Now that the new version of The Love of Three Oranges is street legal, you may be wondering what the difference is between Oranges: Classic and Oranges: New Hotness.

To start with, I’m going to let you in on a dirty little secret. There really isn’t any such thing as the “original version” of my Three Oranges. To start with, we changed some of the script during the rehearsal process so the show the actors read at auditions and the final show that we performed were both different. Secondly, between curtain call of our final show and when the book was published in 2002, I made some changes and tweaked some scenes that I never really felt worked as well as they should. So the version that has been for sale all these years wasn’t even truly Oranges: Classic as it had already been modified a few times.

That said, while the majority of the play is the same, there are some changes in the new edition that anyone who’s read a previous version will likely notice. Most of it is just smoothing out of dialog and other general writing tweaks but the most fundamental changes all come under the head of… sensibilities.

Carlo Gozzi wrote his commedia dell’arte scenerio for an audience of adults. Off-color humor was absolutely the order of the day. I wrote my play for an audience of college kids and the off-color stuff still fit right in.

Fast forward to 2002 when my Three Oranges is in print and is becoming increasingly popular with high schools who love the ensemble cast and historical teach-ability of the show but cringe at some of the off-color stuff. School boards, religious schools, PTA’s: this play has managed to tick all of them off over the last decade. I was repeatedly asked for a “school friendly” version of the show and that version was already in the works when Playscripts came into the picture. Rather then have two competing versions of the show out there, I decided to clean up what I could and then just write alternate cleaner scenes that groups could have upon request.

I want to say from the start that I didn’t want to change the spirit of the show and sanitize it beyond recognition and it truly hasn’t been. I refused to change more then I actually changed. But there were a few parts that needed a little tweaking and I think we achieved some fantastic compromises to keep both student and adult groups happy.  Continue Reading »

If you’re on Twitter, you may want to follow our new official account for The Love of Three Oranges (@loveof3oranges). Anytime you want to chat about Three Oranges online either add #loveof3oranges or #TLOTO to your tweets to join in the discussion. The latest chats appear on the bottom of every page of the Three Oranges site and look like this:

Wait, you say. Three Oranges website?

Shell blog madness continues here at HillaryDePiano.com and I’ve set up another mini-blog within the main blog, this time for The Love of Three Oranges. Now, any post about TLOTO not only posts in the main blog, it also appears on TheLoveofThreeOranges.com. (If you see typos on the new site, please let me know. I threw this up so fast it’s crazy.) If you’re only here for the oranges, it gives you one stop to see everything about the play instead of wading through the whole blog.

Whew! Let me know what you think…

I’ve had “2011 is the year of the orange!” written on the dry erase board above my desk for 2 years now so I wouldn’t forget that 2011 marks the 250th anniversary of Carlo Gozzi‘s The Love of Three Oranges, the commedia dell’arte scenerio that both the Sergei Prokofiev opera (usually translated as The Love for Three Oranges) and my play are based on. Originally written in 1761 (which was also the year that Twinkle Twinkle Little Star was published if Wikipedia is to be believed), I love the fact that, two and a half centuries later, people are still enjoying Gozzi’s story.

And my version? While it was first published in 2002, I actually wrote it in the summer and fall of 2001 meaning it’s having its 10 year anniversary this year as well!

One of my biggest concerns when I signed with Playscripts, Inc was that I knew how slow the publishing process could be and I didn’t want there to be a long lapse in availability of the play. There are productions going on all the time and I didn’t want groups interested in doing the play to be unable to get copies of the play if they wanted it. But, on top of this, I also had big plans for the anniverary of the play this year and I would have hated for my version to have to sit this entire historical year out because of the delays of the publishing industry. But, when I explained this, Playscripts went above and beyond and got the book print ready in absolutely record time. It also completely thrills me that, with the release of the new edition, everything old is new again and we have the opportunity to celebrate this story in a way that merges past and present.

On  personal note, 10 years ago, I identified with Carlo Gozzi and his original project on a very deep level. Sure, I was a female college kid with a major in theatre and a passion for e-commerce and he was an Italian playwright and misogynist and on paper we had absolutely nothing in common. But the more I researched the circumstances that lead to the creation of Three Oranges, the more I realized that we were in very similar situations though separated by centuries. Over the course of the year that I wrote and directed the show, I gained a deeper appreciation for the theatrical heritage it represented and felt this a strong connection to the work and its mythos.

Throughout this historical year, I’ll be taking a look back both at the writing and production process behind my version of Three Oranges but also Gozzi’s journey 250 years ago and how they parallel each other in ways that sometimes feel as magical as a fairy tale itself.

But for today, let’s just take this opportunity to wish Carlo Gozzi and his oranges a happy birth-year!