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[0:00] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Hello, and welcome to the Drama Book Show. My name is Mark-Eugene Garcia. In this episode, we explore the history, influence, and creative contributions of Latin-A artists in shaping the American musical theatre canon. We're joined by Stefan Sittig, author of Latinidad in Musical Theatre, an exploration of the substantial impact of Latin-A artists through music, dance, and choreography over the last century of American musical theatre. From early performers like Carmen Miranda to contemporary creators like Lin-Manuel Miranda, Sittig examines how Latin-A artists have helped shape the art form while moving beyond stereotypes and appropriation to tell their own stories and to find our own narratives.

Through case studies of iconic works including West Side Story, Bye Bye Birdie, In the Heights, and Hamilton, Latinidad in Musical Theatre explores the careers and contributions of artists such as Chita Rivera and Graciela Daniele, highlighting the cultural and artistic legacy of Latin-A voices in musical theatre. Stefan Sittig is a Helen Hayes Award-nominated director, choreographer, fight director, and intimacy and movement coordinator, author, educator, performer, and podcast host. With more than 130 productions to his credit across New York City, internationally, and throughout regional theatres in the United States, Stefan brings a wide-ranging theatrical perspective to this important conversation. Here's Stefan Sittig live at the Drama Bookshop.

[1:44] Stefan Sittig: Thank you so much for being here tonight. As I told you upstairs, so far I've made it as far as Graciela Daniele in the book. And it's a small book, but you've packed a lot in there. There were a lot of fun tidbits that were new even to a musical theatre nerd like myself. I figure we'll start at the very beginning, which Julie Andrews told me was a very good place to start. So what led you to write this book in the first place?

[2:15] Stefan Sittig: Thank you. Hello, everyone. Good evening. It's nice to see some of you. I haven't seen you in a while. I guess it fell into my lap, as some of the best things in my life always have. I was at the Association of Theatre and Higher Education Conference in Austin, Texas. We won't talk about the Spurs and the Knicks last night. Anyway, and my... My friend was at the game. I haven't talked to her yet about how she feels about it. Oh, gosh. No sports. It's the theatre. Okay. But no, and full disclosure, my partner is from San Antonio, Texas, so we were pretty close. So it was just a quick drive, and a friend of mine had a panel on musical theatre, and she was exploring in that panel the influence of the Jewish-American culture in musical theatre, African-American culture in musical theatre.

And she said, hey, I need someone to come and talk about Latinos in musical theatre. And I said, me? She goes, yeah, you. Why not you? You grew up in South America. Your mom's from Uruguay. You spent most of your formative years in Brazil and in Montevideo, in Rio and Montevideo. And you love musical theatre, and it's what you do for the last 30, 40 years. And I said, oh, okay. And I was shy about it, weirdly. I don't know. So I went and I spoke, and I was supposed to have a paper. I didn't have a paper. I was too quick. So I literally just spoke off the top of my head, things that I had discovered, noticed in my 30 years of choreographing musicals, of directing musicals. What I had seen and experienced and felt in the back of my mind was happening with the evolution, as I call it, of the Latin-A population in the musical over the last hundred years.

And I just kind of spoke extemporaneously. And there was a guy sitting in the back who I didn't know who he was. And the next day I got an email from Bloomsbury, Metho and Drama, saying, would you like to write in this series a book about the influence of Latinos in musical theater? And I said, okay, sure. I don't have a paper. And he said, no, please. You spoke so eloquently that I think you could write a book. It's a small volume. And so it was daunting at first, but I was very excited to jump in. So that's how it all germinated. It wasn't something I sought after. It just happened. And over time as I've been, really, the book was about discovering myself in a way. I had done this to, grew up in South America, speak Spanish with my mom every day.

Grew up in Rio, where I learned Portuguese. And that was always a part of my life and all my Brazilian friends. And then I had musical theatre over here, right? And then I would be choreographing a musical that had nothing to do with Latin America. And there'd be a tango in the middle of the show. Or a rumba. And I thought, am I hearing this? Is it a samba? And I'd be like, am I hearing this in my head? Or is it really here? And then I started asking, why? Why is this here? These are European people who wrote this show. Why did they put a bunch of Latin music in the show that has nothing to do with Latin America? Why is there a tango right in the middle of the pajama game? Nando's hideaway. Ole.

And who's got the pain when they do the mambo right in the middle of Damn Yankees? Those are two examples. We were chatting just upstairs about all the examples. And especially by the 50s when those were written, it was very de rigueur. The audience expected a Latin number, whether it had anything to do with the plot. So I asked, why? In my head, why? Why did they? And I think a lot of people in the audience were subconsciously going, oh, we like this. No, they don't even know maybe where it was coming from. They just liked it.

