CANTA Y NO LLORES
An original, bilingual celebration of the Day of the Dead
Created by Martín Milagro
Directed by Olga Sanchez

Every fall, the dead are commemorated in a lively show of dance, music and theatre in Portland’s longest-running Day of the Dead celebration. This year, los muertos return singing old-time tunes that harken back to another era when times were tough and tradition was one of the few things folks could call their own. In the middle of the Great Depression at a camp near where WPA workers are constructing Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, five strangers arrive from different parts of the country in search of work and a place to call home. Even as they must shed one way of life for another, and though they have lost everything they hold dear, optimism lives on. Funny and irreverent, Canta y no llores (Sing and Don’t Cry) reminds us all that the only thing to fear — in life or death — is fear itself.

Patron Comment 11/13/09
Hola!
Is is Friday morning. Despite mechanical difficulties during the trip over from Bend, I made it to the theater in time for last night's show. It was wonderful!!! Several scenes brought me close to tears and I continue feeling their power in my heart even now.
The story is fresh, compelling and beautifully crafted. The performances all were excellent, and brought many endearing moments. For personal reasons, I was especially moved by the arresting convergence of spirituality and imagination, as Canta y No Llores provides such simple, powerful, convincing images of both the yearning for our lost loved ones, and the realization that they are still right here with us.
Thank you so much!
As my mechanical challenges persist, I am not certain whether I am going to continue on to Seattle, as originally planned, head back to Bend, or hunker in Portland for another night. If I am here, I may just swing by El Teatro Milagro again tonight!
In any case, I look forward to future productions, and to seeing if this wonderful Dia de Los Muertos program evolves into a road show.
Que tengan muchos buenos dias!
jeffrey

Patron comment 11/5/09
Tim,
Thank you so much!!!  I will forward this to her & I am sure she would love to catch a different performance.
I introduced a whole new group of people to your theatre & everyone had a wonderful time!  Each year I love the dia de los muertos performances & this year was no exception!  After the performance we all met at my home and had a potluck, where everyone brought a favorite dish of a loved one who had passed.  All in all, it was a magical performance.
Thank you Tim, I am sure you will be hearing from Amy!
Nicola

Review: "Canta y No Llores (Sing and Don't Cry)" sends message of hope in marking Day of the Dead celebration
By Richard Wattenberg, special to The Oregonian
November 01, 2009, 6:00PM

Autumn at Portland's Miracle Theater means the annual celebration of the Day of the Dead. The 2009 version may differ from the broadly acrobatic fun of recent years, but the warm-hearted "Canta y No Llores (Sing and Don't Cry)" makes for feel-good entertainment. Put together by the company under the auspices of director Olga Sanchez, this spirited play is often touching but never slips into maudlin sentimentality. It is, in fact, a cheerfully upbeat salute to the importance of song, dance and faith during trying times.

As a comment on our own economic woes, "Canta y No Llores" is set during the Great Depression. The play centers on Raúl (Enrique E. Andrade) and his wife Consuelo (Verónika Nuñez), who have fled California to a rough Oregon forest abode to escape the forced repatriation or deportation that befell many Depression-era Mexican and Mexican-American agricultural laborers whose jobs were sought by white Americans coming West from the midwest dust bowl.

Despite the narrow-minded prejudice they experience, the generous Raúl and Consuelo take in three homeless vagrants: the reserved Eduardo (Carlosalexis Cruz), an itinerant Puerto Rican carpenter; the wide-eyed teenage Mary (Melanie Meijer), a "train orphan" who enthusiastically dreams of Hollywood stardom; and the heartbroken Miguel (Osvaldo "Ozzie" Gonzalez),  a Texas goat-herder who roams the West lamenting his young wife's death. The five form a tight community bound by music and dance.

Wandering among these living characters but unseen by them are the returning dead: Raúl and Consuela's good old friends Felicia and Severino (Rosa Floyd and Sherman Floyd), Miguel's wife, Dorotea, (Nicole Virginia Accuardi), and Mary's idol, the deceased actress Mae Catrina (Rebecca Frost Mayer). 

