O encontro do teatro musical com a arte engajada de esquerda: em cena, o Show Opinião (1964)

Abstract

This work tries to establish a dialogue between art and society. It is a reflection on Show Opinião, a musical spectacle performed in 1964 in the city of Rio de Janeiro by Grupo Opinião and by Teatro de Arena, both of them from São Paulo city. Oduvaldo Vianna Filho s, Paulo Pontes s and Armando Costa s musical has marked Brazilian theatrical scenario not only because of its innovative dramaturgy but also because it was the first artistic experience to criticize openly the military regime which was imposed 1964 in Brazil. In discussing Brazilian society s political problems and cultural matters in the 1960s, Show Opinião breaks through the idea that the politically compromised and engaged theater has to be grave, didactic, schematic, and not causing laughter. In this thesis, the interventions regarding Brazilian popular music, laughter, comical situations, unusual typical characters and other fanciful and fictional elements from the theatrical scenario will be understood and valued as resistance political tools which are able to encourage people to the debate and interventions leading to a questioning of the political arbitrariness the 1964 military coupe d état perpetrated. Although Show Opinião is an important reference to the drama scenario in the 1960s, its performance has raised many controversies. With its structure based on sources from Brazilian popular culture and popular, participant music in a time when music industry was raising this spectacle was understood by critics, intellectuals, and journalists as a romantic and welcoming manifestation from suffering people. Besides, the assiduous presence of popular music in its performance has led many people to interpret Show Opinião as a commercialization of the political fight that was being built at the time. Unlike such ideas, this thesis begins with the hypothesis that Show Opinião is an important manifestation of political and organized resistance against the 1964 military coupe d état. To be understood as such, this spectacle should be viewed as something that goes beyond the coupe d état s impact. The matrixes of this politically engaged drama come from nineteenth-century s musical theater (teatro de revista) tradition, as in the valorization of laughter, comical situations, irony, and music; from União Nacional dos Estudantes s Centro Popular de Cultura, an organization that produced aesthetical and artistic experiences to promote popular culture which contained fanciful, comical, musical and amusement elements to politicize the theatrical scenario; and from Zicartola restaurant, where traditional Brazilian music (samba, xote, and baião) were played and where intellectuals and artists willing to face dictatorship used to meet. German drama experiences such as the ones by Bertolt Brecht and Erwin Piscator, above all the valorization of music, gesture, strangeness, and music on the stage, completed Show Opinião political engagement. Since this spectacle joined an innovative aesthetical form a play with protest songs and popular sources with an explicitly political content on the stage, this thesis argues that such a spectacle was a manifestation of resistance to the 1964 political events.