My favorite activity is going to the theater. (I guess that's why I'm a playwright--it just took me many years to realize that one could lead to the other.) So, naturally, when I travel, I look for opportunities to do the same. But this can be problematic when you're travelling in countries where you don't know the language. (Does this include England? Well, it did when I saw Lionel Bart's musical MAGGIE MAY - his next musical after OLIVER! - in London many years ago. All the characters spoke with a thick Liverpoolian--or, more correctly, Liverpudlian--accent. To this day, I have no idea what was going on in that show. Nor did my brother, who accompanied me.)
I recently travelled to Madrid on vacation and was excited to discover that it's is a thriving theater town, with as many theaters as New York (despite a much smaller population). I could choose from about 35 different shows at what were more or less the equivalent of Broadway theaters. Plays and musicals like Tom Stoppard's Rock 'n Roll, Chicago, God of Carnage, Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, Calderon's The House of Bernardo Alba, a musical called 40, and so on. The only problem being that they were all in Spanish and my Spanish is less than elementary. In the end, I settled on three English-proof shows:
(1) Spamalot. I'd seen it in NY, so I figured I'd know what was going on. And I more or less did. Except that I tended to laugh out loud at the physical comedy while my fellow theatergoers responded more enthusiastically to the verbal jokes that went right over my head.
(2) Zarzuela. This is an art form unique to Spain--a cross between opera, musical comedy, and flamenco dancing. I saw Dona Francisquita. Luckily, there was an English synopsis in the playbill. Otherwise, I didn't know exactly what was going on but enjoyed the spectacle--except for the occasional scene where 60 people stood around singing and swaying. Kind of like a performance of the Ladies Light Opera Society (or whatever it was called) on I Love Lucy.
(3) Flamenco. I went to what I guess would be considered a modern neo-Flamenco show called Cambio de Tercio. Not much of a language barrier here--though there were some lyrics. Otherwise just the universal language of dance and percussion.
All of which reminds me of two other excursions into theater in other languages. In the Summer of Woodstock, I travelled around Europe with my roommate, and we saw two shows in Paris. One was a comedy called Quarante Carats--which was in fact simultaneously playing on Broadway back home as Forty Carats starring Julie Harris (later made into a movie with Liv Ullmann, Gene Kelly, and Edward Albert). Fortunately my French was pretty good at the time, so I was able to follow most of it and thoroughly enjoyed it. The other was the musicalHAIR--yes, while the original was playing on Broadway, I had to settle for the French-version in Paris (Laissez, laissez entrez le soleil - Let the Sunshine in!) Full nudity, too - but in French. And no one seemed to note that HAIR is the French verb "to hate." A show about love called hate. It was great, at any rate.
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William
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