There’s a particular kind of chaos that takes over a primary school hall when Spectacular Spettacolo rolls into town, and it’s one that Lea da Silva Gomes has spent the past 16 years perfecting without spending a cent on advertising.
“When kids are screaming the songs back at you and teachers are laughing just as hard as the students, you know you’ve created something memorable,” Lea said. “That energy is addictive.”
This year, Spectacular Spettacolo turns 16. The bilingual theatre-in-education company has performed at thousands of schools across Victoria, Queensland and South Australia, entertaining hundreds of thousands of students with a fast-paced mix of comedy, music and Italian language learning, all without a marketing budget.
“There’s nothing else like it; there are no musicals like what we do,” Lea said. “It’s basically a mini, full-scale musical, and the feedback is always the same: it’s always, ‘Oh my gosh, it was so engaging!’”
Six different shows now rotate through the company’s repertoire, each running 50 to 60 minutes and drawing crowds of up to 500 students at a time, depending on each school’s preferences.
The idea began with Lea’s father, Corrado Porcaro, an Italian teacher in Victorian primary schools for 30 years. Though now retired, Corrado was a well-known figure in the sector for the resources he created for the Department of Education, including online programs delivered to remote schools without access to shows like the one his daughter would go on to build.
“He’d been saying to me for years that there was something missing; that there were companies doing a similar thing but not exactly what we ended up doing,” Lea said. “It was essentially him that spurred the conversation. He said, ‘I think you’d be perfect at this. Let’s put our brains together and work on something.’ So that’s what we did.”
Lea brought a background in musical theatre – she holds a degree in the field – while her father brought decades of classroom experience and a stellar reputation among Victorian teachers.
“In the very beginning my dad’s name was on it, and that really helped get us in the door,” she said. “They trusted the product because they knew him, and they knew he was trusted by the Department of Education. That helped us initially, and then I think the shows have just kept them coming back.”
From there, Lea and her father built the show, one element at a time. Lea surveyed and interviewed teachers about what they wanted to see, then she wrote and shaped the show creatively. Her father wrote the music and helped tie the Italian content back to the curriculum, covering topics such as colours, animals and greetings, while the pair also developed teaching resource packs, complete with a semester’s worth of posters, worksheets and lesson plans which were sent out to every school that booked a show.
It’s basically a mini, full-scale musical, and the feedback is always the same: it’s always, ‘Oh my gosh, it was so engaging!’
The company’s Italian roots run deep for Lea, who grew up speaking the language fluently in her family, even spending a year attending school in Italy as a teenager, and later returning after finishing university.
While the shows have been rewritten over the years – updated with references today’s kids will recognise, from TikTok to whatever else is culturally relevant – Lea said the format has had to stay simple by necessity. It has been built for schools where performers might have as little as 15 minutes to set up.
Despite the scale of the operation, Spectacular Spettacolo remains a two-person show behind the scenes. Lea now works alongside business partner and performer Michelle, who took over performing duties as Lea moved into other work.
“I had to keep it as basic as I could,” Lea said. “I have one performer on stage, who is now my business partner, Michelle. She takes the day-to-day phone calls and bookings, and does the performances, while I jump in during the evening and do any bookkeeping. I still write and direct all the shows.”
Keeping today’s kids engaged, Lea said, means grabbing their attention immediately and making them part of the story rather than passive viewers; building shows around adventures, mysteries and time travel that pull the audience in from the first minute. Spotting the “cool kids” in the crowd and getting them on side early, she said, can bring the whole room with them; a skill she credits to Michelle in particular.
Lea and her family – husband, and children aged 14 and 11 – moved to the peninsula 13 years ago after years of Lea holidaying there while growing up. They settled in Dromana when their daughter was a toddler, and both kids have grown up as the company’s unofficial test audience, weighing in on which jokes land in rehearsals, even though somewhat ironically, they studied Japanese rather than Italian at school.
Lea’s other job is just as demanding: she works full-time as a producer in animated television, on an American musical production which she’s unable to name publicly, having had to sign a non-disclosure agreement.
She is also producing a feature film, shot over 16 days in Melbourne earlier this year and starring Kat Stewart and Marg Downey; it is now in post-production with an eye on a Sundance submission.
It’s a lot to juggle alongside two kids in weekend sport and a theatre company still touring schools across three states, but for Lea, none of it would be worth trading the peninsula for.
“I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, or raising my kids anywhere else,” she said. “It’s just such a great place to raise them.”
And when the curtain calls come around again – some 60 or 70 schools a year, across three states, and sixteen years in – it’s still that same sound Lea’s chasing: kids screaming the songs back at her, word for word.
