Experiencing the bilingual musical “Dancing in My Cockroach Killers” at GALA Hispanic Theatre is like walking through a city. Sometimes you run into a street festival, swirling with color and sound. Sometimes you run across a sight that’s bleak or poignant — a desolate alley or suffering person. Sometimes you arrive at a construction site that’s pulsing with energy, where looming cranes suggest a present hurtling into the future.
Comparable moods and vistas flare and shift throughout “Dancing in My Cockroach Killers,” a co-production by GALA and New York’s Pregones Theater/Puerto Rican Traveling Theater. Less of a traditional musical than a dramatized poetry collection with accompaniment, this interesting, edgy, sometimes funny piece showcases six confident actors interpreting Magdalena Gómez’s striking texts, which seem to riff on the Puerto Rican and Nuyorican experience. Directed and adapted for the stage by Pregones/PRTT Artistic Director Rosalba Rolón, and featuring infectious Latin music by Desmar Guevara (who also plays keyboard in the three-piece onstage band), “Dancing in My Cockroach Killers” is impressively idiosyncratic, while also bristling with feminist and anti-establishment attitude. As the backdrop relays photos (a cityscape, a diner counter, a playground), the actors conjure characters or take turns voicing passages in fierce, jazzy spoken anthems.
In the memorable sequence “Fuego en la Cocina,” a woman in a red dress (Yaremis Félix) kneels at a washtub, recalling in detail the domestic abuse perpetrated by her partner. (English supertitles accompany dialogue in Spanish; much of the show is in English.) In the dark but funny monologue “Christian,” a seemingly deranged loner (Omar Pérez) raves about his dead wife and the robber who stole her rosary. (Gómez created the projections. Harry Nadal designed the summer-block-party costumes, and Paulette Beauchamp the economical choreography. The cast also includes Caridad De La Luz, Krystal Pou, Jesus E. Martínez and Christin Eve Cato.)
The dialogue’s gritty lyricism often simmers with frustration, as in the sequence “Why I Lost the Popularity Contest,” which calls out the establishment’s patronizing mind-set (“You love it when we write / watered down cultural anecdotes / about roasting pigs / in the back yard”). There’s more optimism — albeit a smart-alecky kind — in a recurrent routine titled “Invent This!,” in which characters come up with ideas for innovations that would improve the world (“Invent paper that spontaneously combusts / when inhumane legislation is drafted”).
Gómez’s writing is so tangy, it is a shame when the occasional word gets lost in a flurry of music or stage business. Not that “Dancing in My Cockroach Killers” depends entirely upon the spoken word. In a terrific sequence, band percussionist Nicky Laboy takes center stage with a conga drum and beats out an astonishing cascade of varying rhythms — as if a single instrument were relaying all of a city’s contrasting voices.
Dancing in My Cockroach Killers, adapted and directed by Rosalba Rolón; texts and visuals by Magdalena Gómez; music and musical direction by Desmar Guevara; lighting design, Christopher Annas-Lee. 90 minutes. In English and Spanish (with supertitles). $30-45. Through July 1 at GALA Hispanic Theatre, 3333 14th Street NW. galatheatre.org.