of Basilicata, a dramatic landscape that also inhabits her heart and can be heard in her music. She comfortably crosses genres between Mediterranean music and contemporary jazz.
Best known as lead singer and front person of the award-winning group Newpoli, she currently co-leads a new ensemble Zafarán, that performs a variety of music spanning from Turkey to Greece and Southern Italy, Cape Verde, Spain, and Portugal, as well as traditional and modern Romani repertoire.
She has performed and taught Italian folk dances in venues and at festivals such as the Library of Congress (Washington D.C.), CRASHfest at House of Blues (Boston, Massachusetts), PVDFest (Providence, Rhode Island), Old Town School of Folk Music (Chicago, Illinois), and Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater (New York, New York) in the United States, and Adriatico Mediterraneo Festival (Ancona, Italy) and La luna e i calanchi Festival (Matera, Italy) in Europe, to name just a few.
She was a Grand Finalist of the “Massimo Urbani International Jazz Competition”, winner of the Independent Music Award for Traditional World Music, finalist in the USA Songwriting Competition in the World category and recipient of multiple nominations by the Boston Phoenix for Best World Ensemble as well as from "Premio Nazionale Città di Loano per la Musica Tradizionale Italiana”.
In the fall of 2019 she made her debut as an actress in the comedy “La Giara” by renown Italian writer Luigi Pirandello and started her collaboration with the Boston based Italian Theatre Company Pazzi Lazzi directed by actress Chiara Durazzini.
Apart from being a performer she is also an Associate Professor of Voice at Berklee College of Music.
Dan Meyers
Dan Meyers is a versatile multi-instrumentalist, Dan Meyers is a flexible and engaging performer of both classical and folk music; his credits range from premieres of contemporary chamber music, to headlining a concert series in honor of Pete Seeger at the Newport Folk Festival, to playing Renaissance instruments on Broadway for Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre Company. He is a founding member of the early music/folk crossover group Seven Times Salt, and in recent seasons he has performed with the The Folger Consort, The Newberry Consort, Hesperus, The Henry Purcell Society of Boston, Early Music New York, Amherst Early Music, The 21st Century Consort, In Stile Moderno, and the Cambridge Revels, making concert and theatrical appearances in NYC, Washington DC, Chicago, Minneapolis, Memphis, Santa Fe, at the Yellow Barn Festival in Vermont, and at at the "La Luna e i Calanchi" festival in Basilicata (Italy). He enjoys playing traditional Irish music with the bands Ulster Landing and Ishna, as well as eclectic fusion from around the Mediterranean with the US/Italy-based group Zafarán; he also played winds and percussion for over a decade with the award-winning Italian folk music group Newpoli. As an educator, he teaches historical wind instruments for the Five Colleges Early Music Program in Massachusetts. He has also taught at Tufts University, for the Pinewoods Early Music Week, and at festivals around the Northeast. Dan holds a Master of Music degree from the Longy School of Music, and BA degrees in Music and English Literature from Whitman College. www.danmeyersmusic.com
Marco Zanelli
Marco is happy to be collaborating with Pazzi Lazzi as actor and director. Past roles include Malvolio in “Twelfth Night”, Solyony in Chekhov’s “The Three Sisters”, Bottom in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”, Parolles in “All’s Well That Ends Well”, The Sexton in “Much Ado About Nothing”, Baron Van Swieten in “Amadeus”, Tim in “Noises Off”, Carlino in “Wait Until Dark”, John Thoreau in “The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail”, Scrooge and Jacob Marley in separate productions of “A Christmas Carol” Reginald Beresford in “The Big Audition” in Hollywood, CA and The Narrator in “Pasqual D”Angelo, Una Vita” in L’Aquila, Italy. Marco had also spent 4 years acting with the Boston Youth Theater and has acted in industrial film and video, feature films and in promotional spots and programs for WCVB-TV, WHDH-TV, WVBF-FM, WBZ-TV, WFSB-TV in CT and NBC-TV. Marco has studied acting in Los Angeles with Diane Salinger, Chris Game, and Gina Gallego, and in Boston with Spiro Veloudos and Ingrid Sonnichsen. Marco holds a B.A. from Emerson College and an M.A. from Middlebury College.
