My life with men... and other animals, offers the viewer a hilarious crash course on love, seduction, death and ... olive oil! The show - part in Italian and part in English - turns Americans' conception of Italian romance and femininity upside down, demystifying the archetypes created by movies, television and from divas such as Gina Lollobrigida, Anna Magnani and Sophia Loren. Established myths explode and - with the support of projections and images - a seductive and magical world emerges, partly anchored to a piquant reality and partly projected into a surreal and clownish imagination.

Maria Cassi premieres to Spoleto with My life with men... and other animals, which she wrote to four hands with Patrick Pacheco. In a recent enthusiastic review, Le Monde calls her "a clown without the red nose." Thanks to her classical training and then years of research in comic and musical theater, she has often been compared in her many-year career to to Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, and Jacques Tati.

‍PeterSchneider, Tony Award-winning producer of the musical The Lion King, directs an Italian actress for the first time. He recently directed Sister Act, a highly successful musical to London, after leaving the presidency of the Disney Film Studio where he was responsible for creating such hits as Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast and The Lion King. He produced the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty, a firsthand account of those years at Disney, which will be presented at the Spoleto Film Festival on June 26.

‍PatrickPacheco is an award-winning journalist and biographer who writes for The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, The Wall Street Journal, and also for theater and film. He recently collaborated on the musical Chita Rivera: The Dancer's Life and the documentary Waking Sleeping Beauty.