[5:35] Stefan Sittig: And then I started doing research for the book. And then I realized, oh, this didn't start in the 1950s, right? As we talked about. It's going back to the 40s. Okay, let me go back 30s. Cole Porter. Night and day is a rumba. Cole Porter was obsessed with Cuba. So he was obsessed with Cuba. So really, Cole Porter was our biggest first ambassador. And then I went back into the 20s and the teens. And that was reading the examples that you give of Cole Porter songs. And some of them obviously begin the begin. He's telling you exactly what he's doing. But you mentioned night and day.

[6:18] Stefan Sittig: The Gypsy and me. Yes. And it's really. And I was going, I was like, oh, I never thought like, I've just known night and day my entire life. I never thought about what style it was. It's subconscious, right? And that's what I thought was really interesting. Now, even though Cole Porter isn't, wasn't Latino, but he loved the music so much. So he put it in there. So I like to say that music was our passport for us as Latinos into the musical because we were like subconsciously putting in there. And then, of course, I start the book with Carmen Miranda because in 1939, she appeared in a musical called The Streets of Paris, which was a flop other than Carmen Miranda. So Walter Winchell, a big critic of the time, wrote that the show was really awful, except for the nine minutes that Carmen Miranda was on stage.

So she saved a show, really, and then it became popular. You know what this Paris musical really needs? A Brazilian number. Exactly. We'll talk, we can talk about that later, but how it all gets mixed up, right? But then the rest is history. She got whisked off to Hollywood. She was so spectacular, right? So I, that's why I start with Carmen Miranda because, and also I grew up in Rio. So obviously, Carmen Miranda was everywhere. And I start with her, and then originally the title was From Carmen to Lin-Manuel Miranda, the Evolution of Latinidad in the Musical. The last three words ended up in, but because it's a topic, so it has to be a certain length. But if you look in the book, it's right there.

It's in the second, right underneath the title. They let me keep the sub. So that was the germination of my idea of how to create this narrative of the book, of what to include in the book, what not to include, which is really difficult when you have a limit of 100 pages, small pages. So I had to think, I don't want to miss anyone. I don't want to leave anyone out. But at the same time, who are the people that I, from my perspective, the ones that need to be signposted. And the book does say, and the series says, this is to give you the taste. This is to just put the bug in your ear and give you enough information that you understand that there's a bigger conversation to be had.

[8:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So you were in, obviously in the professional theater world, you were in the education world. Had you officially done any writing?

[8:25] Stefan Sittig: Yes, articles. I put together a play, a musical, that got a workshop production in DC called Volver, Return, which is a tango memory play about my mother and my grandmother who came to the United States in the 1960s. And my grandfather who passed away before they came, who I never met, and he's in there as the ghost, in a good way, inspiring them to do what they do. And it's all tangos, that the music is all tango, but then there's a script. So I co-wrote that with Mary Jane Walsh, who's from New Jersey, go Mary Jane. And so I have done that sort of thing artistically, and I was involved in a Spanish version of Working, Stephen Schwartz's Working, called Trabajadores in Uruguay, my mother's home country.

And so we had to do some devising there and some writing. We did get permission from MTI at the time. And if you look up, you can actually go to MTI and get that version. That's our version. Yeah, it's been done in Spain and Mexico since, so I feel proud about that. So yeah, but no, never an actual book. So this was my first one, so I'm very happy about it.

[9:27] Mark-Eugene Garcia: So then what's your process like when you've spoken extemporaneously, based on bringing your own very personal experience and your observations of the history, and now you're going to do the research and you're going to write it down. So what's then your process in terms of structuring the book, deciding who gets a chapter and who mentions in other people's chapters, and how much of that was informed by the research that you were doing?

[10:01] Stefan Sittig: A lot. I started, like I said, I came in through the music, right? And music, because I choreographed musicals, I listened to the music over and over. So I know orchestrations, I can call out a trumpet. I don't read music. So because of that, I have to memorize it. And that was my way in. And then I started researching music in musicals, and then Latin music in musicals, right? So I kind of went down that road. So we've talked a bit about that. And then in terms of who to include, because I started with Carmen, and I ended with Lin Manuel, then I just had to fill in the middle. And so this happened subconsciously. I didn't sit there and go, I better do it. Chita Rivera and Graciela Daniel came out.

I don't know why. And then I did a lot of research, and their names were popping up a lot. Of course, Chita, I adore, and I've always adored. And so she was naturally going to be there, I thought. So the way I structure the book is it's four real signpost people, really, that I think of that are important for the evolution. So you start with Carmen Miranda. She's stuck in the stereotype, but she's a big success. But then she gets whisked off to Toledo. But she's the star. We can accept a Latina woman on stage leading a musical, really, being the star. Then Chita goes beyond that, right? She's the star, but then she's almost above the marquee. She starts to play. Carmen got stuck in a stereotype, not by her own fault. It got appropriated. She had to wear the Tutti Frutti hat.

