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(More customer reviews)There was an old time movie director who, by the autumn of his life, had become a living legend. Constantly revered for his body of work he would inevitably be asked to be the guest of honor at symposia where his work and career were discussed. Film fans, notorious for finding hidden meanings and symbolisms in their favorite films would besiege this director with the most stupid of questions. What is the meaning of this, Mr. Director? What is the meaning of that? At one of these conferences, an overzealous fan asked, "Mr. Director, in the scene where the two protagonists first meet there are ominous black clouds in the sky. Did you mean this to be a symbolic foreboding that their relationship was doomed from the start?" The director, by now sick and tired of people finding a myriad of meanings in his films that he never intended, stared at the fan directly in the eyes, and very tongue-in-cheek replied: "Well, yes, there is great symbolism in those clouds. They are symbolic of the fact that we had zero money left in our budget and couldn't afford to re-shoot on a clearer day. So the clouds stayed in the shot. I suppose that if an airplane had flown by at the time we were filming, it would have stayed in the shot too, and no doubt you would make a big deal of that also, and wrack your brain trying to explain what the hell it is the damn plane symbolized".
And so it goes with this book. The author has combined what is obviously her great passion, feminism, with another passion, music, to create a convoluted hybrid of the two that is, at its best, arguable and, at its worst, totally ridiculous. She goes to great lengths to present her thesis, for this is what this is, but the fact remains that she is just speculating, and, like the overzealous movie fan of the story, finding hidden meanings and symbols where there are none to be had.
Her first big faux pas is to label the salida a genre. A salida is no more a genre than love duets are a genre, or quartets are a genre. Salida, from the infinitive salir, means to come out. Or in stage terms to enter the stage. Salidas are arias designed to introduce the main character to the audience. They tell us who the character is, what he/she does, his/her likes and dislikes. Salidas, then are simply entrance arias and they are by no means exclusive to Cuban zarzuela, nor did Cuban composers make of it an art form, much less a genre. In El Barberillo de Lavapiés both Lamparilla and Paloma sing entrance arias, or salidas. Juan has his own famous salida in Los Gavilanes, and so does Jorge in Marina. So salidas are not the exclusivity of female characters. And there are plenty of examples of salidas in opera, most notably Figaro's Largo al factotum. A chair is still a chair, even when there's no one sitting there ... A salida, then, is just a salida, for God's sake. It is not a genre unto itself.
Ms. Thomas then goes further and implies that these salidas, indeed ALL musical numbers and character types in Cuban zarzuela have deeply rooted socio-political connotations and agendas and are symbolic of the goings on in Cuban society at the time. By spending most of the book socio-politicizing every zarzuela, every character in a zarzuela, and every action that takes place in a zarzuela, she manages to alienate the reader, who is forced to go through endless dissertations of gender and race, before she throws him a morsel of useful information, like a handful of crumbs to a hungry bird.
In her eagerness to prove her points, invalid as they may be, she seems to forget that Lecuona, Roig, Prats, and their respective librettists were not philosophers or social commentators. They were working musicians trying to satisfy an overwhelming demand for live entertainment in an era where there was no television, and radio was in its infancy. What is amazing is that they were able to churn out product of such quality and artistic merit in such haste and at such a frantic pace. By her own account, if we are to believe her Appendix, Lecuona composed 8 works for the lyric stage in 1927 alone, including the classics Niña Rita and La Tierra de Venus. In 1929 in addition to El Cafetal he premiered 5 other works, including El Batey. Gonzalo Roig was just as prolific. In 1932, the year he gave the world the gift of his Cecilia Valdés he also premiered 7 other works, including El Clarín. 1933 brought 7 more stage pieces by Roig. The sheer amount of work is staggering if one takes into consideration that our greatest living musical theater composers, Jerry Herman and Stephen Sondheim take years to regale the public with a new work. Lecuona and Roig then, were too busy trying to come up with melodies to devote any time to making social commentary through their zarzuela characters. To suggest that Lecuona and Roig had an agenda in creating these women is tantamount to saying that Puccini was trying to make a political statement about Japan and the United States when he composed Madama Butterfly. To further imply that characters like Cecilia Valdés, María La O, and Amalia Batista are representative of Cuban women of the thirties is as ludicrous as affirming that Lucy Ricardo and June Cleaver are representative and symbolic of every American housewife of the fifties. These zarzuelas were conceived as pure entertainment, nothing more, nothing less. I love opera, and I also like boxing, but it would be foolish of me to try to devote an entire book to the parallels, real or imagined, between the two. There are none. Apples and oranges, as they say.
