The Capeman. - New York, NY - theater reviews

Progressive, The, June, 1998 by Margaret Spillane

I saw The Capeman twice, and both times I kept swiveling my head in search of what journalists had reported: fidgeting, dissatisfied audience members sitting on their hands. But all I could see was people riveted or rocking, sometimes weeping, usually transfixed. At the curtain calls, people yelled and whooped and stomped out their pleasure as if they were cheering the victorious home team. And, in a way, they were: Capeman's extravagant display of Puerto Rico's vast musical wealth--bombas, plenas, aguinaldos, jazz, mambos, salsa--was lavished on an audience that contained more Latin faces than I've ever seen in any Broadway house. (On some nights during the fifty-eight-performance run, Latinos made up 90 percent of Capeman's audience.) Some of the lyrics sung from that stage related directly to the experience of audience members with roots in Ponce or Mayaguez or Humacao. "I was born in Puerto Rico. ... We came here wearing summer clothes in winter."

The forty-member, mostly Latino, cast was astonishing, almost liturgical in their style of speech and gesture, owing much of their choreography and attitude to religious pageants, traditional dance, and Caribbean narrative style. The remarkable Ruben Blades, playing the older Salvador, embodied the vigilance of someone who had spent many years in prison--someone constantly monitoring the movements of those around him, but also his own actions, thoughts, and impulses.

"Correctional facility," he sings, "they call this place/But look around and you will see/The politics of race."

Marc Anthony captured the emotional volatility of the young Sal, and the nimbleness to which Sal aspires as he walks the fraying tightrope of his neighborhood. And yet he claims guilt as well as victimhood: "The evil we do can't be blamed upon our destiny."

Ednita Nazario as Esmeralda, no one-dimensional martyr-mom, beautifully does the job that the poor must do to keep their sanity: name and articulate the conditions of their collective experience. In her letters to the imprisoned Sal, she weaves together the threads of the history they've lived, helping her son connect their footprints on the beach at El Malecon with the tenements "tall as our mountains," so he is able at last to sort out how "numb and battered" he'd been by the streets, and by his father and stepfather.

For weeks before The Capeman closed, I read the New York journalists' screeds disguised as reviews or analyses--almost all of them vindictive, ad hominem attacks on Paul Simon. But why?

The critics' saturation bombing after opening night had been preceded by months of sporadic bullet sprays. Showbiz and gossip columns dropped hints about a spendthrift, megalomaniac Simon micromanaging everything and firing people left and right. The words "arrogance" and "control freak" cropped up in article after article, along with frets about whether the subject matter was "appropriate" to a musical--a form that has accommodated stories ranging from the cannibalism of Sweeney Todd to the bloodletting dictatorship of Evita.