[11:28] Stefan Sittig: You had to have the bananas and the, so she didn't, she wasn't, what she wanted to, and I read, a lot of the research I read, she wanted to be a dramatic actress. She wanted to be able to do other things, but she got stuck in this stereotype. And then Chita went beyond that, right? And then Chita Rivera gets to a point after, of course, Anita, and then Rosie in Bye Bye Birdie, which I talk about in the book as sort of her transition. Then she starts playing characters that have nothing to do with being Latino, right? Velma Kelly in Chicago, she originates that, it's really an Irish name, right? So there's Chita, and so suddenly it didn't matter. It did matter and didn't matter, right? She broke through and kind of, she was Chita Rivera, really, that's what mattered.

And in a way, it sounds like it doesn't matter, but then it brings all the other people, gives the possibility for anyone who's Latine to come and play those roles. So she broke through and it's 1975, right? So these sort of things are happening. And then since then, she became a grand dame of theater. So she really broke through as far as I'm concerned in that way, which is hard to do.

[12:30] Stefan Sittig: And then Graciela Daniele, the third one, because she's in charge. She's the director, choreographer, and divisor. So not only is she a woman directing and choreographing a musical, which everyone gives Susan Stroman a lot of credit. I love Susan Stroman. She deserves all the credit. Graciela Daniele was doing it before Susan Stroman. And doing it with material that was not necessarily mainstream. And she was asking you to absorb Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Jorge Luis Borges' Latin. She was using Latin plays, Latin books and novels as her themes on top of it. And she was going to weirdos like Michael John LaChiusa and saying, let's do, to the point where then he said, okay, I've got a new weird idea and it's got to be Grazi who's going to... So she became the leader, right?

And so that's another breakthrough. Here's a woman, a Latina woman who's in charge. As much as one can be as a performer and creator, she was in charge, right? And then of course I end with Lin Manuel. We don't have to even talk about Lin that much because you all know, right? And that's so cool. We are in the house that Lin built. The house of Lin. But I call him in the book, the Latino entrepreneur, right? He does a lot of different things. He's in film, he's with Disney, he's, you know, musicals, obviously. So that's taking, each of them took Latin culture and brought it a little bit more into American US culture.

[13:53] Stefan Sittig: And in very different ways. Correct. Using musical theater. And so that was how I chose them, really. And then I realized that most of them are women, except for Lin. And that was probably subconscious too, but I grew up with strong Latin women in my life. So that was probably how that happened. And do you think that also may have had, we talked upstairs a little bit about Desi Arnaz as well, who potentially had a bigger part to play in the book, but there were limits to what you could...

[14:25] Yes. So yeah, there's only a hundred pages, right? And so when I went to the publisher and I started talking about my proposal, what I wanted to do, some of the editors were like, well, you have to include Rita Moreno, right? And in my mind, I never thought of Rita Moreno because I adore Rita Moreno, but musical theater, I didn't think of her as having that big of, you know, and also you got Chita in the book and then you got Rita and then the people start confusing them, which is not what I want. Right. And so the, and then I thought I can't just do a whole chapter on Rita Moreno. So they asked for a chapter on, so I thought Desi Arnaz, here's another person who, so I, the chapter became about these Latine artists who started in musical theater, but then went elsewhere and became important in the culture on TV, obviously, or film, or in some other way, they influenced and brought Latinidad to us in different ways.

[15:18] Stefan Sittig: I wonder culturally, in the very white-centric American culture of the early 20th century, that was like letting Latin culture in where they were enjoying it. I wonder if it was easier for women to fulfill what they saw...

[15:37] Interesting.

[15:37] Stefan Sittig: ...than for men to come. And then obviously, Desi also broke ground as a producer and a director and, you know, and all that in television.

[15:45] The three cameras at Desilu Productions. Yeah, all those things. But Desi started, weirdly enough, also in 1939, same year as Carmen Miranda, on Broadway in a show called Too Many Girls, which later became a movie, which is where he met Lucille Ball making the movie, right? And the rest was history. But I think that he, yes, and there is something that I talk about in that unreleased chapter. Not in the book, sorry, but maybe a blog post in the future. I have a sub stack that I'm working on now, so maybe it'll be there. That he did a lot for changing culture's view of the Latin man, right? Here's a lead of household, head of household, who's got his wife and they're having arguments, definitely spirited, but also friendly and loving.

And we know Lucille Ball had to fight for him to be able to be on TV in the 1950s, right? As a husband. So that was neat. And then Rita Moreno is just had such a big career starting so young, and she was like really the, she dubbed herself and rightfully so, or maybe MGM or Louis B. Mayer did, the Latin Elizabeth Taylor, right? And she was just a beautiful woman and also incredibly talented. They all contributed to this, but I could only talk about the...

