Stephanie Trudeau’s Chavela Vargas has already been a cabaret set, a Bistro Award winner and a two-time Edinburgh Fringe entry. Becoming Chavela, the staged version she wrote and performs, gets three performances at Teatro LATEA in October.
The run is Friday, October 23 at 7pm, Saturday, October 24 at 7pm and Sunday, October 25 at 4pm, at Teatro LATEA, 107 Suffolk Street on the Lower East Side. The show lasts 90 minutes and is billed by its producers as the first ranchera musical.
Stephanie Trudeau wrote it and plays both Vargas and herself. Leonard Peters directs. Ana Leon Bella choreographs and appears as Frida and Macorina, and Sean Kenin Elias-Reyes plays Diego, Pedro and Jose Alfredo.
Vargas is the reason any of it exists. A Costa Rican immigrant to Mexico, she sang ranchera — the country music that was supposed to belong to men — and became one of the country’s great voices. She drank, vanished from the stage for years, and came back. Pedro Almodóvar, who put her records into his films, called her “a volcano”. The show works through her songs of lust and longing and through the company she kept: Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, Elizabeth Taylor, Almodóvar himself. It is set in mid-century Mexico City, when that city was the center of Latin American culture.
The other half of the piece is Trudeau’s own. It opens on her family — a Puerto Rican mother who came to New York as a small girl, a Bronx childhood of Spanish, Puerto Rican food and Latin music — and follows that music to Vargas. “I’m Puerto Rican, but I feel this Mexican singer in my bones,” Trudeau says.
The score sets ranchera standards beside Caribbean songs and Trudeau’s own writing, with dance and multimedia, and the text moves between English and Spanish. Gender, gay rights, immigration and Mexican culture all come into it without the evening turning into a lecture.
It has taken a while to reach this shape. The cabaret version won the 2020 NYC Bistro Award for Outstanding Tribute Performance; since then the piece has played the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in 2022 and 2023, New York, Los Angeles and Florida, and a Spanish-language performance in Guadalajara. Trudeau has been acting and singing for more than 40 years in New York cabaret, Off-Broadway and regional theater, is a Fulbright Scholar, and edited The Dylan Tapes: Friends, Lovers and Players Talkin’ Early Bob Dylan. Peters has directed more than 50 productions, among them work at Playwrights Horizons, The WPA Theatre, La MaMa, Circle Repertory Company, the Joyce Theater and Lincoln Center.
After Teatro LATEA the show goes to the Bronx Music Hall on March 6, and then to Lima, Peru on April 9, 10, 11, 16, 17 and 18.
Tickets are $25 to $35, on sale through the Teatro LATEA listing and by phone on 212-529-1948. The box office sells in person from 9am to 5pm Monday to Friday and from 10am to 3pm on Saturday.
