Off-pitch kitsch and four Joses don’t add up to whole night’s fun
Just when you thought you’d forgotten all about the Macarena, that unholy marriage of song and dance that spread like a virus through American sporting events and office parties in the mid-’90s, along comes O’Connell and Company to dig up old cultural skeletons.
The Latin-tinged gyration makes an early appearance in the extended festival of off-pitch kitsch that is O’Connell’s production of “4 Guys Named Jose and Una Mujer Named Maria.” The show opened Friday night in the company’s new theater in the Administration Building of Erie Community College North Campus in Amherst.
Both the venue and the show will transport you back to a time you may not be willing to revisit. As for the theater, which on opening night was bone-chillingly cold because of a heating malfunction, it is a convincing facsimile of your high school auditorium. Which, sad to say, is perfectly appropriate to the variety-show quality of the production itself.
The musical, a kind of drunken hopscotch tour through the highs and lows of Latino music, has one of those critique-proof premises — this show is supposed to be cheesy and unpolished! — that appeal to companies of limited resources. It features, as the script itself helpfully spells out, “Four Latino guys, snowbound in the heartland of America with only their songs to keep them warm.”
Company founder Mary Kate O’Connell assured audiences at intermission that the frigid temperature was not an attempt at environmental theater. “We’re not that smart,” she joked.
Said snowbound group is performing its unpolished act at a VFW hall in Omaha, Neb. But their fifth and most important star, that mujer named Maria, is nowhere to be found. Fortunately for Jose, Jose, Jose and Jose, Maria’s roommate (Anyone want to guess what her name is?) offers up her services, and one by one the titular quartet falls for her wily and elusive charms. Does it make any kind of sense? Not a whit.
But it is marinated in a certain kind of nostalgia meant to appeal just as much to Latinos as it does to Americans who remember with fondness the songs of Desi Arnaz, Ritchie Valens, even Ricky Martin, Enrique Iglesias and Selena. The show also honors obscure Mexican composers like Pablo Beltran Ruiz or Consuelo Velasquez, whose songs have been popularized — and Americanized — by countless interpreters.
The show’s weak premise and wheeze of a plot is unassisted by its cast, which tries its level best with the help of director Carlos Renaldo Alvarez Jones to deliver the show’s often challenging music with una poca de gracia. But the material far too often overwhelms this cast and the show suffers greatly because of it. The Joses are played by Rolando Gomez, Rafael Perez, Pedro Rodriguez and Josean Torres.
That’s not to say that “4 Guys” is entirely devoid of appeal. To the contrary, its cast has no shortage of charm and good comic timing to make up for its vocal and physical limitations. That’s especially true when it comes to Victoria Perez (Maria), a gifted actress who rescues the show from the total flop it might have been.
Theater Review
“4 Guys Named Jose and Una Mujer Named Maria”
★½
Musical comedy presented by O’Connell & Co. through Nov. 1 in Erie Community College North Campus, Amherst. For information, call 848-0800 or visit www.oconnellandcompany.com.
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