[17:04] Stefan Sittig: Singing in the Rain. She's playing the... You could imagine that Zelda Sanders would have played Cleopatra. It's unfortunate she has very little screen time, right? Because she's wonderful. And in King and I, right. And there was a lot that they had to confront and in the research, Carmen Miranda is the one that really came out the most sad. She died young and she had a lot of health issues around some of the... She was taking some medications, not quite like Judy Garland, but on the Judy Garland essay. And I think a lot of it came from the frustration. This is me guessing, not anything I read, that she wasn't able to have the career that she wanted because she was a Latina. And of course, Rita Moreno had a lot of those same frustrations, but she, and this might have been a kind of post-Carmen Miranda thing, Rita Moreno was able to take that frustration and turn it into comedy.

[17:44] Stefan Sittig: You can see the doors that the people later went through that were opened by the ones before. And that was really humbling for me to read. And we've had Terrence McNally's biographer here, and we've talked about how Rita Moreno's frustration became a bit that she would do at parties and someone said, oh, you have to tell my friend Terrence this. And then he wrote Googie Gomez in the Ritz for her, having seen her take on all of the over-the-top, just standardized ethnic stuff that she had to do in Hollywood. And that became a Tony Award for her.

[18:23] Stefan Sittig: I think that I talk about that in the book with Chita Rivera on Bye Bye Birdie. There's a song in there called Spanish Rose, which I dissect pretty closely because it's a really, if you just read the lyrics, it's an awful song about all these terrible stereotypes of Latinos. I eat the tacos and the enchiladas, I drink tequila till I feel no pain. The only song I sing will be Granada, I'll be more Espanol than Abbey Lane. That's just off the top of my head. So if it wasn't Chita Rivera, you can't sing that song. And so what Chita did by being given that song is turn it on its head and go, yeah, you're going to call me all these things, let me show you. I'm going to laugh in your face and that. And so that's, in a way, for 1960, progressive, we have to think, over time. And also, it allowed her to break out of Anita, which was so successful for her in 1957. She wanted to play more than Anita.

[19:19] Stefan Sittig: And that great line, right off the boat from the tropics far away, which is funny since where I come from is Allentown. My handsome Latin lover from the Bronx. So it's nice because in a way, you can break up those stereotypes. Having grown up watching my mother and my grandmother face those things, especially when they opened their mouth and tried to talk. I'll never forget, I was in New York as a child, and we were in a jewelry store. This was in the early 1980s. And my mom was looking at some jewelry and stuff, and she pointed at something, and the guy yelled at her and said, Page Primero. Never forget that. Pay first. I almost died, and I wanted to yell and scream at him. So, having grown up with that, I think that's why I wanted to tell a little bit of our story with this book.

[20:14] Stefan Sittig: Does anybody else have any questions about the book, about the process, about some of the history inside of it?

[20:22] Unknown speaker: Yeah.

[20:23] Unknown speaker: Hi, Jackie.

[20:24] Unknown speaker: Hi. You mentioned Desi, and you mentioned Rita. I'm just curious if there's any other musical theater artists that you researched and didn't quite make the book, but were still heavy hitters for you?

[20:39] Stefan Sittig: So for the podcast audience, the question is, we've talked about the Desi and Rita chapter that didn't make it into the book. Were there any other artists who you researched in putting this book together who didn't make it into the book, but you now have a chance to talk about for the podcast audience?

[20:59] Stefan Sittig: Yes. In that same chapter, so it was really one big chapter that ended with, I wrote about Rita and then I wrote about Desi. At the end, I had, I think it was like four or five pages of just names that I listed of famous, or not so famous, people in musical theater who really contributed. I debated for a while, there was almost a chapter on Raul Julia, and I figured I might be a little biased.

[21:27] Stefan Sittig: Nine is also one of my favorite musicals. Yeah, and I thought, do I really want to write about this, or is it just that I just love Raul Julia, just looking at it? But no, because being a leading man in Nine, and being able, but again, I felt like Raul Julia, someone should write about him as a whole. There's so much there, and he died so really soon, too young-ish, in my view. But yeah, he had a film career then later, obviously, so that was a whole other, but yeah, he was one that came up, and there's so many, I hate to point just one out, because there were so many of them, and they're still out there now, right? They're out there, but I didn't really, didn't go into depth into any of those, because they would have taken forever, and this is another book.

[22:08] Stefan Sittig: Raul Julia is someone who, like Chita, played the Latin roles beautifully. He had Man of La Mancha, but he also could, oh, you just need, you need a charming Italian man, why not Raul Julia? You need a charming British man, he did three of any opera. You need a charming Transylvanian man, he did charming, yeah. And to this day, I say, of course, he was in the movie of The Addams Family, right? But the musical Addams Family is another one of those that haunted me. It's not that old, it's new, but I had to choreograph it five, ten years ago, whenever, and it's so Latin, the music is so Latin. I know they're trying to lean into the Spanish of Gomez, but really it's a Latin score, it's a beautiful Latin score.

