UPDATE: Robert Faires' review in the Austin Chronicle, June 4: "The way in which producer-director Leticia Rodriguez has invited us into that history and this community is welcoming and warming. By making us feel so at home here, she opens us up to see this neighborhood as the home of others. With the cookies and gelato, with the singing, with the feel of the open air, with the setting of the sun, we are brought into this community and made to belong. It's a lovely, loving way to honor a past and a place well worth the encounter."
is coming this May. Performance Encounters is about to treat Austin to a brand new edition of its highly acclaimed performance art series, Home Entertainment.
Home Entertainment 2009 is a a one of a kind full dinner theatre experience with delicious culinary delight by Joe Cooks! Catering accompanied by a theatrical performance of heart, soul with storytelling, music, and film and fun for all generations.
Home Entertainment 2009 preparation has been going on right under our noses for months. Audio interviews have been chronicling the experiences of a fascinating spectrum of the lives and culture of one of Austin’s oldest and most vibrant neighborhoods, Blackland.
Home Entertainment 2009 opens Thursday, May 28. Additional evenings will be May 29, May 30, June 4, June 5 and June 6.
Performance Encounters @ El Sol y La Luna2009 Fundraiser
JOIN USFor Paloma Patrones, dancing to Boleros Tropical con Leticia Rodriguez and chillin' at the NEW El Sol y La Luna Sunday, April 5th5 - 8 pm 600 E 6th, El Sol y La Luna (NEW LOCATION)
Suggested donation $10-20/person (food and drinks sold separately) Parking is available at the Convention Center or along the curb areas. (Map to El Sol)
Leticia Rodriguez’s charming one-woman show at the Mexican American Cultural Center is really a one-woman-and-three-musicians-and-a-crowd show. She is onstage throughout, but the magic of multimedia brings us video reminiscences from her family, photos, recorded music, visual jokes and a hectoring quizmaster running a zany bilingual quiz show.
The Big Question for the quiz show is “Eres tejana o coco?”
Are you a Texan with Mexican roots, or are you a coconut – brown on the outside, but white on the inside?
Rodriguez initially plays her young self in 1975 as a beauty queen contestant, aspiring to represent her community. But will she take the oath of allegiance to the Tejano community? Not whole heartedly? In that case, in multimedia dazzle, she is bounced into the quiz.
It’s a sly, funny, heart-warming gambit that gives her the opportunity to outline her roots, from five generations back, to mock stereotypes (frijoles or brisket? Selma Hayek is: a), b) or c)?) and to sit listening with us as her mother and aunt recall growing up Tejana.
My favorite was the translation test. “Traduzca lo siguiente!” booms out the announcer, with idiot cheerfulness:
- - “I do not like green eggs and ham. I do not like them, Sam I am!”
- - “Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. If Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers, where’s the peck of pickled peppers that Peter Piper picked?”
and
- - “T’was brillig and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabes/All mimsey were the borogroves, and the mome raths outgrabe!”
Increasingly frustrated, Rodriguez looks to be losing in the contest, until the announcer plays a bolero from the 1940’s and challenges her to identify the singer, then the song, and then the composer.
She beams and gets all three. And then she lets slip that the singer, Eva Garza, the “Sweetheart of the Americas,” was her maternal aunt.
From that point, despite the indignation of the unseen announcer (“Disqualified!!”), the quiz show slips away.
Rodriguez dons a fantastical dress made for Eva Garza by a Mexico City tailor. She delivers three beautiful numbers by Garza, accompanied by guitar, bass and drums, tying them together with memories of growing up to Tejano music.
Along with a double number by Armando Manzanero (“Somos Novios” in Spanish, which became “It’s Impossible,” popularized by Perry Como), she gives us Ernest Tubb’s “Waltzing Across Texas,” played at her own wedding. Other songs complete this 90-minute presentation.
Leticia Rodriguez is lovely, funny and a heck of a cabaret singer. She is a great advertisement for the advantages of growing up in many cultures at once.
