by Antonio Mejías-Rentas
Los Cuates de Sinalosa
PRIMETIME NARCOCORRIDO: Next week’s episode of a cable TV drama opens with a Mexican ballad about its protagonist, a U.S. drug dealer.
The Spanish-language narcocorrido is performed by Los Cuates de Sinaloa, a nonteño act from Southern California, in the opening sequence of Breaking Bad on AMC. The award-winning drama revolves around a New Mexico chemistry teacher stricken with an incurable cancer who, in an effort to provide for his family, starts making and selling methamphetamine. In its second season, the show is including Mexico’s bloody drug war into its storyline.
A narcorrido—an increasingly popular type of corrido that focuses on and sometimes glorifies Mexico’s drug culture—was sought after by show creator Vince Gilligan. He commissioned it from Pepe Garza, one of Los Angeles’s most influential radio programmers who also composes for top banda and norteño acts.
The song, titled Negro y azul, refers to the character played by Bryan Cranston as “a dead man who doesn’t know it.” It is included in Los Cuates de Sinaloa’s next album, due in May.
Last year, Cranston won a best actor Emmy award for his performance on Breaking Bad, which just this month won the Peabody Award, a prize given by the University of Georgia for excellence in radio and television broadcasting. The narcocorrido episode airs April 19 at 10 p.m.
STAGE ‘ENCUENTRO’: Some of Southern California’s top Latino theater presenters are set to come together for a historic meeting this week.
The event, titled Encuentro 2009, is being organized by the Latino Arts Network and supported in part by the California Arts Council. The ail-day event at Los Angeles’ Plaza de la Raza, will bring together theater artists, organizations and patrons of the arts to exchange ideas, build relationships and, according to organizers, raise the profile of the city’s Latino cabletheater scene.
Scheduled participants include Michael John Garcés, artistic director of Cornerstone Theatre Company, Diane Rodriguez, associate producer/director of new play production of Center Theatre Group, Jesús A. Reyes, artistic director of East L.A. Rep. and Luis Alfaro, an award-winning poet and playwright.
The Los Angeles event is scheduled for April 19, 8:00 a.m. 7:30 p.m.
In related theater news, this week’s 50th anniversary edition of the Festival de Teatro de Puerto Rico will revive some of the most emblematic works by the island’s top playwrights.
The program for the festival, taking place April 16-24 in various San Juan theaters, includes René Marques’ La carreta, Manuel Méndez Ballester’s Bienvenido Don Goyito and Francisco Arrivi’s Vegigantes.
ONE LINERS: Rolando Villazón, in the midst of a comeback, was forced to cancel all his scheduled performances in L’Elisir d’Amore at New York’s Metropollitan Opera this season, because of what the company said was “acute laryugitis”; last year the Mexican tenor took a six-month hiatus that led to speculation that he was suffering from vocal troubles… Alicia Alonso, the 88-year-old director of the Ballet Nacional
de Cuba, has staged a new ballet inspired by a poem by Federico García Lorca with music by a friend of the Spanish poet, Angel Barrios; Preciosa y el aire will premiere this spring in Havana… and Argentinean folk singer Suma Paz died April 7 in Buenos Aires, at 70, of heart failure; she was the top interpreter of her country’s best-known folk composer, Atahualpa Yupanqui. Hispanic Link.