These spirits bring a touch of good humor to offset the emotional and economic losses suffered by the living. The playful give-and-take of the Floyds and Mayer's Mae-West-like wry humor nicely counterpoint some of the piece's more sorrowful moments.

Also intriguingly balanced are the various musical numbers drawn from Mexican folkloric tradition, on the one hand, and the popular 1930s musical repertoire on the other. Sad Mexican folk songs alternate with popular Depression-era tunes like "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime?" and "Life is Just a Bowl of Cherries." A mesmerizing Vera Cruz "Brujas" folk dance performed by the women in broad skirts and with candles perched on their heads contrasts well with the company's entertaining and tautly choreographed parody of a Busby Berkeley rendition of "We're in the Money."

Though an occasional tentativeness or physical awkwardness is noticeable among the company members, the performers give us vividly distinguished characters who are refreshing in the simple clarity with which they are drawn

As diverse as these various characters are and as divergent as the musical and dance traditions that the production explores, the play holds together surprisingly well. In this, one can see Sanchez's skilled directorial hand.

Sanchez's artful manner of shaping the whole is most apparent with the celebratory climax. At play's end, when the living characters build an altar to celebrate the Day of the Dead, the worlds of the living and the dead merge. For this final scene representing a victory over all hardship, even death, Sanchez orchestrates movement, sound and light into a stirring crescendo -- one that sends audience members home with smiles on their faces and hope in their hearts.

Canta y no llores
Ben Waterhouse, Willamette Week
November 4, 2009

This year, Miracle Theatre’s annual Day of the Dead show ditches the symbolic conceits of the past three years in favor of a more straightforward narrative: migrant laborers living in the woods of Mount Hood in the midst of the Great Depression, hoping to find work on the construction of Timberline Lodge. They take in a Puerto Rican carpenter, a 15-year-old runaway with Hollywood dreams and a heartbroken goatherd, and eventually they all celebrate el Dia de los Muertos. The story is sappy, little more than a framework for song and dance; but it’s good song and dance, a blend of ’30s pop and Mexican and American folk tunes with similarly internationalist choreography. Osvaldo Gonzalez’s tearjerker rendition of “Volver, Volver” and Rosa Floyd’s performance of “La Bruja” are the highlights, but the whole shebang’s a lot of fun.

Miracle Theater gets collaborative for Dia de los Muertos
By Marty Hughley, The Oregonian
October 30, 2009

The spirit of Hollywood movie star Mae Catrina (played by Rebecca Frost Mayer) takes center stage in a song-and-dance dream sequence in Miracle Theatre’s “Canta y no Llores” (Sing and Don’t Cry).”

For its annual celebration of the Day of the Dead, Portland's Miracle Theater is presenting, "Canta y No Llores (Sing and Don't Cry)," a new play by Martin Milagro. It's an interesting project, in part for the way the show weaves together stories of folks from various backgrounds banding together to scrape through hard times, offering relevant bits of social history, poignant emotional moments, and songs both sad and celebratory. And interesting, too, in that there's actually no one named Martin Milagro involved.

That credit is a pen name used for what's really been a collaborative project, assembled from ideas brought in by director Olga Sanchez and other Miracle staffers, then shaped and refined through rehearsals with the help of its nine-person cast.

"Canta y No Llores" marks a departure from the way the company has approached the holiday in recent years, when it presented shows based on "la carpa," a style of entertainment that drew on elements of vaudeville and circuses and was popular in Mexico and the Southwest U.S. through the first half of the 20th century.

"The past couple of years we'd gone in this almost acrobatic direction, and I found that I was missing some of the old classic Mexican songs that we'd usually sing for Dia de los Muertos," Sanchez said after a recent rehearsal. "So one of the first thoughts was to go back to a traditional vein."

