Poster Flap Doesn't Derail GALA 'Coca-Cola'

GALA Hispanic Theatre's production of "The True History of Coca-Cola in Mexico" was nearly derailed by a controversial poster before the comedy about globalization ever opened.

The fringey satire by Patrick Scott and Aldo Velasco -- which is performed in English and runs tomorrow through April 26 -- skewers the effects of American capitalism on traditional Mexican culture. GALA hired an artist to design the poster: It pictured a Coke bottle framed as if it were the Virgin of Guadalupe.

Some religious groups in the theater's Columbia Heights neighborhood took offense, and e-mails of objection began arriving. Artistic Director Hugo Medrano decided the better part of valor was to get a new poster. The new one features a Coke bottle, too, but it is overlaid only with the play's title. Under the bottle is a torso, buckling under the weight of Coca-Cola.

Medrano sent out a letter of apology and says the kerfuffle is over.

"We didn't want to create friction with our community," he says. The original poster was meant to "translate what the play says about the popular culture [of Mexico] being in danger of being destroyed by international corporations," Medrano says. "So we found another image."

Director José Carrasquillo says he wanted to keep the original Virgin of Guadalupe poster, but that he understands why GALA decided not to. "I have to pick my battles, and my battle is: I have to do a good show -- and that's the one I'm fighting," he says. And comedy, he notes, "is hard."

Scott and Velasco wrote "Coca-Cola in Mexico" while at the University of Washington in Seattle. It premiered in 1995 at Minneapolis's Mixed Blood Theatre Company. In the play, two young actors named Aldo and Pat (like the playwrights), Americans who have Latino roots, travel to Mexico to do research among the poor -- for a theater piece about the steamrolling of Mexican culture by U.S. commercialism. Jaime Robert Carrillo and Daniel Eichner will play the pair at GALA; each actor takes on 15 or so roles, doing quick changes, "Greater Tuna"-style.

The playwrights were "politically active and critical of United States policy" when they wrote it, says Velasco, who is now an independent filmmaker in Los Angeles. (Co-author Scott teaches school, writes and acts in Seattle.) But they also wanted the play to be "a criticism of ourselves -- the easy, facile liberalism that people are prone to."

The characters, he says, were written as "sort of cartoon versions of ourselves."

'Show Boat' Returns

Signature Theatre's 20th-anniversary season will include a new production next November of "Show Boat," the 1927 Jerome Kern/Oscar Hammerstein II classic, with fresh orchestrations by Broadway's Jonathan Tunick for an intimate staging by Signature's Eric Schaeffer.

"It was all about the 20th anniversary . . . just doing the whole gamut of musical theater," says Schaeffer, the artistic director. "Wouldn't it be interesting to do one of the ones that started it all, which was 'Show Boat'?"

In February, Schaeffer will celebrate Signature's 20th in another way, directing Stephen Sondheim's "Sweeney Todd" for the third time. (He did it in 1991 and 1999.)

The world premiere of "Sycamore Trees," an autobiographical musical by high-profile music-theater composer Ricky Ian Gordon ("My Life With Albertine"), will end the new season. It was commissioned as part of Signature's American Musical Voices Project. Tina Landau of Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company will direct. (For the full Signature season, see the accompanying list.)

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Howard University will hold a memorial service Monday from 3 to 5 p.m. at Rankin Chapel on campus, in honor of Henriette "Henri" Edmonds. As a professor and department head, she was a pillar of Howard's Department of Theatre Arts for 30 years.