A show that’s so Santa Fe
Annual Fiesta melodrama serves up fast-food chicken with side of cheeky humor, and as is tradition, audience participation is part of the fun
Poor La Reina Lorena Larrañaga. Outsiders are coming into her beloved city of Santa Fe and want to change the way some traditions are celebrated, like Fiesta de Santa Fe and how fast-food chicken is served.
Thankfully, she has a good friend in exotic dancer-investigative reporter Calamity Daniels, who will not only strip away the false pretense and naked lies of political leaders and shady business operatives in her journalistic pieces, but shimmy and shake the night away in an effort to get to the bare facts behind their underhanded shenanigans.
Meanwhile, the city’s easygoing and balding mayor, Don Coyote Webber, is inadvertently engaged in the felonious activities of the two main bad guys of the story — Dick Phillip-Lay and Buck Starr — and, for reasons best left unexplained because they make little sense, finds himself pushing for a ban on straws.
If the layout of this story enchants, enlightens and maybe even embalms you, blame it on an anonymous committee of writers who joined together to once again skewer the politics, people and pageants of our fair city. Yes, it’s time for the 99th annual Santa Fe Fiesta Melodrama, a pastiche of comedy, music and a little-too-real reflection on what’s happening in Santa Fe.
This year’s title says it all. Well, maybe. It’s called A Duping Duplex of Dastardly Developments or The Straw That Broke the Horse’s Back or Turn the Other Cheeks or A Conniving Couple of a’ Cads, A Calamity, a Crank and a Clunker or (finally) 10 Ways Straws Can Suck the Life Out of You.
The show officially opens at 7:30 p.m. Friday at the Santa Fe Playhouse.
Be ready to boo, hiss, cheer and applaud because the melodrama relies on audience participation, co-directors Andy Primm and Vaughn Irving said before a recent rehearsal.
“Santa Fe is literally a character in the play every year, so the audience is part of the show,” said Primm, who has worked on the melodrama in one capacity or another since 2011.
The show’s continual appeal, Irving said, is tied to tradition. “It’s a tradition going on for nearly 100 years,” he said. “People have been attending it for generations. The melodrama gives us a chance to laugh at ourselves.”
That it does. The Santa Fe Playhouse, once known as the Santa Fe Community Theater, has been in operation for a century or so. Its first reported melodrama was 1919’s
The Witches of Nambe, about which very little is known today. For decades, the theater’s artists would perform a wellknown melodrama until, sometime in the 1960s, they began creating their own works spoofing current events — always setting the stories back a century.
For example, this year’s melodrama takes place in 1918, when New Mexico was celebrating its sixth year of statehood. The East Coast bad guys come into town to open a Cheeks-Fil-A, introducing locals to fast-food chicken and fast-moving chicks. They also want to set up roulette tables in a downtown cathedral and mess around with the Fiesta celebration. And being villains, they of course want to get away with as much money as they can, so finding a way to dupe city officials into emptying the coffers (especially because the city does such a bad job of keeping track of its money) becomes part of their plan.
Along the way, the 14-member ensemble finds time to break into song and dance, performing parody knockoffs of well-known show tunes, some culled from Disney movie musicals. A talking horse, no doubt a distant relative of the late Mr. Ed, is a main character, and the supporting players include a fake dog, a mechanical man and a mime artist known as Mia Wulf.
Cliff Russell, an 83-year-old who has appeared in 17 Fiesta melodramas to date, plays Mr. Salazar, a chef who is somewhat befuddled by the new fast-food joint’s combination of poultry and pulchritude.
He said the appeal of these annual send-ups is simple. “People like the fact that they recognize the characters in the show because they live in this town,” he said. “And it’s just fun.”