Journalist: How did the idea come about?
Paul Gorler: I did not want to pay homage but to find four characters from the golden Argentine cinema. I was always concerned about working on memory and after the death of an artist, a trigger appeared to think about eternity. The only ones who keep the figures alive are the spectators, and it depends on the magnitude of the artist whether the flame goes out or remains lit. With the death of Beatriz Bonnet, she was a great figure and she died
alone, with hardly anyone at her funeral, I wondered what happened that she was so alone. I wanted to think about who builds the figure of the artist.
Q.: And who does it? Why those four and not others?
PG: I leave that to the viewer, I like to think that each town has the diva it deserves. I did a review of Argentine cinema in its golden age and Tita, Zullly, Libertad came to me and I wanted a fourth. And there Fanny appeared to confront and show that the crack is not something of recent years. How Fanny and Libertad suffered consequences for being on one side or the other.
Q.: Are there divas like these today?
PG: No. They were supreme, stars of a time when the big screen ruled everything. The new film with Zully Moreno, who was a kind of Greta Garbo, was expected. It was expected that what Tita or Lamarque would launch, or Navarro, would be smash hits. If I have to say divas today they are Mirtha, Susana, Moria, Nacha. And they paint us as a people.
Q.: What attracted you to your stories?
PG: Libertad wanted to be a figure since she was little and she made her way by dint of charisma and drive. They say that, like Tita, they were brave and competitive. Tita had an ugly and unfortunate childhood, she had her lucky break thanks to her work and charisma, that made her a star. Tita was the same on the street when she went to buy vegetables that on the screen, Zully or Libertad were not seen in everyday life. Zully, as soon as he discovered the first little wrinkle in her, decided to leave. Fanny was a great theater figure who jumped to the movies and her devotion and her friendship with Eva Perón, in addition to her courtship with Juan Duarte, overshadowed her later. She dedicated herself to the military and when Eva died, Peronism itself closed the door on her. After the Liberating Revolution she was buried and Duarte’s head was shown to her on a tray. They are very strong stories and it seemed attractive to me to provoke that meeting in a kind of limbo where they talk a little about their lives but also about who forged them and what it means to be a star.
Q.: Would they fit into the current paradigm?
PG: We work with the author, Luis Longhi, on the theme of sorority. These women are empowered in that talk by understanding what happened to them and is happening. Lamarque brings her attempted suicide, she jumped out of the apartment where she lived and did not die by a miracle because she was caught by an awning. She threw herself at her because her husband beat her. Fanny was terribly mistreated by men, Tita must have prostituted herself. The one who had a happier life was Zully, she wanted to be a figure, she achieved it quickly due to her enormous beauty, she married for love, not for convenience, with the great film director Luis César Amadori, she had a family life, and when she didn’t she endured losing her youth, she retired from acting and was a Maipo businesswoman. During the Liberator she went into exile in Spain. However, we do not make a biography but the axis is the conversation and the relationship.
Q.: What audience comes to see this musical at Cultural San Martín?
GP: Many young people come and the one they know best is Tita because she is the most popular. Along with the playbill I wanted to give a brief biography of the four to add something more, not because she can’t see herself without knowing about them. And the answer of how a diva is built is the verdict given by the public.
Source: Ambito
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