Latino family and parallel show-biz lives
The poetry of Marga Gomez’s “Latin Standards” is that of beginnings and endings. Time so swirls in the comedian’s solo show, in which she parallels two big show-biz opportunities — one hers, the other her father’s — that every detail has at once the first blush of discovery and the faraway sepia tones of nostalgia. Everything in a lifetime seems to happen at the same time; you greet only to immediately bid farewell.
The show’s Saturday, Jan. 13, opening night also mixed debut and swan song. It’s the first production in Brava Theater Center’s intimate, stylish cabaret theater, part of a $2 million renovation of the company’s long-shuttered but newly reopened 24th Street storefront. Yet for Gomez, “Latin Standards” is her “final” solo show (though she clarified
in an email that she’ll continue to perform stand-up and the solo shows already in her repertoire, as well as undertaking “things I haven’t tried — writing for two or more actors perhaps”).
Directed by David Schweizer, “Latin Standards” is structured as a series of freewheeling exegeses of songs written by Gomez’s father, the allaround entertainer Willy Chevalier, who worked in television, radio and Latino nightclubs, where he hosted the likes of Tito Puente and Celia Cruz, in 1960s New York City. From a Chevalier title like “Una Mesa y Dos Sillas” (“One Table and Two Chairs”), which is on the surface about a lost romance, Gomez unpacks a pain more heartrending for its specificity to her father and the oblique way he expresses it — the “pain of keeping butts in seats,” of trying to get audiences to keep coming to a venue whose glamour had faded.
It’s a pain Gomez understands implicitly. The song takes her to her own butts-in-seats campaign: that of creating a comedy night at Esta Noche, the Mission District’s now-closed gay Latino nightclub. If a pall colors both stories — Chevalier fell victim to changing tastes, while gentrification claimed Esta Noche — Gomez also limns the two portraits with the implacable zeal of each artist’s creative spirit. You get the sense, watching “Latin Standards,” that we are our most genuine selves when we spout ideas, as when at a TV studio Chevalier rattles off pitch after pitch for a coffee commercial (each with disaster movie melodrama or Gothic grotesquerie, all with gratuitous female nudity) or Gomez herself instantly leaps, in her imagination, from a comedy night theme idea to having a documentary film crew follow her around.
Gomez as performer doesn’t always match Gomez as writer. She brings an agitated energy to a densely layered narrative, launching into particular threads without utter clarity of purpose and then rejiggering their character midway through. A bit of stand-up at the show’s beginning, while deftly pointing out the mismatch between our new marijuana laws and the drug’s legacy outlaw appeal, only saps the opening of its momentum.
Still, Gomez’s characterizations are impossible to resist. As her mother, she hisses a can of hair spray around her body as might a cobra coiling to lunge. As Esta Noche’s owner Manuel, she speaks with jaw so slack it’s liable to unhinge. Gomez says her father’s all charm, but when she embodies him, it’s not a superficial charm — it’s a kind of congenital affability, a deep-seated delight in life. It’s as if that gold jacket she wears (and that works sparkly wonders with the magentas and turquoises of Cathie Anderson’s lights) weren’t just a showman’s costume, but the very nature of father and daughter alike.