Recap: Good Morning, From Here, January 04 – 10
Monday
Does everybody have a nice big chunk of Rosca, Three Kings bread, with coffee this Epiphany morning? (Don’t break a tooth on baby Jesus.) I read that Mexico City residents will spend 4 billion pesos on gifts for their kids today; Christmas just keeps on giving.
The Palm has premiered a new show called Living Legends, which made its debut last Friday. The show features the incredibly talented Guadalajara native Mariana Vigueras Restelli, who brings a remarkable voice to the stage. This particular production pays homage to some of the most celebrated and, at times, the most challenging voices in music history, including Julie Andrews, Streisand, Cher, Whitney Houston, and more. Mariana’s voice sails up and over the highest notes with her extraordinary upper range acing Celine Dion. And her voice is powerful, unlike many sopranos. Mariana is charming and warm and, after some of the enormous stages she has sung upon – including Teatro Degollado, it was endearing to see her exhibit a touch of nervousness during her first show at The Palm. Cabaret is a completely different environment, where the audience is right there, just a few feet away, and such intimacy can be both thrilling and intimidating.
Brent Barrett and Bernie Blanks, a dynamic duo onstage, celebrate their life together in Islands in the Stream, currently at the Casa Karma Red Room. I will have more on this lovely show in a separate article soon.
The First Saturday of every month means a joyful fiesta with live music, freshly-made tacos, and an eclectic mix of tourists and ex-pat art lovers who come together to celebrate at Arte Vallarta Museo. Run and mark February 01 on your calendar for the next one.
I had the pleasure of reuniting with Brian de Lorenzo and John Amodeo who are visiting from Boston; we had not seen one another since 2019, so we had lots to talk about over coffee at Dee’s by the pier in Zona Romantica. John writes reviews for various magazines on the East Coast, including NiteLitfeExchange, so we had several shows to discuss that are happening in Vallarta while they are in town.
Tune in tomorrow morning to learn about a new dance class happening every Sunday in Centro, dinner with dear friends on the beach at Langostinos and the triumphant return of Hedwig and the Angry Inch at The Palm Cabaret. Bring coffee and leftover Rosca From Here.
Tuesday
My multi-talented dear friend Deborah Darr, painter, ex-Broadway dancer, singer, and snowbird for three months every year, is also a certified N.I.A. teacher. Her classes are held at the International Friendship Club across from the Municipal Market every Sunday at noon. The fee, 120 pesos, is a donation to the IFC. The workout is gentle, rhythmic, and open to everybody at any fitness level; it is very much engineered around doing what your body can do with relative ease, with no physical or mental pressure to ‘follow the routine.’ I am still an old gym rat and have eschewed ‘aerobics’ in any way, shape, or form until I took one of Deb’s classes three years ago at Casa Karma. You know where I will be every Sunday at noon until the end of March! Join us!
Dinner at Langostinos on the beach was a wonderful surprise. The vegetarian Bolognese spaghetti was one of the finest pasta dishes I have ever had! My dinner companions, Jan Dorland and Rob Burton, were as delicious as the food, and my darling Bogie received Jan’s leftover filet mignon with delight. We slow-walked down the Malecon, partly from the overdose of food but mainly from the crowds of people, south toward the Palm Cabaret and the season premiere of Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
The high-voltage energy was cracking the air outside the doors of the theater as the sold-out crowd pressed to get in.
The band trickled onto the stage, nonchalantly tuning up; costar Yoalli Guerrero, as Yitzak, untangling long microphone cords, already in character, bustling (and bristling) his/her way around the stage like a perfect gofer.
Executive Producer Jack Aaronson sat calmly in the front row, smiling, and said to me with awe, “Ohh, the talent on this stage!” I could not have agreed more.
Then, Jordon Carnegie, as Hedwig, stormed onto the stage and held everybody’s attention for the next hour and a half without having time to even breathe between sentences or songs.
The breakneck speed of Hedwig as a production requires at least three viewings, I think. I have seen two season openers and already cannot wait to see it again. There are German-accented, lightning-fast references to the Second World War. I want more time to study the intricacies of Hedwig’s denim jacket and her eye makeup. There are a thousand threads in this brilliant production that touch every human emotion, often with a sledgehammer, sometimes with unbearable tenderness, as Hedwig spits out her life story. She is unwittingly funny, outrageously and awkwardly beautiful, broken, wounded, bitter, lonely, and like every one of us, perfect, exactly as is, From Here.
Wednesday
It rained for about a minute this morning around 6:15; I hope that’s not a preview for the rest of the day. Do you have your tickets for Blooming Together, the annual Vallarta Garden Club Gala? It’s three weeks tomorrow, January 23rd, at Oscar’s, and after our last board meeting on Monday, it is shaping up to be the best one yet! In the past, we have chosen a particular color scheme: white, pink, and last year’s red was great fun. This year, we decided on blooms, so gentlemen, find your brightest Hawaiian shirt to augment your tan and ladies, the garden is yours.
The following is reprinted from NLE. Be sure to catch Brent and Bernie’s last show tomorrow at Act2PV:
“The idea to write a show about their life together sprang up during COVID, locked down in Nevada watching DVDs and reruns of I Love Lucy and other TV shows that Brent Barrett and Bernie Blanks watched growing up decades ago. Islands in the Stream opened in Las Vegas for four shows, was amended somewhat for Palm Springs, and altered again for its debut last night in Puerto Vallarta.
