Review: Singing along—and honoring Zarzuela tradition—with Teatro Lirico de D.C.
By hola | Published | No Comments
The lucky few who caught Teatro Lirico de D.C.’s two zarzuela performances on Oct. 9 and 10 were treated to an enchanting mix of drama, slapstick humor, romance, delightfully cheerful music, along with thorough use of the theater—including the audience.
Throughout the production, the singers paraded down the aisles of the GALA Hispanic Theatre, singing their parts in Jacinto Guerrero’s zarzuela “La Rosa del Azafran” (“The Saffron Flower”), a tale of forbidden love between social classes. Towards the end, two of the protagonists hopped offstage to lead the audience in a sing-along competition to the song “Las Espigadoras,” pitting the women against the men to see who could sing the loudest.
It wasn’t a surprise to anyone that the women won— though we did outnumber the men in the theater.
If you haven’t heard of zarzuela, you are not alone. While Italian opera and American Broadway musicals are famous around the world, if someone were to mention “the zarzuela,” then the likelihood of associating the word with “zarzuela” seafood stew instead of a musical production, is extremely high. Unfortunately this is even more true in Spain, this musical form’s motherland. After all, zarzuela is a rather forgotten art form, no matter how worthy of remembrance.
What is “the zarzuela”? Simply put: it is an operetta, sung in Spanish, not Italian, but it is also different from an opera because it alternates between the sung arias and occasional scenes of dialogue. It is very much like a musical, in that sense, except that the actors are tenors and sopranos trained in opera singing. Sometimes there’s also Flamenco-style dancing. But the focus was on the singing in Teatro Lirico’s production, which starred Patricia Portillo (playing Sagrario the lovesick elite) and Ricardo Rosa (as Juan Pedro, the peasant in love with the lady Sagrario). This was Ricardo Rosa’s first appearance with Teatro Lirirco de D.C., but the standing ovation he and Portillo received at the end suggests he has a promising career ahead.
The Zarzuela was a popular form of entertainment a century ago in Spain and Latin America. Its origins are a little hard to precisely determine, but many believe it dates back to mid-17th century Madrid, where the actors played before King Phillip IV and his court in a pavilion filled with overgrown blackberry bushes known as “zarzas,” hence the name “zarzuela.”
Zarzuela was also an extremely prominent art form in Latin America at the turn of the 19th century in countries such as Argentina, Venezuela and Mexico. Each country put its own fun cultural twist on the stories to make them more Latino and less Spanish. However they preserved the Hispanic wit in the dialogues, along with the lovely flowery language of the songs.
Marco A. Campos, the artistic director for the production, gave the audience a brief synopsis of the story and talked about a fun zarzuela tradition in many Latin American countries: Near the end of a production, the zarzuelas were accompanied by audience sing-alongs. Two actors led the singing before the audience, instructing the men and the women to follow along. At GALA, actors Alex Albuquerque, playing Moniquito, and Giuliana Concha, playing Catalina, began the sing-along, while the rest of the cast set up the stage for the wedding scene. However even I, a native Spanish speaker, had trouble following the singing because I couldn’t quite understand what the song was about. The lyrics (conveniently included in the program) used a form of the Spanish language from turn of the 19th century Spain. What admirable learning capabilities the Teatro Lirico cast must possess, I realized as soon as we were enlisted to sing the following lyrics with peasant-style vocabulary and set to the rhythm of the rural Mancha village:
“ay ay ay ay
Ten memorias de mi segador
No arrebanes los combos de mies
Que detras de las hoces voy yo…”
This musical style may already sound a bit like an ‘acquired taste’— I won’t lie and say that it isn’t. Just as not every Italian likes opera, not every Spanish speaker will enjoy a zarzuela. Younger generations in particular (like mine) are detached from these musical cultural forms. It may be because we are unused to them and have grown up with other pastimes and more ‘pop’ music genres. But I find this loss of interest in many aspects of Hispanic culture troubling.
It saddened me to hear that the production of this zarzuela lasted only a weekend. Not only because it was superb, but because it only reached a limited audience.
I was introduced to Zarzuela at the age of eight when a production came to D.C. They performed the famous “Luisa Fernanda,” which in the world of Zarzuela rivals the famous opera, “Carmen,” or the Broadway musical, “Chicago”, in my opinion. Even then, zarzuela was obscure—virtually unknown among the audience members. If both opera and zarzuela have lost popularity with my generation, the zarzuela was already nearly out of the race when I was an 8-year-old. But because I am Hispanic, my parents knew it was important to get to know this cultural art form—one that my father and all of his friends and acquaintances had grown up listening to..
I am so glad they did, not just because being open to different music genres is important, but because it’s vital to get to know the depths of genres from our native tongues. Although the zarzuela is rather outdated, its importance to our Hispanic heritage remains. It should be treated as exactly that: an important aspect of our cultural heritage.
—Lucia Jimenez
Recent Stories
