“Paint your village and you will paint the whole world” is advice attributed to Nobel Prize winner Leo Tolstoy. Few theatrical experiences in recent memory make the point as vividly or successfully as the immersive music-driven production, “¡Viva La Parranda!”
The musical, commissioned by Venezuelan-born theater director, writer, and producer Michel Hausmann, co-founder and artistic director of Miami New Drama, and produced by Miami New Drama, returns to the Colony Theatre featuring the original ensemble, a revisiting of its premiere in 2019. The show opens Thursday, July 10 and runs through Sunday, July 27.
Staged as a backyard get-together around a typical sancocho, a traditional stew that cooks (for real) throughout the show in a large pot, “¡Viva La Parranda!” transports the audience to El Clavo, a small town in Barlovento, a region in the center north of Venezuela. With an approximate population of 1,500, El Clavo “is not in Wikipedia,” deadpans lead singer Betsayda Machado in one of the on-stage moments.
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Barlovento has deep, centuries-old African roots, and the ensemble plays its music on ancestral instruments such as the mina (a large drum with roots in what is now Benin), the culo’e puya (small drums of Kongo origin), and the quitiplás (bamboo drums). In between songs, there are moving personal stories told by the performers, all neighbors of El Clavo. They aren’t professional actors but their grace and emotion come from authenticity.
Born in Caracas but raised in El Clavo, where her mother still lives, Machado was already a leading voice in Afro-Venezuelan music when an inquiry by producer Juan Souki led to the idea of capturing the experience of la parranda, a genre of Afro-Venezuelan music, but also the name of the ensemble that plays it and the party around the music.
Souki was an admirer of Machado well before he met her.
“I just knew her voice from a recording. It was a large vocal ensemble, so I didn’t even know her name, but I recognized her voice. Betsayda has such a universal voice that it feels like she can sing to you about the pulse of the earth,” he says.
Souki had collaborated with Machado on a bolero project and wanted to do more with her, so he asked her to show him something of interest from her hometown.
“And I told him, ‘Well, from my house, for as long as I can remember, there is a parranda every January first.’ The parranda in the pueblo de El Clavo is older than me, and I’ll be 52 in August,” says Machado in Spanish, during a telephone interview.
“So I took him to the town one weekend,” she says. “I brought all the parranderos up to date; they prepared as if Juan were a visiting mayor, and he was welcomed with a sancocho.”
The encounter, and hearing Machado perform in place with the group, led to a recording featuring her with La Parranda El Clavo: “Loé Loá (Rural Recordings Under the Mango Tree).” The title was no marketing cutesy.
“No sir. It was recorded under a mango tree,” says Machado. “And we invited the whole town so that they could experience what it was like to record an album. Because this was the first time that the group was called to do a recording.”
It was also Souki’s first recording. “And my last,” he quickly adds. “It’s not what I do. But that album ended up on the New York Times’ list of the best albums of 2017.”
The reception of their recording opened the world to Machado and La Parranda El Clavo and led to international touring and appearances at events such as WOMEX and Global Fest, leading World Music gatherings, and venues such as the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C.
“The farthest the group had gone was the town of El Guapo. Our first trip [after the album] was to Canada,” says Machado, adding that “of course” the group on stage is only a small representation of the actual parranda. “The parranda is the whole town,” she says. “But I couldn’t bring the whole town onto the stage.”
Hausmann and Souki have known each other since they were teenagers in Caracas, and, as Hausmann puts it, “precocious theater directors.” However, at some point, Souki transitioned to music production and world music, recalled Hausmann. When Hausmann learned about the Parranda El Clavo project, he was moved. “Juan was posting videos about it, and I called him and told him, ‘We got to do a play with them . . . So we spoke about the idea of a documentary play.”
The result is a one-of-a-kind, profoundly moving theatrical documentary.
The backyard staging allows for the personal storytelling and the music to unfold naturally. “I remember that I said that we were going to prepare a sancocho,” says Machado. “And that’s how we have it in the play. Our first experiences as parranderos were born with a sancocho.” Naturally, at the end of the performance, the audience is invited onstage to share the experience and taste the food. That is no showbiz, that is the way of El Clavo.
In addition to Machado, members of the ensemble are Blanca Castillo, a retired nurse; Youse Cardozo, a firefighter; a founding member of the parranda, Asterio Betancourt, is a former basketball player and a drummer; and Nereida Machado, Betsayda’s sister, is a singer, dancer, and insurance analyst.
The stories they tell speak of family and community but also violence, death, single parenthood, drug use, and the back-breaking work in cocoa fields.
“They tell their stories in anecdotes,” says Souki. “At the end of the day, it’s soup, a beer, rice, and telling stories. The text is the literal anecdotes from them and their experiences as they were told to me in a very informal context, not from interviews, but long days of conversation.”
In 2019, when Hausmann first introduced “¡Viva La Parranda!”, he had yet to cultivate an audience that included mainstays, Miami’s predominant Venezuelan community.
“. . . Part of the reason we are bringing it back is because we might have done that show a little too early in our company’s career. . . This is our way of reminding this community that there is something intrinsic in the Venezuelan spirit that allows for […] continuing at it in the face of adversity.”
The foundation of the musical also brings something to the stage that resonates.
“The emotions are so powerful because they are raw and they are real. It is impossible not to connect with what they feel because we all recognize those emotions. And I think that that is the power of theater: to remind us that we are all made of the same emotional DNA and to some degree, every story is a universal story,” said Hausmann.
WHAT: “¡Viva La Parranda!”
WHERE: Miami New Drama at the Colony Theatre, 1040 Lincoln Road, Miami Beach.
WHEN: 8 p.m. Thursday, Friday and Saturday; 5 p.m. Sunday, from July 10, previews, opening night, Saturday, July 12. Through July 27.
COST: $46.50, $66.50, $76.50
INFORMATION: (305) 674-1040 and miaminewdrama.org
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