With the chilling effect of the economic crash heavy in the air this spring, company executive director and co-founder José Eduardo González suggested creating a Depression-era story to draw parallels to current hardships. Sanchez recommended setting the story in Oregon, in honor of the state's sesquicentennial. Marketing director Tim Krause came up with the title, a snippet of the lyric from the classic Mexican song "Cielito Lindo."

Other story elements came out of trolling for songs, which ended up including several classics from both sides of the border, including American standards such as "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime" and "Life Is Just a Bowl of Cherries." Then there was historical research. Lynne Duddy of Portland Story Theater, for instance, told Sanchez about the Depression-era phenomenon of "train orphans," children whose parents could no longer afford to care for them and so sent them west by rail to find their way as laborers.

"What was happening in Oregon at the time, that was the trickiest part," Sanchez said. She found plenty of historical accounts of Latinos in the state during the 1920s and 1940s, she said. "But around the '30s it was like crickets. There was no information."

Sanchez and company extrapolated from what they could gather. They came up with a tale that centers on Consuelo and Raul, an immigrant couple that have fled north from California to avoid forced repatriation to Mexico, a policy that began after Dust Bowl immigration brought whites into an agricultural labor market previously open to Latinos. Living out of a makeshift cabin near Mount Hood, the couple take in other stragglers who come by: a Puerto Rican carpenter hoping to find work building Timberline Lodge; a white train orphan who dreams of being a Hollywood star in Busby Berkeley's escapist spectacles; and eventually a grief-stricken goatherd wandering the west after the death of his wife.

And of course there are the representations of the dead, who, in contrast to the sometimes care-worn living, float through the proceedings as, well, blithe spirits.

Through it all come lessons about community, tradition and the preciousness of loved ones, either in presence or in memory. The results are a charming tribute to the spirits of the departed -- and to the talents of Martin Milagro.

Miracle Theatre goes back to the Great Depression to connect with today
Julie Cortez, El Hispanic News Writer
October 29, 2009

If the Day of the Dead can celebrate death, why shouldn’t a Day of the Dead show celebrate our difficult economic times? With song and dance and Spanish and English, “Canta y No Llores,” the latest incarnation of Miracle Theatre’s annual Day of the Dead celebration, examines how we cope with various forms of loss and seeks out the tiny kernels of goodness that can accompany it.

The theme, story, and style for this year’s show sprang from a combination of Miracle Theatre’s increasing interest in making the Day of the Dead show more regional in focus, Executive Artistic Director José González’s request to explore the Great Depression, and Artistic Director Olga Sánchez’s desire to take a more traditional, stripped down song-and-dance approach to Day of the Dead.

The sum of that equation is “Canta y No Llores,” which is set in a camp near the construction site of Timberline Lodge in 1936. The play’s characters have come from as far as Texas, New York, and Puerto Rico in search of work.

Osvaldo “Ozzie” González, who plays Miguel in the show, can relate. Ozzie acted in high school and college as a hobby before deciding to pursue a career as an architect. When he moved here a little over a year ago from Los Angeles with his young family, his wife found work. He did not. Ozzie hit the lowest point of his emotional job search as he saw friend after friend laid off and realized it was going to be awhile before he found work as an architect.

“It had never occurred to me that this career could be so fragile,” he says. Ozzie has since embraced his roll as a stay-at-home dad, but being cast in “Canta y No Llores” has given him the chance to re-sharpen his acting and musical skills, as well as his social ones.

“Theater has always been a therapeutic thing for me,” Ozzie says. “I’m having a great time and it gets me out of the house.”

José says Miracle strives to be conscious of what going on in the world outside the theater, and recognize how the times we’re living in affect people’s lives. Last year’s Day of the Dead show, “La Carpa del Ausente,” touched upon the wars of today by telling the stories of Latino soldiers in World War II. “Canta y No Llores” similarly ties our current economic hardships to the even greater struggles of people living in the Great Depression.

“The thematic link became a sense of loss,” says Olga, who is directing the play. Loss of job, home, sense of our place in the world, and, of course, the loss of our loved ones.

