• Cita a Ciegas (Blind Date)
• by Mario Diament
• Directed by Jose Carrasquillo
• Produced by GALA
• Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

Cita a Ciegas is a terrifyingly beautiful, imagistic play in which a blind man interviews isolated strangers on a park bench, and finds interconnections between them and his own life. If Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot is about waiting; then Diament’s play is about our deep need to achieve immortality by being heard as we face the meaninglessness of existence. [Read more...]

Latido Negro, Peru’s African Beat

directed by Rafael Santa Cruz

written by Fernando Barreto Arce

choreographed by Lalo Izquierdo,

review by Rosalind Lacy

Break down the barriers. Let fusion reign. In GALA’s world premiere of a new musical Latido Negro: Peru’s African Beat, intoxicating rhythms of African drums blend with echoes of sweet-and-sad Andean or Spanish flamenco-like melodies. Forget the story.  It doesn’t matter anyway. It’s a frame for the poems, and songs, music and dancing passed down from the Afro-Peruvian soul. [Read more...]

A co-production from Teatro de la Luna and Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia

Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy     

 (L-R): Kathy Hankins, Alvaro Rodríguez, Adriana González  (Photo: Raymond Gniewek)

     Even though Spain was politically unstable in 1904, composer Amadeo Vives found peace from living with freedom in his heart. He looked to the past to celebrate the carefree life of the mid-1800s by composing the music for Bohemians (Bohemios). Passionate lyrics, by Guillermo Perrin and Miguel de Palacios supported his vision of a love-filled world: The power of love “….makes the flowers in my shawl bloom,” sings the gypsy girl in Act II.      Teatro de la Luna is known for leading its Spanish-speaking audiences to Latino avant garde plays. The Opera Theatre of Northern Virginia is recognized for introducing operas rarely heard. Together the two companies seem perfect partners for producing this zarzuela, a neglected orphan of Spanish musical theater that refuses to die. Beautifully sung by a splendid band of local opera singers under the artistic direction of music director John Edward Niles and staged by Mario Marcel, the ultra-romantic Bohemians soars. [Read more...]

Produced by GALA Hispanic Theatre
Reviewed by Rosalind Lacy

(l to r) Cynthia Benjamin, Carlos Castillo and  Manuel Cabrera-Santos (Photo: Daniel Troconis)

Argentine playwright Griselda Gambaro took an enormous risk because she couldn’t keep silent about “the disappeared.” When she wrote The Walls (Las Paredes) in 1964, she was ahead of her time. She held up a mirror to the reality of never-ending military state terrorism, which started in the 1960s and peaked in 1983 during the Dirty War, a period of kidnappings, Nazi-like tortures and executions by security police. [Read more...]