In Ms. Thomas' world there were only two types of theaters in Cuba. Strip palaces for men only, like the Shanghai, which were the equivalent of American burlesque (think Gypsy Rose Lee only bawdier, more dangerous, and more vulgar) or theatres like the Payret, devoted to the finer arts like symphonies and opera. According to her, women were not permitted in legitimate theatres, so the zarzuela became their haven. Zarzuela for women only? Is that like Broadway musicals only for the consumption of musical theatre queens? How condescending! Cuba is a country rich in theatrical tradition, from the classics of Spanish theatre like Don Juan Tenorio to absurdist fare like Ionesco's. From baroque opera to the more modern works of Menotti, whose The Medium was presented in Cuba with Rita Montaner and María Teresa Carrillo, a short time after the work's premiere in the United States. We were not theatrically deprived and women were not theatrically challenged when it came to appropriate fare for them to enjoy.
Ms Thomas' biggest hindrance is to focus on her subject through the eyes of a 21st century American feminist. She fails miserably in the question of race because she approaches race in Cuba from her American standpoint. While the practice of black face has acquired demonic proportions in the United States and is uniformly and unanimously despised in this country, that was never the case in Cuba. It still isn't. American racism is hatred. Pure, violent, unadulterated hatred. Racism in Cuba was never about hatred of blacks, it was more about exclusion. Blacks were simply not allowed in the upper echelons of white society. They were not permitted in "private" white social circles. So they created their own. I must point out however, that exclusion did not mean segregation. The upper classes of white society practiced exclusivity not only on blacks, but on lower class whites also, who were not allowed to frequent private clubs or beaches either. But there was never segregation among the populace. Cuba never had black and white water fountains, rest rooms, or restaurants. And there was no back-of-the-bus for Cuban blacks. Blacks had access to the same public privileges whites had, and the intermingling of blacks and whites in everyday life was never an issue. I must also point out that while here miscegenation was not condoned or accepted, in Cuba it was not only commonplace, but rampant, bringing about a totally new hybrid, the mulato. In 2011, as I write this, you can turn on local television channels in Miami and see Cuban actors performing sketches in black face. No one bats an eye. Blacks or whites. Racism, whether it comes in the form of hatred as in the United States, or in the form of exclusion, as in Cuba, simply has no place in a civilized society. But Ms. Thomas' is mistaken in judging the race issue in Cuba by its American counterpart. A black American will refer to himself as an African-American, even when the majority couldn't point to Africa on a map if you asked them to. They are generations removed from Africa and know absolutely nothing about that continent, its history, its people, and its customs. Yet they insist on labeling themselves African. In stark contrast if you ask a black Cuban who and what he is he will simply tell you, I am Cuban. He is emotionally, physically, and psychologically as far removed and distanced from Africa - and rightly so - as a white Cuban is today distanced from his Spanish ancestry. We are not Hispanics, we are not Afro-Cubans or Spanish Cubans. We are simply Cuban, Ms. Thomas.
It's a shame that Ms. Thomas has chosen to devote a book about Cuban Zarzuela to socio-political conjecture, because when she leaves her pulpit behind and concentrates on the music and its creators, the book takes on another patina altogether. It is then, that it becomes interesting reading, even if these moments are ephemeral and too far between to really matter to the bored reader, overwhelmed as he is with the author's insistence on deriving social commentary from light musical entertainment. These zarzuelas are not South Pacific, a musical fully intended to enlighten its audiences and make a statement about racism...Read more›
Click Here to see more reviews about: Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage
On September 29, 1927, Cuban soprano Rita Montaner walked onto the stage of Havana's Teatro Regina, her features obscured under a mask of blackened glycerin and her body clad in the tight pants, boots, and riding jacket of a coachman. Standing alongside a gilded carriage and a live horse, the blackfaced, cross-dressed actress sang the premiere of Eliseo Grenet's tango-congo, "Ay Mamá Inés." The crowd went wild. Montaner's performance cemented "Ay Mamá Inés" as one of the classics in the Cuban repertoire, but more importantly, the premiere heralded the birth of the Cuban zarzuela, a new genre of music theater that over the next fifteen years transformed popular entertainment on the island.
Cuban Zarzuela: Performing Race and Gender on Havana's Lyric Stage marks the first comprehensive study of the Cuban zarzuela, a Spanish-language light opera with spoken dialogue that originated in Spain but flourished in Havana during the early twentieth century. Created by musicians and managers to fill a growing demand for family entertainment, the zarzuela evidenced the emerging economic and cultural power of Cuba's white female bourgeoisie to influence the entertainment industry. Susan Thomas explores zarzuela's function as a pedagogical tool, through which composers, librettists, and business managers hoped to control their troupes and audiences by presenting desirable and problematic images of both feminine and masculine identities. Zarzuela was, Thomas explains, "anti-feminist but pro-feminine, its plots focusing on female protagonists and its musical scores showcasing the female voice." Focusing on character types such as the mulata, the negrito, and the ingenue, Thomas uncovers the zarzuela's richly textured relationship to social constructs of race, class, and especially gender.
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