[22:57] Stefan Sittig: Pop, Latin pop score. It's there, it's still happening. There's the Latin number is still being thrown in there. And I have a whole introductory chapter where I talk a lot about how the Latin music is so instrumental in It's Our Passport. People love it. And I mean, just going back to like, the Cole Porter of it all. I think that elements of it have become so intrinsic in the musical theater style that there might be people who are utilizing that who don't even realize. They feel like they're pulling from the musical theater tradition, not realizing how much the musical theater was influenced by Latin music. Yeah. And later on, I try to start to talk about more newer musicals as we look at the stuff from the 30s, the 40s. But even Andrew Lloyd Webber in writing Evita, right?

It always stuck in my craw as a kid because there's no tango in Evita. And how do you write a musical about Argentina with no tango in it? And then the big dance number, let's say, but the big dance number, is a samba. And it's really much stolen wholeheartedly from Ibarroso's Brasil. When I read that part of the book, I pulled out my phone. I was like, I have to hear this song. It's the same backing. Yeah. It's not the exact same melody because I guess he didn't want to get sued that time. And not to fall hard on Andrew Lloyd Webber in the sense that what Andrew Lloyd Webber was doing was what he learned watching Carmen Miranda movies, maybe. Yeah. In that he thought Brazil, Argentina, down Argentine way, that's the name of a movie that takes place in Brazil.

MGM Studios Brazil. And I will say as much as I think that one of the podcasts I was talking at earlier a couple of months ago said to me, the North met the South. What happened was, and it's not wrong, that with all the horrible things happening in Europe in World War II, America turned to their potential allies to the South, right? South America. And so suddenly from the late 30s onwards, not a coincidence, 1939 is Streets of Paris. Donald Duck went to Rio. There's a whole Disney where Disney went crazy and literally had Donald Duck dancing on Copacabana Beach or whatever, because it felt more friendly with all the chaos happening in Europe. And he said all that to me. And I said, my father's from North America and my mother's from South America.

So I inherently understand that. That's what I grew up with, those cultures meeting. So I think it was meant out of love at the time. It's just that there wasn't a lot of respect for the, it becomes appropriation because you're not listening to where, why is Carmen Miranda singing in Spanish? Nobody in Brazil speaks Spanish. They all think they speak Spanish, but you know, because they can understand it. But I remember I went to Rio when I was six years old. I spoke Spanish fluently when I got to Rio. And I remember we were in the hotel, first day we arrived and the hotel employees were taking our luggage and helping us get up. And the two guys started talking to each other in the elevator. And I started crying because I realized this is a whole new language.

I think I know Portuguese. Portuguese is totally different from Spanish if you don't understand the slang. So it is a whole different culture and language. And Brazil is such a big country. Why do we always think of Spanish when we think of Latin America? Brazil is bigger than the rest of South America. It's as big as the United States really. It is continental United States. If you don't count Alaska and Hawaii, Brazil is equal size. It's a big country. It's a lot of millions of people. That in and of itself tells us how we love something as in the US and we appropriate it. And sometimes out of love and excitement, we don't even listen or care about the details, right? Or some of it could be for sure racism.

But the other side is also lack of care. It's like, I don't know, I like it. I don't know where it's from, but I like it. And then it becomes something I think can be two sides of the same racist coin. Yeah. And then we assimilate it. We're like the Borg. And I can say that as an American, I'm a third culture kid like Obama. I'm an American born here, but raised elsewhere. And it does give you a different perspective of your own country. You look at it from the outside and you go, Oh, okay. And you see all the good and all the bad. Anybody else have any questions? Yes.

[27:27] Audience Member: Did you find any similarities or differences amongst Latin women as they responded to discrimination? Because I'm sure they were discriminated against as both women and men.

[27:41] Stefan Sittig: The question for the podcast audience was in your research, did you find any differences or similarities in how some of the Latin women who you were researching responded to discrimination, both racial and gender? I'm trying to think of specific examples. I'm going through my head with the Rolodex or the Filofax or whatever it is. But I definitely found that there was, from all these women, the three women, the determination to just keep going despite the doors being closed in their face. Because then other doors opened. They found allies, particularly Chita Rivera and Graciela Daniele, who are contemporaries and are women who just keep going, going and going. Graciela Daniele didn't get a Tony till 2020.

During the pandemic, they gave her a special Tony, which is great and wonderful. But they just afford this indomitable energy of, I'm just going to keep moving forward and do my thing. And talent and ability and energy is going to win out because I'm just going to keep showing up. Carmen, like I said, is a little bit more dramatic. And I think she really had the hardest time of these because she came earlier. And I think just so difficult. Yeah, there was a lot of research about her depression, a lot of research about her wanting so many different things in her life that she didn't get because of who she was on the outside and her background in this country. And then also feeling alienated when she went back to Brazil.