Musical Director Mark Hartman is back for the season (you can find him holding court at Ovations Piano Bar at Act2PV every Saturday at 9 pm), playing crisply and flawlessly as always.
Brent and husband Bernie fittingly wore their white, not-quite-matching wedding ‘dresses’ for the first half of the show. After the backstory of how they met – during a production of Camelot, how their lives were with Bernie living and working in Germany and Brent in the US, Brent told us in song how he proposed. After 14 years of living together and in front of the 80 people at their place for brunch (about the same number as last night in the Casa Karma Red Room), Brent got down on one knee, and a surprised and delighted Bernie wept and accepted. It was a lovely and poignant recreation that moved the entire audience.
Islands in the Stream is as joyful and fresh as the New Year; it overflows with gentle respect and caring – when two people are as in love as these two are after two decades, the entire dynamic around them changes. We were changed and charged positively by the energy of their love that makes everything possible.”
Far away from the busy streets in Zona Romantica, another musical opening took place last night at Rancho Santiago in Paso Guayabo, just upriver from Paso Ancho. Tribute Tuesday, brought to you again by Kurt Sinner and Hollis Harris of El Rio BBQ fame and Merv Buchanan of Trend Records, Canada, the late, great, Jimmy Buffett presented his greatest hits via Jimmy Parrish. A lot of Buffett fans and Parrotheads showed up to sing along and dance to the distinct Buffett style that tribute artist Parrish has studied and faithfully performed for decades. Even a resident Paso Guayabo horse and cowboy two-stepped to the music at the end of the show. It was a joyous reunion of El Rio BBQ fans, staff, and followers of great music in general. El Rio BBQ’s distinctive black tees dotted the crowd, who devoured the food prepared by chef Hollis; it has been some time since those tasty fabled ribs have been consumed with joy. Sandra Bradley, columnist for Vallarta Mirror, dear friend, and my date for the evening raved about the fish tacos between mouthfuls!
Next week, catch Tribute Tuesday at Rancho Santiago, starring the unforgettable Jeff Scott as Elton John, who is one of the best tribute artists in the world. Just ask Paramount Pictures From Here.
Thursday
The highly-anticipated season opener of Airotic at Coco Cabaret finally materialized last night. Every new, plushly upholstered club chair was filled. This show, originally from the men’s club Industry that lifted its ban on women for Airotic’s run for the past two seasons, has found a new home at Coco Cabaret. The expansive, six-meter-high stage held bodies hanging from sheer silk, hula hoops, rope, and one another – ballet in the air, performing all kinds of seemingly bone-less maneuvers with extraordinary strength and precision.
Airotic is composed of three men from Spain, Italy, and Australia and one woman from Ukraine, who danced, flew, and wound themselves around one another in a series of vignettes that included aerials, fistfuls of confetti, semi-transparent stretchy fabric, bathwater, and body paint. The lighting for this production is superb, turning two naked bodies into fluorescent-yellow paint mobile art pieces. How they cleaned up in mere minutes is a mystery!
If you love Cirque du Soleil-type aerials, beautiful, muscular bodies, visually stunning costumes that appear briefly before being discarded, agile, sensuous choreography – in the air and on the stage – then you must see Airotic Soiree. It’s why Coco Cabaret was built and why last night was standing-room-only From Here.
Friday
For the first time in years, I heard from an old client and friend from Vallarta Tribune days, Kassiano Smith, a Jamaican-born, internationally famous singer, entrepreneur, environmentalist, healer, and dad. He wanted me to know about the launch of his daughter’s new storefront. I first met Kass’s daughter, Tashara, about 10 years ago when she participated in Act2PV’s Voice of Vallarta; when those weeks of competition were over, we lost touch until yesterday.
The often painfully shy teenage girl is gone and replaced by a lovely, fit, confident businesswoman who is completely bilingual and, more importantly, bicultural. A hobby to augment her income while studying foreign relations at university kept calling her back.
Two years of hard work and experimentation, building her own production center adjacent to her parent’s home in El Nogalito where Tash grew up in the jungle, have paid off, and she is now ready to introduce her online business to brick-and-mortar and the public.
Tash presents her soap and candle-making business Usawa (Swahili for Balance; her dad was just in Kenya). Tash uses environmentally-friendly organic products ONLY and grows all the roses, herbs, spices, etc. that she needs in the surrounding hills on the family farm. Her mom helps, as Tash says wryly, “I’m very good at dehydrating the stems and flowers, not so much with the watering beforehand!”
Usawa’s production center smells divinely spicy and pungent with the mixture of pure essential oils and loaves of soap, curing for at least 30 days, slowly integrating fragrance, glycerin, and natural colors, becoming hard and long-lasting. Tash has developed shower bombs – the big crystals release fragrance into the steam – great for those of us who don’t have a bathtub. Her line also includes bath salts, hair care products, and lip balms, and candles, of course, in two sizes.
The packaging is earthy, cardboard and brown paper, always putting Mother Nature before commerce.
Usawa opens at Los Mercados, Aquiles Serdan 265, Local C, in the Zona Romantica, on Friday, January 17, at 4 pm. You will be able to sample ‘Candle Drinks’ made with the same ingredients as Tash’s candles. If they taste only half as good as they smell, they will be delicious! Another very cool idea – you will be able to cut off a skinny piece of soap to try and buy by weight, so much better than investing a bunch of money and finding out you are not that fond of the fragrance.
Usawa is innovative marketing, good for the environment, great for your body, and all-natural by Tash. I will see you at Los Mercados, one week today for the Grand Opening of Usawa, From Here.
