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      in Television

      Delia Fiallo, Master of the Telenovela, Is Dead at 96

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      She wrote more than 40 telenovelas, the American soap opera’s addictive cousin, and was one of the most celebrated names in Spanish-language television.Delia Fiallo, the Cuban-born television writer known throughout Latin America as the “mother of the telenovela,” the addictively melodramatic Spanish-language cousin to the American soap opera, died on Tuesday at her home in Coral Gables, Fla. She was 96.Her daughter Delia Betancourt confirmed the death but did not specify a cause.Every fan of the genre knew what to expect: Gypsy maidens. Wicked stepmothers. Wealthy, handsome male heirs. Amnesia, fictional illnesses, mistaken identities, misplaced babies. And at the center of it all, a young and beautiful woman who was often an orphan, but always from a humble background, and with whom the well-born young man would fall madly in love — though the couple would be thwarted through all sorts of swirling Shakespearean complications (murder, faked pregnancies, love triangles, those conniving stepmothers) before coming together in a happy ending, 200 or so episodes later. (American soap operas go on forever, with an unending cast of characters. The telenovela works itself out in under a year, with a finite cast of characters. Mostly, they end happily.)“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo told Variety in 1996. “A couple meet, fall in love, suffer obstacles in being able to fulfill that love and at the end reach happiness.” She added, “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Ms. Fiallo was a master of that operatic, weepy form. Throughout the 1970s and ’80s, she wrote more than 40 telenovelas, most of which were produced in Venezuela and then adapted (often by Ms. Fiallo herself) and televised all over the world (and continued to be shown long after her last original drama, a blockbuster called “Cristal,” first aired in 1985). In Bosnia, pirated versions of “Kassandra” — which she adapted from a show originally called “Peregrina,” about a Gypsy maiden who falls in love with, well, you know — were so popular that when the series went off the air in 1998 it caused an international incident. The State Department intervened, pleading with the distributor of the series to donate all 150 episodes to maintain the peace in a small Bosnian town riven by political factions but united over its love of the show.“I want my ‘Kassandra,’” The New York Times reported at the time, “became a complaint of many ordinary Bosnians.”While Ms. Fiallo’s Cinderella stories were global successes, it was in the Americas that they resonated the most.In the United States, three generations of Latin American families often wept together in a nightly ritual that’s hard to imagine today. “You watched what your family watched, every day for weeks and months,” said Ana Sofía Peláez, the Cuban American writer and activist, whose fluency in Spanish came in large part from sobbing with her Cuban-born grandfather through years of Fiallo dramas like “Cristal,” “Esmerelda” and “Topacio.” She recalled both of them losing it when Luis (the wealthy stepson of the head of a modeling agency that is the plot pivot of “Cristal”) sang “Mi Vida Eres Tu” — “You Are My Life” — to his beloved Cristal (the orphaned model whose ruthless boss turns out to be her biological mother).“The essential theme of a novela is the story of a love that is obstructed,” Ms. Fiallo once said. “If you don’t make the public cry, you won’t achieve anything.”Leila Macor/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images“My grandfather and I were raised in different countries,” Ms. Pelaez said. “We had different frames of reference. But we found the same things romantic, and we were transported by those stories together.“We were all in,” she continued. “It was a shared experience that I didn’t appreciate at the time but I value so much today. It was a pan-Latin experience. Her shows were Venezuelan. But my parents would say proudly, ‘Of course, pero es Cubana’: She is a Cuban writer.”Delia Fiallo was born on July 4, 1924, in Pinar del Rio, Cuba, the only child of Felix Fiallo de la Cruz, a doctor, and Maria Ruiz. The family moved often, from small country town to small country town, and Delia, shy and bookish, began writing stories to combat her loneliness.She majored in philosophy at the University of Havana, and in 1948, the year she graduated, won a prestigious literary prize for one of her short stories. She edited a magazine for the Cuban Ministry of Education, worked in public relations and wrote radionovelas — the precursor to the telenovelas that arrived with television in Cuba in the 1950s — all at the same time, before turning to the form that would make her famous.In Cuba before the revolution, that form flourished thanks to the sponsorship of companies like Colgate-Palmolive, said June Carolyn Erlick, the editor of ReVista: The Harvard Review of Latin America, and the author of “Telenovelas in Pan-Latino Context,” (2018). Writers like Ms. Fiallo honed its central themes: “Love, sex, death, the usual.”Ms. Fiallo met her future husband, Bernardo Pascual, the director of a radio station and a television actor, when they were both working in radio. They married in 1952. (Their daughter Delia said it was love at first sight, just like in one of her stories: “She told herself, ‘That man is going to be mine, ese hombre va a ser mío.’”) After the couple moved to Miami in 1966, Mr. Pascual worked in construction and then started a company that built parking garages. “The family joke is that in exile Bernardo passed from the arts to the concrete,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1987.Ms. Fiallo first tried to sell her scripts in Puerto Rico, for $15 an episode, but Venezuelan broadcasters offered her four times as much; to prepare, she immersed herself in the culture of Venezuela, a country she barely knew, by reading novels and interviewing Venezuelan exchange students in Miami to learn the local idioms.She took her themes from the news, but also from romance classics like “Wuthering Heights.” She often tackled social issues — rape, divorce, addiction — which meant often butting heads with the censors. A late-1960s drama, “Rosario,” a sympathetic exploration of the trauma of divorce, was suspended for a time by the Venezuelan government. In 1984, the government threatened to cancel “Leonela” if Ms. Fiallo didn’t kill off one of its characters, a woman who was a drug addict.“Some friends say I could have chosen a more literary genre,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald. “But this is what I feel most comfortable with. You can touch more people this way than with any book. Novelas are full of emotions, and emotions are the common denominator of humanity.”In the late 1980s, as many as 100 million viewers in the Americas and Europe tuned in to watch episodes of Ms. Fiallo’s shows. Her fans were devoted to her characters and their odysseys, and they often called her at home — her phone number was listed — to discuss plot lines. One fan, claiming she did not have long to live, begged Ms. Fiallo to reveal one story’s ending.“The fans are passionate about the characters,” she said in 1987. “I would be embarrassed to have my number not listed. I don’t think it would be quite fair.”In addition to her daughter Ms. Betancourt, Ms. Fiallo is survived by three other daughters, Jacqueline Gonzalez, Maria Monzon and Diana Cuevas; a son, Bernardo Pascual; 13 grandchildren; and three great-grandchildren. Mr. Pascual died in 2019.“I consider myself successful if I can deliver to viewers a world of fantasy, even if only for an hour,” Ms. Fiallo told The Miami Herald in 1993. “Everyone is young at heart. Illusions don’t fade with time, and it is beautiful to rekindle a love affair, even if it’s not your own.” More

