A scene from the new musical “Bernadette de Lourdes”
After the enormous success achieved in France, it arrives in Italy for the first time Bernadette de Lourdesthe musical, included in the official Jubilee programme, which tells the true story of the young French girl Bernadette Soubirous.
The Italian version will be on stage from 16 January to 16 February at the Auditorium Conciliazione in Rome, and then continues on 8 March at the Teatro PalaPartenope in Naples, on 15 and 16 March at the Teatro Team in Bari and on 28, 29 and on March 30th at the Alfieri Theater in Turin. In 2026 the film of the original French show will arrive in cinemas in over 100 countries, while the musical will arrive on Broadway and in the United States.
It is certainly not the first time that Bernadette’s story has been represented in the form of a show. Indeed, it can be said that for decades the face of Bernadette in the collective imagination was that of Jennifer Jones in the Hollywood film Bernadette of 1943 directed by Henry King (photo below), film adaptation of the novel Bernadette’s song by Franz Werfel (author among other things of the famous book The forty days del Mussa Dagh, on the episode of heroic resistance during the Armenian genocide), a fictional version of the apparitions to the shepherdess of Lourdes. Jones, despite being ten years older than Bernadette at the time of the apparitions, gave a very convincing interpretation which earned her the Oscar for best leading actress and the Golden Globe. The film won three more technical Oscars, and the Golden Globe for best drama film. It is easy to imagine that in the midst of the Second World War a film of hope and miracles could be a desire of many and be well received. Later, Bernadette’s life was featured in Bernadette (1988), film by Jean Delannoy with Sydney Penny in the role of the saint and its sequel Bernadette’s passion (1989), while it is from the year 2000 Lourdesa television miniseries written – among others – by Vittorio Messori. In more recent times we remember the 2011 film Bernadette – Miracle in Lourdes (Je m’appelle Bernadette) with Alessandra Martines in the role of Louise, the mother.
Bernadette’s experience is also the subject of a song by Jennifer Warnes, Song of Bernadettewritten with Leonard Cohen (lyrics) and Bill Elliott (music) and contained in the album Famous Blue Raincoat of 1987. Finally, on 11 February 2024, in Lourdes, the first screening of the docufilm Cercando Bernadette by Bruno di Marcello took place.
A scene from “All Stand Up”
Films set in Lourdes
Lourdes remains a very suggestive place, where films that have nothing to do with Bernadette’s story were also set.
In the movie Lourdes of 2009, winner of four awards at the Venice Film Festival, the protagonist is Christine, a girl suffering from multiple sclerosis who goes with a group to Lourdes more out of simple tourist curiosity and need for sociality than out of a desire to test her his faith, very skeptical about the possibility of a miracle. But, he unexpectedly recovers from his illness: this sudden and unexpected situation, rather than casting doubt on the miraculous origin of the event, instead highlights the reactions of the other participants in the pilgrimage, the dynamics that are created when faced with the happiness of others.
In Everyone stand upa 2018 Franco-French film of which Riccardo Milano filmed the remake (with Mirian Leone and Pierfrancesco Favino), a conman who pretends to be in a wheelchair to seduce a talented paralyzed violinist for fun, when he realizes that he has really fallen in love with knowing how to extricate himself from the deception he himself created, he organizes a trip to Lourdes with the girl and other invalids to then pretend to recover thanks to a miracle. But a priest unmasks him and urges him to be sincere.
Maggie Smith and Kathy Bates in “Miracle Club”
A pilgrimage to Lourdes is at the center of the film The Miracle Clubfrom 2023, Maggie Smith’s latest performance. The cast boasts truly extraordinary actresses and actors (including Kathy Bates, Stephen Rea and Laura Linney) for a story about the authentic sense of faith and forgiveness. We’re in a workers’ village near Dublin in 1967: three friends of different ages participate in a competition organized by the church, which offers tickets to go on a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Each of them has a miracle to ask of the Madonna: healing from a tumor, the end of a child’s selective mutism, reconciliation with their past. On the occasion of the funeral of a fourth friend of theirs, the woman’s daughter, who had gone to America when she was young, shows up again after 40 years of absence. She decides too leave for Lourdes and that trip will be the opportunity to face a painful episode that had separated them and in which they were all involved. And to discover that miracles exist, even if they arrive through different paths than they imagined.