She had a song, Disseram que eu voltei Americanizada. You said that I came back Americanized. She had to sing a whole song about it, because then she wasn't really liked in Brazil either. She couldn't go back to her roots because she was seen as a sellout to the US. So it was a really difficult. There is a nice musical in there. I know some people have tried different musicals, fringe musicals around Carmen Miranda. There's something there that I think is a really interesting story of someone. But yes, they faced adversity as best they could. It was tough, but yeah, certainly a lot of resilience. And I would also say, especially since you're talking about someone who everyone in the theater world loves her, but has not really gotten the recognition that she maybe deserves.

If you're not familiar with the musical Gardens of Anunzi, after working with her multiple times, Michael John LaChiusa went to Graciela Daniele and said, I'm going to write a musical about your upbringing, and you're going to direct and choreograph it. And Priscilla Lopez is going to play you. And they did it at Lincoln Center, and it was beautiful. And I highly recommend it to anyone who's interested in hearing how she told her own story to Michael John and how he turned that into musical theater.

[30:31] Stefan Sittig: Yeah. Graciela Daniele, I think is of all of them, the one that surprisingly resonates the most with me, or maybe not surprisingly. She was born in Buenos Aires. My mother was born in Montevideo, right across the Rio de la Plata from each other. It's a one hour boat ride. And the tango, the culture, the food, everything's very... Argentina and Uruguay are very similar. Uruguay is like Argentina, but with a beautiful beach coastline in many ways. And so she's my mother's age-ish. Mom's going to kill me. But-ish, my mom's age. And so she's a woman of my mother's generation. I understood her while reading about her and her journey. She's quite an interesting history. She started as what they used to call a gypsy dancer, right?

And she's one of the few people I can think of that really was successful working with Michael Bennett and Bob Fosse in leadership roles, not just as a dancer. And you mentioned in the book that she was the only Latino woman, other than Chita, in the cell block tango.

[31:32] Audience Member: She's Hunyak, yes.

[31:34] Stefan Sittig: And she played a Hungarian. And she says only, not guilty, right? And then Bob Fosse loved her because she remembered everything, and she was a dance captain. And Michael Bennett asked her to be assistant choreographer on Coco, which was a famous Katharine Hepburn musical about Coco Chanel. And she talks about it-

[31:50] Audience Member: Longest Tony performance in record.

[31:52] Stefan Sittig: The what? Say that again?

[31:53] Audience Member: It's the longest Tony performance.

[31:54] Stefan Sittig: Do they do the whole fashion show?

[31:55] Audience Member: They did an entire scene leading into the entire fashion show, yeah.

[32:00] Stefan Sittig: Michael Bennett was spectacular. And then Michael Bennett apparently, and Graciela tells this story in the book, it's a really neat story, that she said, I was dancing with all these people and I didn't even, I was just doing the best I could. And Michael Bennett said, hey, didn't your roommate, wasn't she a model when you lived in Paris? Wasn't your roommate a model? Yeah. Then get up here, show me, show me, show me what you did. Come on, do some modeling. So this is how it started, right? And eventually she, because she could remember all the steps, obviously, Bayork Lee is, I'm a big fan of. She's Michael Bennett's left arm.

[32:30] Audience Member: Yeah, yeah.

[32:31] Stefan Sittig: And Bob Avey in the right. But Graciela Daniele was in there too. And then she never really gets the same, I don't know. So I think she's just maybe not an out there person. She's more about putting her head down and doing the work. And so maybe she doesn't get seen as much. So I wanted her to get seen. That's why I put her in here. You had a question as well.

[32:49] Audience Member: Just given all of the different creative hats that you have worn over your career, I'd love to hear a little bit about who are some of your biggest influences, both in the theater or outside of the theater?

[33:06] Stefan Sittig: So the question for the podcast audience is, with all the creative hats that you have worn professionally in the theater, who are your biggest influences, both theatrically and outside of the theater, just in your life? As I've been exploring and examining where I come from and my experiences up until now, I've discovered recently that I am much more influenced by Brazilian popular music than I ever thought I would be. I listened to it as a child growing up, six years old, seven years old. That's one of the ways I learned Portuguese. And Neymar do Grosso is a Brazilian performer who's still alive performing. He was recently in the carnival and who, during the military dictatorship in Brazil, was performing almost naked on television, doing a lot of very sensual moves with his face painted black and white, singing against the dictatorship on television in 1973.

I think that's cool, right? And so that somehow in there influenced me. But in terms of traditional musical theater, of course, Chita. And that's why she's here. And I've mentioned Fosse and Bennett and all those. Those were my first loves. But I always found that Chita Rivera, who I got to meet one time, lucky me, really was the stalwart, the one that I looked at. I remember being a young person, very young person, and seeing a video.