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      in Music

      Rauw Alejandro Draws a Fresh Blueprint for Spanish-Language Pop

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      On “Vice Versa,” the Puerto Rican singer traverses the lines of house music, baile funk, bolero and beyond, shirking convention and opening possibilities.“¿Cuándo fue?,” the 10th track from Rauw Alejandro’s new album “Vice Versa,” provides an unexpected jolt. As the Puerto Rican singer mourns the departure of a lover, the producer Tainy blends rivulets of synths and delicate percussion, allowing them to bleed into a hiss of hot air. Suddenly, a skittish breakbeat drops, plunging the track into rave territory. The transition is like a static shock, the equivalent of shuffling across the floor in warm socks and touching a doorknob.Ten years ago, it was perhaps unimaginable to hear this kind of moment on a mainstream Spanish-language star’s album. But Alejandro refuses to be pigeonholed into one sound. The 28-year-old artist has quietly emerged as a musical renegade, even as he’s maintained a commanding presence in the upper echelons of Latin pop.“Vice Versa,” which follows last year’s “Afrodisíaco,” elaborates on that vision, embracing melody and an unflinching (but calculated) desire to implode the traditional structures of pop and reggaeton. The album traverses the lines of house music, baile funk, bolero and beyond, shirking convention and reveling in the thrill of boundlessness. No matter the genre, Alejandro assumes the role of a playboy, delivering songs of love, lust and bombast.Alejandro surfaced from the creative playground of SoundCloud in 2014 with his first mixtape, “Punto de equilibrio.” “Trap Cake, Vol. 1” was his first formal release, a 2019 EP that positioned him as a forerunner of the putative Spanish-language R&B movement. But he shed that label with “Afrodisíaco,” which signaled a desire to jettison the constraints of genre. It included requisite features from reggaeton and trap heavy hitters like J Balvin and Anuel AA, necessary for any newcomer hoping to establish his relevance. But it also dabbled in house and synth pop, suggesting Alejandro had more ambitious designs in mind.“Vice Versa” expands on those experimental endeavors, partially bolstered by the work of Tainy, the mad scientist behind some of Bad Bunny’s most virtuosic, boundary-pushing tracks. Alejandro draws on elements of club culture on the album’s other songs, too: “Cosa guapa” — produced by Eydren Con El Ritmo, Mr. NaisGai, El Zorro, Kenobi and Caleb Calloway — opens as a not-quite-dancehall elegy for a former flame, but transforms into vengeful deep house, pierced by eerie sirens and the liquid groove of a four-on-the-floor rhythm. “Let me tell you something,” Alejandro warns in English. “I don’t need you anymore.”Though electronic music is the protagonist of Alejandro’s innovation on “Vice Versa,” he ventures into other worlds too. “Brazilera,” which features the Rio de Janeiro-born superstar Anitta, is a delicious romp into baile funk, the familiar boom-cha-cha-cha-cha of the genre slowing to a reggaeton tempo about halfway through, only to accelerate back into its original lightning speed seconds later. Anitta peppers the track with a coy dance-floor command that demands to be yelled at full volume at the club after 15 months of confinement.“Vice Versa” is Alejandro’s second full-length album.The honeyed textures of Alejandro’s voice, foregrounded on the R&B-trap-reggaeton hybrid “Aquel nap ZzZz,” set him apart from pop-reggaeton vocalists whose melodies tend to overflow with cloying sentimentality. He also has a knack for strategically deploying nostalgia: “La old skul” nods to early ’00s reggaeton, sampling genre-defining classics like Daddy Yankee and Nicky Jam’s “En la cama,” as well as Sir Speedy’s “Siéntelo.”Taken together, these maneuvers are signs of a necessary expansion of potential for Alejandro and Spanish-language pop at large. Much of the mainstream music topping the Billboard Latin charts today falls into predictable templates, diluting the most dynamic elements of reggaeton into a pop format — a reality that has produced much-needed critiques surrounding the genre’s whitewashing. For the most part, Alejandro sidesteps that pitfall by drawing from a more eclectic palette.Alejandro’s experimentation isn’t always successful, though: “Nubes” is saccharine pop-reggaeton engineered to be a radio hit, while “Tengo un pal” is anodyne trap-pop that leans a little too heavily on facsimiles of Travis Scott ad-libs. But the valleys of “Vice Versa” are few and far between. With his collaborators and beatmakers, he has drawn a blueprint for the freakier possibilities of Spanish-language pop. Now their peers will have to learn to catch up — or be consigned to a lifetime of making watered-down reggaeton. More