“One of the ideas was, ‘What happens when we’ve lost everything that we’ve valued?’” José says. “What happens next?”

When money and jobs become scarce, the material things we once coveted suddenly seem a bit less important. We begin to simplify, to change our expectations. Death speeds up and makes whole that simplification.

When we die, all the stuff we’ve collected loses all meaning to us and it doesn’t matter if we had a big house or a fancy car in life, José says. “We’re all kind of the same once we pass away.”

Death equalizes the dead and unites the living. Day of the Dead, Olga says, is about dealing with death in a “communal way.” She adds, “we honor [death], celebrate it, poke fun at it.” She loves that the day “addresses death with liveliness, with life,” and with song and dance.

Hence “Canta y No Llores” Sing and Don’t Cry a chance to deal with loss of life, loss of funds, loss of job as a community, and as revelers.

October 30, 2009-November 15, 2009

Hispanic Heritage in Oregon
Oral and Written Histories of the Latino Experience
An experiential learning/service learning project in collaboration with Miracle Theatre presented by Spanish V honor students from Catlin Gabel School
http://inside.catlin.edu/site/hispanicsinoregon/

PRODUCTION SPONSOR

Los Porteños
Miracle's writers group will present original stories and poetry written for the Day of the Dead prior to the matinee on Sunday, Nov. 1, beginning at 12 pm. Free.

Post-play discussion
Talk about the dead with the director, cast and crew immediately follows the 2 p.m. matinee on Sunday, November 1, 2009.

Day of the Dead procession
Check out related activities on Alberta Street, including altar displays, a procession and art exhibits: www.pdxdayofthedead.org

CAST 
Nicole Virginia Accuardi … Dorotea la Difunta
Enrique E. Andrade … Raul
CarlosAlexis Cruz … Eduardo
Rosa Floyd … Felicia
Sherman Floyd … Severino
Rebecca Frost Mayer … Mae Catrina
Osvaldo “ozzie” Gonzalez … Miguel
Melanie Meijer … Mary
Verónika Nuñez … Consuelo

PRODUCTION STAFF
Olga Sanchez … Director
Hal Logan … Musical Director
Jeff Woods … Lighting Designer
Drew Foster … Scenic Designer
Darrin J. Pufall … Costume Designer
Alisha Flaumenbaum … Prop Master
Sherman Floyd … Folkloric Music Arranger
Rosa Floyd … Folkloric Choreographer
Lynne Duddy and Lawrence Howard of Portland Story Theatre … Script Consultants
Christina Lydy … Dramaturge
Stephen Pick … Stage Manager
Rebecca Lewis … Master Carpenter
Ruth Waddy … Wardrobe
Sylvia Malán and Sarah Hinds … House Managers
Analee Fuentes … Artcard Artist

“The world may be in constant transformation, but at times those shifts are felt more keenly, unsettling us and creating cracks in our foundation. We must grab hold of the most important things we have to sustain ourselves. But what are the most important things? This season Miracle looks at the biggest challenges we face in life — loss of home, loss of identity, loss of money, loss of life — and the strength of the human spirit to rise above all these losses. Told in vibrant acts of theatre, these tales of transformation create a purifying crucible in which the human essence, what is truly most important, is revealed and celebr ated!"--Olga Sanchez, Artistic Director of the Miracle MainStage and Bellas Artes.

Miracle MainStage presents both adult and family oriented artistic productions in English, commissioned from the ranks of the company's resident playwrights, as well as plays by accomplished and emerging Hispanic writers from the USA and abroad. The productions are performed in the El Centro Milagro's intimate theatre in inner southeast Portland . Performances have ranged most recently from the critically acclaimed 2004 production of Lorca in a Green Dress - a play that explores the power of poetry to challenge oppression by Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Nilo Cruz -to Guillermo Reyes' outrageous comedy Deporting the Divas, winner of three 1999 Drammy Critic's Awards.