[34:26] Stefan Sittig: I remember watching the production of Pippin, the famous VHS with William Catt and Chita Rivera playing Fostrata. And as a 10-year-old or however old I was, looking at it just going, who is this woman? And she spins the crown down her leg. Yeah, so things like that. But if you haven't seen it, look up the video of Chita Rivera doing "Spread a Little Sunshine." I think you can rent it on Amazon somewhere. But it's really what she does with that. And of course, I was a fan of Bob Fosse. So watching her in the movie "West Side Story" as a child, I've done "West Side Story" six times. Always as a Jet. I've never played a Shark, interestingly. But I found myself sometimes in productions of "West Side Story" having to coach the actors who were playing Sharks with Spanish because I actually speak Spanish. So it was weird. But hey, that's part of the melting pot. But yeah, those are the big ones, I think. I don't know if I've mentioned enough.

[35:26] Mark-Eugene Garcia: What about the future? Who should we be watching now and going forward? Who are the young stars?

[35:34] Stefan Sittig: Well, I know I'm not supposed to answer the question, Mark. Yeah, Mark Garcia. Mark-Eugene Garcia is definitely one of them. Writing and performing. I think Luis Salgado would be someone, and he's already, I'm going to say he's up and coming. He's already doing quite well with his Revolución Latina here in New York, but also directing. He just directed a production of "1776" at Ford's. To have a Latino man be able to do that, I think is great. And he also, he was in the chapter that's no longer here. He's in that chapter because I do mention him. Someone asked about some newer people or, because in "In the Heights," in the original production of "In the Heights," Andy Blankenbuehler, who's a fantastic choreographer, who was a Fosse dancer, really, chose Luis to come and Luis was in the show as well.

He did a lot of the salsa and the partnering, the Latin partnering for the show, right? And I think he's up and coming. Luis Salgado is his name. I think he's the one that I would look for. I'm trying to think, the ones I think of are maybe because I'm a little older are not as up and coming. They're already doing fine. Sergio Trujillo does not need my help. He's doing just fine, directing a beautiful production of "Damn Yankees," and I'm watching. Yes, I'm so excited for it coming into New York. Beautifully done. What a great way to treat an old musical with care and yet completely refresh it, I thought. And he's great. Julio Agustin, who has been on this podcast before, he's great. I like him a lot.

And I think he's doing things because he's directing productions that are in Spanish. "Mi dulce carida," "My Sweet Charity." He's trying to push a little bit and bring in the Latin flavor whenever he can in a way that works and it can be part of the canon moving forward. And I like that.

[37:20] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Nice. Could we hear a little bit from the book?

[37:25] Stefan Sittig: Oh, sure. A little bit? Yeah. I do have a little post-it in here. See? Okay. All right. This is from the intro. So even if you've just started reading, this is on page two, so you don't have to get very far. So this goes back to what we were talking about with Latin music being the gateway. In the vast and expansive ever-changing world of musical theater history, the contributions of Latin-A artists have been woefully ignored, even if they have been considerable. Particularly in the last 100 years, the influence of Latin-A artists has developed and grown, increasing the impact of Latinidad exponentially. Even if Latin-A artists have not always been allowed to participate in the development of the musical, they have claimed space by engaging the hearts and minds of audiences.

The popularity of Latin rhythms, music, dance, and culture has been so pervasive that they have been difficult to ignore. The pull to especially include Latin music and rhythms has been so strong for both creators and the audience that the form itself has had no choice but to adapt yet again and bend to its impact. While the full influence of Latin music on Broadway did not take hold until the late 1930s, there were traces of it in the musical bloodstream earlier. Latin music is pervasive in the music of most of the celebrated musical theater composers of the early 20th century. George Gershwin, Cole Porter, and Irving Berlin leaned on Latin music to spice up, in quotes, their shows. As John David Cockrell explains, Tin Pan Alley and Broadway were significant in introducing and popularizing Latin music to a North American public.

This music was so pervasive that it runs often unnoticed by the public like a recurring motif built into the scores of many musicals of the 1900s to the 1930s. In a book on Cuba's influence in the United States, "The Havana Habit," author Gustavo Perez Firmat devotes a chapter to what he calls the latun, a song with a Latin beat and an English lyric. Even though these products of commercialization often watered down the Latin styles they emulate, Broadway has been one of the few, if only artistic scenes or environments in the United States where such original compositions have been continually written and performed. I'll stop there, but it goes on and on. But yeah, thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

So what I'm trying to do is draw the parallel between sometimes in order to break through as a group of people in the United States as a culture, you have to win in the cultural arena, right? You have to do something, unfortunately, that seems to be the way that people gravitate towards. The same could be said of rap music or hip hop culture. Until everyone's doing it, then it's somehow accepted, right? But who started it? Where did it begin? What's the culture? And so same with Latin music and Broadway. We were, in a way, the music was our passport to get in. And that's how we started. And then dance.