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      in Television

      ‘A Sense of Belonging’ for Hispanic Children, With Puppets

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      “Club Mundo Kids,” a new TV series debuting on April 10, is the latest result of a push for programming that uses Spanish to reach Latino audiences.Standing outside a home, Romina Puga paints endangered animals, plants a garden, hosts guest experts and talks about the news. She is joined by two friends: Coco, a puppet shaped like a coconut, and Maya, a plush pink puppet.Maybe most important, Ms. Puga is as likely to speak in Spanish as in English.Those are scenes from “Club Mundo Kids,” a TV news show debuting April 10 on Televisa and April 11 on Universo, aimed at young, first- and second-generation Hispanic children in the United States, where the large Hispanic population is growing, diverse and often underrepresented in television and in movies.“There is very little content being created that is speaking to U.S. Hispanic, Latinx children and telling their stories,” said Ms. Puga, the show’s 31-year-old host. “The younger generation doesn’t really have anyone breaking things down and talking directly to them in a way that is digestible.”Latinos make up the largest minority group in the United States, accounting for 18.5 percent of the population, and more than one in four newborns are Latino, according to the Pew Research Center.But only 4.5 percent of all speaking characters across 1,200 top-grossing films from 2007 to 2018 were Latino, according to a 2019 study by the University of Southern California Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.Broadcasters have occasionally tried to reach young Hispanic audiences, often with cartoon programming like Nickelodeon’s “Dora the Explorer,” about the adventures of a young animated Latina and her friends. In 2016, the Disney Channel introduced “Elena of Avalor,” an animated series praised for featuring Disney’s first Latina princess. Univision has “Planeta U” a Saturday programming block of animated and educational programs aimed at children ages 2 to 8.And for decades, “Sesame Street” has featured Rosita, a blue bilingual puppet from Mexico.“Club Mundo Kids,” in contrast, puts real people in front of the camera, including a host, children and guest experts, and makes a point of talking to children ages 6 and up about Latino life in a real-world context.“It’s a real opportunity to meet Spanish-speaking kids where they are and to help them build language and reading skills, like ‘Sesame Street’ and ‘Reading Rainbow’ has been doing for decades in English,’’ said Jason Ruiz, an associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame.He added that the show, possibly alone among programs for children, “will be symbolically important for giving Spanish-dominant kids a sense of belonging by having a show aimed directly at them.”Hosted by Ms. Puga, a former ABC News correspondent, the series features a mix of live-action and animated segments that explain topics like where food comes from and why there are so many Spanish dialects.Ms. Puga said the show combines elements of the 1990s children’s programs that she watched growing up Chilean-Argentine in Miami, but with current trends, themes and explanatory segments. In an episode about agriculture, for instance, an animated cornstalk named Miguel Maíz explains how some foods act as fuel for our bodies, and Ms. Puga says the different Spanish words for corn (one being “maíz”).And in each episode, children can ask Ms. Puga and guest experts questions that relate to the show’s topic — like, why do our stomachs hurt after eating too many sweets?“Kids will see they can interact, they can be part of the conversation and that it’s also their world,” said Isaac Lee, an executive producer of “Club Mundo Kids.” Mr. Lee said he wanted to create a show where wanted Latinx kids and their friends could get accurate news and information about the country and the world in a way that reflects their realities.The goal, he said, was an “entertaining and engaging” program, said Mr. Lee, a former chief content officer at Univision and now the head of the production company Exile. The pandemic pushed filming into the backyard of a home in the Los Angeles area, but producers are using the setting to encourage children to go outside.Ms. Puga said she hoped the show would “spark curiosity and promote empathy and understanding for other cultures — all while having fun, of course.”Advocates of greater diversity in the entertainment industry praised the trend of media companies trying to reach Hispanic children with educational content that keeps them anchored in their heritage while building cultural bridges through bilingualism.One Latina advocate, Beatriz Acevedo, said the show provided an opportunity for parents who want their children to stay connected to their culture through language.“Hopefully ‘Club Mundo Kids’ will showcase the rich diversity and intersectionality of our Latinidad that the younger generations in our community desperately need to see,” said Ms. Acevedo, who has produced children’s programs and is a founder of LA Collab, a group that promotes the advancement of Latinos in the entertainment industry. More

