INTRODUCING THE SADDEST MUSIC IN THE WORLD
Fado (rhymes with bravado) is Portugal’s national music, the Portuguese blues. Simultaneously personal, political and existential, it sings of loss and regret, both documenting and providing an antidote to the profound melancholy the Portuguese call saudade.
Telling a story of two Portuguese-Canadian women’s return to the homeland, Elaine Avila’s FADO — The Saddest Music in the World provides a rich introduction to the music as well as its cultural and historical contexts. This excellent production from Victoria’s Puente Theatre, directed by Mercedes Batiz-Benet, retraces some familiar tropes of the immigrant experience while beautifully unearthing the particulars of these characters.
Luisa (Natasha Napoleao) has grown up in Vancouver and Surrey listening to her parents’ records of Amalia Rodrigues (a real person), Portugal’s most famous fado artist. An aspiring singer, Luisa wants to learn from the source. In 2000, shortly after
the death of Amalia and her own father, Luisa and her mother Rosida (Lucia Frangione) travel to Lisbon so she can train to be a fadista.
There, while studying with Antonio (Judd Palmer), a master guitarist and old friend of Rosida’s, Luisa meets her gay cousin Rui (Pedro M. Siqueira), loses her heart to her mother’s native country and to poet Tristao (Chris Perrins), and plumbs the depths of saudade.
Meanwhile, Rosida renews her relationship with Antonio and clashes with him and Rui over their personal and national histories.
Here the political backstory could use a fuller explanation as Antonio constantly refers to the terrible abuses of Portuguese dictator Antonio de Oliveira Salazar’s fascist regime (193274).
Providing musical commentary on all this, the ghost of Amalia (Sara Marreiros) sings fado classics accompanied on guitar by Palmer, Siqueira and Dan Weisenburger. The playing and Marreiros’ singing are powerful and stirring, the Portuguese lyrics translated in the program. (“And me/Who heaven forgot/ I am in a lost world/Now I cry alone/For the dead no one weeps for.”)
Napoleao and Siqueira are no vocal slouches either. Both get to show off their fado chops, Siqueira in gorgeous drag homage to Amalia, designer Patricia Reilly providing the stunning gown.
Luisa’s cultural conversion begins comically. On her arrival in Portugal she tries ordering gluten-free and mocks her mother’s fetish for ironing. But she soon falls prey to the beauty and sensuality of the place. And despite Antonio’s assurance, “You’re from a rich, free country. You don’t need fado. You can be happy,” she feels lost, untethered.
Rosida’s pain is more profound and Frangione’s superb performance captures it in intimate detail. Avila has written Rosida as the play’s dramatic centre, pitting her love and self-sacrifice for her daughter against her unregenerate traditionalism. Rosida’s ideological confrontations with Antonio (Palmer is also excellent) subtly outline the different perceptions of historical reality between those like her who left and the Antonios who remained behind.
Although the play celebrates fado, the musical form itself doesn’t emerge unscathed. Under the dictatorship, Antonio admits, it became another form of political repression: “We put our feelings in it and did nothing.”
Fado may not literally be the world’s saddest music, but it carries the weight and fate of a remarkable people.