The Lory Horror Picture Show: Loredana Berté's poster

Loredana Berté makes her way through the fog to reach the center of the stage. The ghostly mist seems to be a metaphor for the ghosts of a frightening past. It's almost like we can see them on the stage of the Teatro Brancaccio, where already last March a thousand fans were ready to embrace the lioness of rock again in the wake of the Sanremo triumph with “Pazza”, before those abdominal pains a few hours before the start of the show forced the 73-year-old diva to postpone the concert and take emergency hospitalization: loneliness, depression, isolation, indifference. Behind her, on the screen, stands a skull which, as it gets bigger, is colored with a thousand patterns: “

I do what I want because I've already seen it all.”sings Loredana Berté in the chorus of “Dark lady”, a self-portrait contained in the latest album of unreleased songs “Manifesto”, which gives the title to the theater tour which yesterday, two months after the accident in March, finally made a stop in Rome. “The homicidal dark lady is not afraid, the worst you can meet”, pushes Loredana on the diaphragm, while her historic backing vocalist, Aida Cooper, keeps time with a stick. Then the lights go out: only a lighthouse remains lit, a cone of light that illuminates only her, Loredana, from above. “I'm alone in my house keeping myself company”, roars the lioness, with that way of singing that is both desperate and sensual.

The first standing ovation of the evening arrives immediately, at the end of “I don't have any friends“, one of the darkest and most intense pages of the film life of Loredana Berté, who in 1994 on the Ariston stage, competing in Sanremo in search of yet another rebirth, sang: “The general opinion is that I don't know how to sing and that I always dress badly / for the national press I commit suicide to make a living, with the hospital as my sponsor”. And it's not just an ovation to the interpretation, which is thrilling: it is an ovation to a career, to a philosophy of life. The one that the voice of “Non sono una donna” has embodied since its controversial debut with “Streaking” in 1974 and which it now transforms on stage into a show that is a sort of Lory Horror Picture Show, a hymn to freedom that brings his entire world to the stagedictated by unscrupulousness, sensuality, the desire to rebel – the collection released in February is titled exactly like that, “Rebel” – against prejudices and preconceptions.

“I was envious and pitied“, he sings in “Daughter of…”, among the many manifesto songs in the setlist, she who he repeatedly slapped morality. Sometimes triumphing without ifs or buts, like when at the Festivalbar final in 1982, on the notes of “I'm not a lady” she showed up in a wedding dress (“I wanted to make a hymn to female emancipation, to overcoming clichés and clichés. I began my performance with my hair tied back, veil and bouquet, before letting my hair down and getting rid of everything: it was my cry of rebellion,” he would have said. Other times without being fully understood: The

big belly fake flaunted amid controversy again in Sanremo in 1986 on “King” is mentioned in the videos that run behind him, retracing the highlights of a career as a true rock star, endowed with a charisma that other colleagues, both new and old generation, dream of having.

“Don't dream it: be it!”, he repeated, in the grip of his delirium, Frank-N-Furterplayed by Tim Curry, floating with a life jacket in a swimming pool that had a reproduction of Michelangelo's Last Judgment at the bottom in the key scene of Jim Sharman's 1975 cult film, a mix of musicals, comedy, horror and science fiction. Loredana didn't dream: it wasto. And she claims it by looking back a life in which dramas and comedies unfold, always characterized by irony and anarchyranging from the existentialist rock of that “Luna” with which in 1997 he set to music all the torment felt after the death of his beloved sister Mia Martini (“What happened to God?”, he screams, leaving everyone astonished) to the feminist manifesto of the same “Non sono una donna”, passing through the nostalgia of “Lost in the supermarket” (“This music doesn't move me / there's too much honey in the words / I want the Clash of '79 back”) and the mockery of “ Dedicated”, among the many hits of a concert that is much more than a concert: the live documentary of a life out of the ordinary.