Jennifer Nettles can thank a late-night internet search for her new musical, “Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo.”
She recalls coming across an article on female serial killers while surfing the internet about a decade ago. “I thought, surely that can’t be a long list,” she said. But then she started reading about Giulia Tofana, whose mother, according to some sources, invented a nearly tasteless poison in 17th-century Sicily — which Giulia distributed as a way for women to kill their abusive husbands. Though little can be confirmed, by some accounts the poison, known as Acqua Tofana, was used to kill more than 600 men.
“We’ve got a woman here who’s responsible for killing people,” she said, “and yet I believe her heart is in the right place. This is one question that’s posed in the musical: ‘Have you ever done something wrong for all the right reasons?’”
Nettles, 51, who is both the writer and star of “Giulia,” which is now in previews at the Perelman Performing Arts Center in Lower Manhattan, made a name for herself as the lead singer of the duo Sugarland, who have five No. 1 country singles — including the hits “Stuck Like Glue” and “Stay” — and three Grammy Awards. She views her move to musical theater as a way to “expand my storytelling.” “I’m an artist,” she added, “I’m constantly looking with new eyes and wanting to do something new.”
She has also had a parallel career as an actor. In addition to screen work, she has appeared on Broadway as a replacement cast member in “Chicago” and “Waitress.” More recently, she had a recurring role as the matriarch of the dysfunctional family of televangelists on HBO’s “The Righteous Gemstones.” (Danny McBride, that show’s creator, wrote in a recent email that Nettles “effortlessly knew exactly what to do” on his tonally “nuts” series.)
Still, Nettles knew that she wanted to get back to the stage after her earlier Broadway experiences. But also: “I could not get the story out of my head,” she said of Giulia Tofana recently over lunch at an Italian restaurant near the theater, which is a short walk from her home.
When she told her partner, the Broadway producer Adam Zotovich (“The Color Purple,” “The Addams Family”), about her fascination with the legend, “He said, ‘Do you think she needs to sing?,’” Nettles recalled. “And I said, ‘I absolutely think she needs to sing.’”
During the coronavirus pandemic she had time to dig into writing the musical, which forced her to work out her subject’s character, motivation and her own view of the tale “How interesting that there was a woman of that time who had such agency,” Nettles said, “even if it wasn’t really 600 men.”
The complexities of the antihero was an undeniable draw. (One of her favorite movies is “Gladiator”; she relishes cheering for Russell Crowe’s “warrior out for revenge.”) And she noted that few of those roles are written for women, especially adult women. “That’s the character that I want to be,” she said.
She and Zotovich took the piece to Bill Rauch, the artistic director of PAC NYC (as the Perelman is known), who said recently that he was “immediately taken with the power of the story,” and has spent the last two years helping develop the project.
Nettles said, “You’ve got to take big swings, and I’m taking a big swing with this.”
She added, “I am coming from a place of deep love and deep respect for the form, a place of wild instinct.”
That love extends back to her childhood in Georgia, where Nettles grew up doing community theater. She got her first taste of Broadway during a trip to visit relatives in New York City when she was in the third grade. The show: “A Chorus Line.”
“I was completely scandalized, but I thought it was fantastic,” Nettles said. “As the story goes, when we were leaving my aunt Courtney said, ‘So, Jennifer, what did you think? Did you like it?’ And I turned around and looked at the marquee, and I said, ‘I’ll be back.’”
Though a longtime musical theater fan, she didn’t initially intend to write both the musical’s book and songs, but she found that the collaborators she was working with weren’t getting the tone she was going for. “I wanted to make sure that it wasn’t campy,” she said. “It would have been so easy to get it wrong. It would have been so easy to do ‘A little pinch of this and a little dash of that’ — Oh, God, save us.”
Eventually, Nettles was introduced to Mary Zimmerman, a theater and opera director who won a Tony Award in 2002 for her Broadway adaptation of Ovid’s “Metamorphoses” and has been honored with a MacArthur fellowship. Zimmerman was impressed by the “density” of the musical’s plot and by how fully realized Nettles’s draft was. “There wasn’t a bad song,” she said, “and she has a real sense of the rhythm of the scenes.”
Together, the writer and director led a trip to Palermo last October with some of the creative team. Beyond just connecting with Giulia via the location — her “dry, hot world,” Nettles said — it also gave a sense of the city’s polyglot history.
“Sicily was tossed around for hundreds of years in terms of who occupied it, who owned it,” she said. “All that is in the architecture, it’s in the food, it’s such a mélange. Seeing the place gave more permission to explore the darkness of it, all of the textures. And musically, this piece is very much anachronistic — obviously, it’s set in 17th-century Sicily, but it’s not that music, it’s pop music. I call it a pop-eretta.”
At a rehearsal in early June at a studio on 42nd Street, these elements and the need to keep them in balance were evident. The room was spare, but props like goblets and pestles gave a sense of the morbid subject matter. A funeral procession that opens the second act has dancing on top of coffins, while a gospel and light hip-hop beat backs up lines like “It’s a revolution / Of the institution / Of marriage.”
Nettles stayed quiet and attentive as Zimmerman worked out the staging, and during a break in the action, the director commented on the humility of the show’s creator as she experienced her words coming to life.
“Jennifer is not the center of gravity in the room,” she said. “If someone walked in and you asked them to pick out which one of these 13 people wrote this play, I don’t think they could.”
A few weeks later, during final rehearsals before the team moved into the PAC space, Nettles acknowledged the “vulnerability and intimacy” of handing over the keys to a piece she’s been working on for so long. “But I love direction,” she said. “In all the projects in TV and film, I love that part of the process. Mary and I have a really good volley in the sense that I’m super open and respectful of her, and she is of me as well. But I love a note — at least from her!”
Nettles believes that her show about a rebel who “turned her pain into her purpose” and found salvation “through her community of women” speaks to this moment in ways she didn’t anticipate. “I think it is the right time for this musical,” she said. “I think it’s the right time for me in my career to have evolved to this place. I think it’s the right time in our country and in the broader world, in terms of the story that’s being told. Even within the industry of theater, we are ripe for this story in so many ways.”
“About every 10 years something comes along that’s original, like a ‘Hamilton’ or ‘Dear Evan Hansen,’” she added, “and I want to shake it up.”
In her view, “Giulia” is personal, political and provocative. “It’s going to be entertaining,” she said, “and it has been supremely life-giving and exciting for me, but I want it to be able to touch as many people as it can and to inspire as many people as it can to make change in the world.
“The joke of it, the irony, is that my little musical about poison is the antidote that we need right now.”
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