La Carpa del Maestro (Miracle Theatre)
Happy skeleton wants you to buy, buy, buy!
January 27th, 2010
Kronos Quartet Monday, Feb. 1 | Chamber music’s biggest innovators come home.0 comments
January 27th, 2010
Willow Jade (Portland Playhouse) | You can go home again, but you really shouldn’t.0 comments
January 13th, 2010
Design for Living (Artists Rep) | Who knew threesomes could be so dull?1 comment
December 30th, 2009
Best Bets In 2010 | The New Year’s hottest tickets.0 comments
December 30th, 2009
Beauty And The Beast (Pixie Dust Productions) | The wonderfully weird world of Disney.0 comments
December 23rd, 2009
Last-Minute Classics | Give the gift of Portland classical musicians.0 comments
December 9th, 2009
Tiger Lilly And Sunny Lu (Do Jump!) | Do Jump! creates catnip out of physical theater.0 comments
November 25th, 2009
Unholy Nights | Three unconventional holiday shows, in order of depravity.0 comments
November 11th, 2009
Everyone Who Looks Like You (Hand2mouth Theatre) | A rowdy ensemble grows up by going back home.0 comments
November 11th, 2009
Chronos/Kairos (BodyVox) | The local company brushes off dust and celebrates 12 years in the biz.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.
Story continues below
advertisement
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.”
RECENT COMMENTS ON “La Carpa del Maestro (Miracle Theatre)”