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      in Theater

      ‘Romeo y Julieta’ Review: Young Love in Two Languages

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      Lupita Nyong’o and Juan Castano star in a podcast adaptation that delivers the poetry — in Spanish and English — but not the fire.The scheme is so harebrained that it belongs more to farce than tragedy, but Shakespeare decided otherwise. In “Romeo and Juliet,” a trusted friar gives the desperate Juliet a potion to drink so she can fake her own demise.For a good “two and forty hours,” she will seem dead, he tells her, “and then awake as from a pleasant sleep.”Awake in a tomb full of corpses, he means, but that’s a mere detail. In countless productions, the hatching of this plan is where the plot flies off the rails. What is he, nuts, suggesting this to a teenager who’s come to him for help?Yet in the Public Theater’s bilingual audio production “Romeo y Julieta,” the extraordinary Julio Monge portrays Friar Lawrence with such warm ease and steadiness that the ploy seems — well, still exceedingly unwise, but almost persuasive. And the clergyman has his usual fine motive for aiding Julieta and her Romeo: to ally their warring families, turning their “rancor to pure love.”The program note for this production suggests that the Public, the most populist of Off Broadway theaters, has a similar motive concerning our own fractured culture. If this free podcast is better at conveying the poetry than the pulse of Shakespeare, its intention is laudable anyway.Starring Lupita Nyong’o as Julieta and Juan Castano as Romeo, the play is spoken in English and Spanish. It’s not a Sharks and Jets arrangement, either; the Montagues and Capulets are fluent in both languages. Switching nimbly from one to the other, midspeech or midsentence, is a means of welcoming speakers of either into the audience, and uniting us there — albeit at a distance from one another.Directed by Saheem Ali, the play is gently adapted by Ali and Ricardo Pérez González, and based on a Spanish translation by Alfredo Michel Modenessi. Presented with WNYC Studios, the recording (with original music by Michael Thurber and sound design by Bray Poor and Jessica Paz) comes with a downloadable script showing every line in Spanish and English, making it easier to follow along.Each actor in the cast of 22 takes great care with verbal clarity. Interpretive depth is harder to come by; textures of humor and passion, joy and grief, are scarce. Any scene where Monge appears, though, finds the others upping their games.That includes the tantalizingly paired Nyong’o and Castano, whose lucid performances never ignite the rebellious adolescent fervor that drives these just-met, I-would-die-for-you lovers to their irrational extremes. Romeo and Julieta are kids, with all the tendencies toward personal drama of people their age, yet we don’t sense that in them or in Romeo’s friends.It’s not a lack of talent on anyone’s part. What it feels like, largely, is a pandemic side effect. This show’s many artists couldn’t gather in a room to dig into characters and relationships; they rehearsed and recorded over Zoom. And when we listen to the podcast, and need the script to figure out who’s who in a crowd or a fight, we yearn for costume and gesture, for bodies in space.This “Romeo y Julieta” is a production in need of a stage, when that’s possible again. For now, it’s waiting on its third dimension.Romeo y JulietaAvailable at publictheater.org, wnycstudios.org and on all major podcast platforms. More