Terrifying, intoxicating, brutally straight-forward and shocking, stripped to its gut-wrenching core, Federico García Lorca’s Yerma, modernized as never seen before, opens the GALA Hispanic Theatre’s 40th season. Opening night audience sat transfixed by theater as haunting as a dream; as numbing as a nightmare.

Emotionally revitalizing, experimental and spectacular. This gut-wrenching ground-breaker exposes hidden Argentinian history, so expect the unexpected in this well-constructed musical by Patricia Suárez-Cohen. Composer/lyricist Mariano Vales has created spell-binding, beguiling lyrics set to minor-keyed music, echoing Slavic-Jewish toe-tapping folk tunes. The mix will keep you edgy with suspense, knocked dizzy and breathless, even inspired.

A large round shadow screen looms upstage, like a rising moon. Eight triangular steps ascend, like a pyramid, in front of it, as if leading to a Mayan temple. The stage floor is lit with a squiggly  pattern of light and dark. Sounds of bird calls and crickets put us in a tropical forest.

That Sor Juana Inés De La Cruz was a poet, a genius and a nun, who lived in Mexico in the 17th century (1650-1694), is well-known. When I visited Mexico in 2009, I felt her impact at the co-ed University of the Cloister of Sor Juana in the Historic Center of Mexico City.  Her memorized […]

In a striving-to-be-perfect Latino jazz band rehearsal, guitarists Brianna (Carol Spring), Tim (Jerry Daniel) and Alex (Miguel Amaguaña) strum furiously and sound terrible. Brianna and Tim gang up on Alex, telling him he needs to switch to drums for the group’s survival. “We need rhythm– something to keep us together,” Brianna says.

Cancún  is a richly-layered comedy, a brilliantly-written four hander, by Jordi Galcerán, Europe’s hottest playwright at the moment, from Catalonia, Spain. Two couples from Spain celebrate 25 years of close friendship on the Fourth of July by vacationing in Cancún, Mexico. On a richly detailed set, replete with real, granulated, white sand that puts us […]

Delightful, daring, death defying, ultimately satisfying. In Puro Tango II, the spotlight immortalizes the women who sing soulful and poetic tango songs, as well as the dancers who dance it. It’s as if the characters seem to be saying: ‘I’m working class, at the bottom of the social ladder. I live in squalor, in slums. […]

It takes more than a mother and father to raise a child. So when well-educated women feel the call to work outside their homes, who cares for the kids? Easy: Hire an immigrant.