“Something appealing, Something appalling”: stalking the Sondheim Musical through the Mexican Archive
While Mexican musical theatre producers have tried to present their productions of the Broadway repertoire as part of a successful and avant-garde narrative, Mexican stagings of Stephen Sondheim’s work have traditionally met with mixed reviews; indeed, only one of his shows as composer-lyricist has undergone a professional production in Mexico. Despite a critical mauling of its first production, and a luke-warm second run, Sondheim’s A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum was revived a third time, beginning our trend of musical revivals. The piecing together of this sort of production history is difficult. There is no archive specialized in musical theatre in the country, scholarship in the field is in its infancy and sources are still scattered throughout state-funded and private archives. Progressive newspapers, both past and present, have tended to neglect and on occasion even ignore musicals, and conservative critics in certain periods have focused more on star power than on actually critiquing the productions. Nevertheless, when examining the Mexican response to Sondheim and the scope of his presence on our stages, the National Serials Library offers a rich and still untapped vein of understanding. This paper aims to present an overview of the reception of the professional productions of Sondheim’s work, using the resources of local archives while critically confronting the fragmented history they provide. The paper also attempts to identify critical implications of the inclusion and exclusion of musicals in the current narrative of theatre historiography in Mexico developed by producers and scholars alike.