[40:39] Mark-Eugene Garcia: We've talked about this being a short book. It's a great first taste. What do you hope that people take away from this book? And what do you hope that the next step for readers is after they read this book?

[40:46] Stefan Sittig: Oh, that's a great question. First of all, I do want just to highlight, to put out there that we did something too. Like I said, there is a lot of ink that has been spilled, and rightfully so, on the influence of Jewish culture, African American culture, and European culture on the musical, right? To create the musical that we've been told or taught. But I think that this piece of the story of how Latin Latinos, Latine culture has influenced Latinidad, the musical, I couldn't find a whole lot about it overall. So that's why I thought it was... So that's what I'd like people to start. And then maybe if anyone that they read about in the book sparks their interest, that they don't know. If you don't know a lot about Graciela Daniele, I can disclose right here, I just signed the contract yesterday.

I'll be writing a book about Graciela Daniele in the next couple of years. Yes. Wish me luck. It's a big endeavor. It's also part of Bloomsbury. She directed the first musical I ever saw on Broadway, which was not a hit, "The Goodbye Girl."

[41:53] Mark-Eugene Garcia: "The Goodbye Girl," yes.

[41:56] Stefan Sittig: Choreographed, not directed. Choreographed, didn't direct. I thought you were going to say "Once on This Island," but you're too young.

[42:03] Mark-Eugene Garcia: If only, I wish.

[42:05] Stefan Sittig: Yeah. So there's so much there. And originally when I was asked to do this book, the publisher said, or you could do this. And I was daunted by the big book. So I said, let me do this first, and then see if I'm still alive. And I am. And so I thought I'd do the Graciela Daniele. So I can actually say I signed the contract earlier this week. So I'm really excited about that one. It's going to be a labor of love. It's going to be a lot of work, but she's got a lot that she's done, and a lot needs to be put out there. So that's my next uphill climb.

[42:33] Mark-Eugene Garcia: Do you think there'll be more musicals like the Buena Vista Social Club? I'm kind of a culture freak. I saw it, and I loved it. I'm probably going to go see it again. Is that sort of a-

[42:44] Stefan Sittig: I hope so. The question from a self-identified culture freak is, do you think that there will be more musicals like "Buena Vista Social Club"?

[42:53] Stefan Sittig: I hope so. It's a beautiful musical. I think Vincent can tell you I cried through most of it. I don't know why. I have no idea why I cried through a lot of it. Something deep inside me was like, thank you, finally. When I did "Volver Return," which was the show that I devised, which is nowhere near "Buena Vista Social Club." Although, interesting link. One of the gentlemen who's in "Buena Vista Social Club" was in "Volver Return" on Broadway. Yeah, he was in my "Volver." Moody, Devon Moody, who's wonderful in both. But "Volver," I had a lot of people singing parts of songs in Spanish during it, and then they go into English. And then I had one section where someone sang a whole song in Spanish, which was this fun kind of Spanish, almost Spanish rap song.

And it was a workshop, so all these people were coming and talking afterwards and giving their views. As people do, you listen and you get. And one of the people said, why was that song all in Spanish? And my answer was, why not? Did you get the song? Did you understand what the song was about? And she said, no, I totally got it. It was my favorite part of the show. I laughed. But shouldn't some of it be in English? Because I don't know if people are going to. And that was 2022. And then here comes "Buena Vista Social Club" saying, maybe it doesn't matter. That's so great, right? So that's what I, yeah, I love "Buena Vista Social Club." I hope there's more. "Real Women Have Curves" also, which was not just Spanish, but it was even better, which is like our version.

"In the Heights" did some of that too, which is US Spanish. Because there's such a big diaspora of Latinos, and not everyone speaks the Spanish from the motherland. We speak our own Spanish in the Bronx. We speak our own Spanish if the people come from República Dominicana, right? They speak their own kind of Spanish. Brazilians that are up here on 46th Street, right? There's a big street in Brazil. It's all Brazilian restaurants. New York has the hugest number of Brazilian immigrants. New York, right? New York City. That's a whole other culture too. So there's so much to explore. So I'm excited. I'm hopeful and excited for the future for Latinidad as we progress. Let's see what the next 100 years brings.

[44:55] Mark-Eugene Garcia: All right. Thank you, Stefan, so much for joining us tonight.

[44:59] Stefan Sittig: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me.

[45:06] Mark-Eugene Garcia: And we are back. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Drama Book Show. Our thanks to Stefan Sittig for sharing his insights into history, artistry, and the lasting influence of Latine creators in musical theater. Coming up next on the Drama Book Show, we'll step into the golden age of Broadway with author Michael Golding and his novel "Quick Bright Things." So remember, follow us on Instagram at Drama Book Show Podcast. Follow us on Eventbrite at Drama Book Shop. And remember, all the books we talk about can be found here at the Book Shop, and so can we, and we will see you at the Book Shop.