La Carpa del Maestro (Miracle Theatre)
Happy skeleton wants you to buy, buy, buy!
July 1st, 2009
Punch Brothers | Chamber Music Northwest gets patriotic.0 comments
June 24th, 2009
Risk/Reward New Performance Festival | Hand2Mouth marries art pop and pop art. 0 comments
June 17th, 2009
Inviting Desire (Dance Naked Productions) | Whips, gangbangs, fisting and Obama.0 comments
June 10th, 2009
Store For A Month | Art bargains and food for thought—now available at a “store” near you.0 comments
June 10th, 2009
The Blue Room (Portland Actors Conservatory) | Sex, drugs and rampant regret.0 comments
June 3rd, 2009
Rush + Robbins (Oregon Ballet Theatre) | The insect women will devour you!0 comments
June 3rd, 2009
Grey Gardens (Portland Center Stage) | Jerry may like your corn, but I do not.0 comments
May 20th, 2009
Everyone Who Looks Like You | Hand2Mouth’s family life: Food, fights and farts.0 comments
May 13th, 2009
Rigoletto (Portland Opera) | Murder with a side of Hunchback.0 comments
May 13th, 2009
Three Sisters (Artists Rep) | Who shot Baron Nikolai Lvovich Tusenbach?0 comments
![]() obey your master: A somber moment in La Carpa del Maestro. IMAGE: Stephanie Davis |
[October 29th, 2008]
Mexico, like most Latino cultures, has a pervasive cult of the dead that sees its fullest expression in the ancestor worship and macabre partying of Dia de los Muertos. In the U.S., we go to great lengths to ensure our ancestors stay buried, pumping them full of preservatives and dumping concrete on their coffins. We’ve replaced ancestor worship with a cleaner and more profitable reverence for nostalgia that sees fullest expression in early evening programming on public television. Why not combine the two?
La Carpa del Maestro, the third edition of Miracle Theatre Group’s annual Day of the Dead variety shows, marries the cadaverous dances of Oaxaca to the cheerful apocalypticism of Eisenhower-era suburbia, interspersing skeletal salsa with happily macabre parodies of advertising from the Atomic Age (“eat Geiger-pops!”).
This year’s production shares much in common with the previous two: cadaverous makeup, flag-dancing by Daniel Moreno, acrobatics by CarlosAlexis Cruz and Tera Nova Zarra (co-founder of ninja-rock band Fist of Dishonor), salsa, song, slapstick and comedic vignettes tied together by a shoestring of a plot. There are some new additions, but the formula remains the same.
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By rights, Miracle’s Carpas (named for Mexico’s traditional variety shows, customarily held under a carpa, or tent) should be cheesy-but-comforting spectacles on the order of the Christmas Revels, but director Philip Cuomo has higher aspirations.
Cuomo, a member of Third Rail Repertory who teaches at Portland Actors Conservatory, manages to infuse these light entertainments with real pathos and, this year, a substantial dose of creepiness. A wistful sadness and somber grace pervade even the comic elements the show, occasionally broken by moments of cackling-skeleton eeriness. Although the production is arranged around the relationship of master and apprentice, the thrust of the show is more consumer-meets-mortality. “Buy Geiger-pops,” it says. “You’re going to die anyway.”
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