"I think he's a very professional presenter with a great, valuable experience. He's a great promoter. Promoting shows like Ballet Folklorico requires work in both the mainstream and the dance audience and the Hispanic media to get to the Hispanic, Latino population, and he does both very well. He does better work than many presenters in the United States. It's a matter of hard work and knowing your turf. He does that."
Jonathan Reinis now sees his turf expanding further in-to the area of Spanish-language theater. He has a dream of bringing uptown theater productions to the Latino masses nationwide. Following his successes with Forever Tango and Freak, his four years as Northern California presenter of the Ballet Folklorico, and a brief engagement in Mexico during his phantom Phantom tour, Reinis has grown to see Latino theatrical production as a promising frontier.
Lately, he's been spending more and more of his time on Latino theater. Earlier this month he planned to catch at least one Latino-oriented show in New York. Next month, he's heading to Mexico City to see an in-the-works Christmas production by the Ballet Folklorico that he hopes to bring to San Francisco in the year 2000.
Though about one-third of California's population is Hispanic, it takes a keen eye to spot any of their number in our mainstream culture. If you doubt this, play the counting game while watching television. There, you'll find Jimmy Smits, and ... hardly anyone else. Or try the movies. There's James Edward Olmos, Jennifer Lopez, and Antonio Banderas if you count Europeans ... but not many more.
Some see this as a cultural travesty. Reinis does too. But he also sees it as virgin frontier for a skilled marketer like himself. At the turn of the century, the Chautauqua theater circuit based its success on the idea that, given a chance, the world's great cultural offerings could be enjoyed by Everyman. Reinis' experience marketing uptown theater to Bay Area Hispanics has led him to believe that selling high-quality theater to Latino immigrants and their descendants could prove a gold mine.
Reinis dreams of someday creating a national circuit of Broadway musicals that would be acted and sung in Spanish. The leads would be played by soap opera stars from Spanish-language television, and Reinis would stage the productions in community theaters in U.S. cities with large Spanish-speaking populations, such as San Jose, San Antonio, Chicago, Miami, and New York, he says.
Though he speaks no Spanish, he likes the idea of becoming a Latino entertainment patron. He compares bringing Spanish-language theater to America to the old Yiddish theater that used to populate the Catskills.
"The longer [Latin American immigrants] are in America, the more difficult it is for them to retain their roots, and this is a possibility for them to retain their culture," says Reinis, of the Ballet Folklorico Christmas production.
Touring Spanish-language Broadway shows, though, might be difficult to pull off, and it might be difficult to sell investors on his dream, Reinis says.
"There's a lot of elements that have to come together. Among them, it's hard to find actors that have appeal to the Hispanic community and want to go out on tour. Theater is hard work for an actor, when compared to film and television. Most agents steer their clients away from theater. Theater is the bad child of the entertainment industry," says Reinis. "So that's going to take me time to develop. When you do new things, people always resist them. They always say why it's not going to work."
Besides, Reinis has a lot of other balls in the air right now. He just got back from New York after viewing a weekful of off-Broadway shows, in hopes of catching something worth bringing to San Francisco. Keeping the Theatre on the Square packed every week is much more than a full-time job in itself. And Reinis will be in charge of Dame Edna's national tour next year. With so much going on, and so many roadblocks in the way, the Spanish-language Broadway idea just might not get off the ground.
But don't bet on it.
