La Venus de bronce: Hacia una historia de la zarzuela cubana (review)

The mulatta is the quintessential symbol of Cuba's national identity. The nation's white imaginary has conceived and constructed the mulatta as a stand-in for Cuba's hybrid/syncretic ethnic composition. Thus, it is not surprising that Enrique Río Prado's La Venus de bronce: Hacia una historia de la zarzuela cubana uses the mulatta as a unifying national symbol. The zarzuela is a genre of lyric theater that came to Cuba via Spain. The author uses the term zarzuela to refer to all forms of lyric theater that have alternating spoken and sung scenes in their dramatic development. Rather than starting in 1927 with the classical Cuban zarzuelas, the author traces their development from 1868 with the vernacular's teatro bufo. He thus underscores the connections between the nineteenth-century one-act farces geared to the audience's "popular sensibility" and the twentieth-century classic zarzuelas such as Cecilia Valdés.

The book is divided into three sections. The first section comprises six chapters in which the author presents a sociohistorical analysis of the four periods in which he divides the development of the zarzuela in Cuba. It is followed by two important documentary sections that are an attempt to define the very corpus of such history. The first documentary section includes a transcription of important related documents such as newspaper reviews of different zarzuelas. The second one is a complete repertoire with technical information of the zarzuelas produced in Cuba between 1931 and 1936, the focus of Río Prado's study. Given the lack of existing bibliography in this area, as well as the poor state of Cuba's periodical publications, which form the basis of the study, these last two sections are an important addition for future critical studies in the field.

The six chapters that constitute the history have parallel structures. The author includes the repertoire of the zarzuelas produced in the four different periods and introduces summarily the main characteristics, themes, subgenres, and musical elements of each period. The first chapter, for example, focuses on the period of the teatro bufo (1868–1890). Río Prado's most important innovation to the literature on Cuba's vernacular genre is his suggestion that the first Cuban vernacular company, La Compañía de Bufos Habaneros, did not know the peninsular repertoire of Los Bufos Madrileños. Indeed, the evolution of Cuba's teatro bufo seems more structurally connected to the U.S. minstrel shows that toured Cuba in the early 1860s than to the Spanish vernacular genre. This first chapter also addresses the important role of popular, danceable music in this genre. The guarachas, danzas, danzones, and rumbas that were sung and danced on the streets were included in the one-act plays as well as in the intermissions. The symbiotic relationship between the audience and the characters and music on stage thus transformed the theatrical space of the 1860s into an independent, Cuban space precisely at a time when the Spanish army denied the island such independence.

Chapters 3 and 4 are devoted to the history of the classical zarzuela cubana, the ones produced in the Regina and the Martí theaters between 1927 and 1936. Rather than catering to a male and "popular" audience like the Alhambra productions of the previous period studied in chapter 2, this new zarzuela presented itself as a dignified show geared toward well-to-do families. Chapter 5 presents a brief analysis of the characteristics of this new Cuban zarzuela; namely, their plots were usually placed in colonial times, and melodrama became an important element for the protagonists: an interracial love triangle with a tragic ending was the most common formula. The most important innovation of the zarzuela of this third period was, undoubtedly, the transformation of the mulatta from a stock character to protagonist. The characters of Rita, Cecilia, María la O, and Amalia are the focus of the book's...