Canciones - The Recs

Founded by a group of theater artists dedicated to visually adventurous and culturally specific work, Boundless Theatre Company aims to blur the lines between performance and lived experience. Their latest show, Canciones, directed by Rebecca Martinez and presented alongside producing partners Radical Evolution, The Sol Project, and Latinx Playwrights Circle, certainly accomplishes that: an ambitious piece of immersive theatre set inside a private residence in Brooklyn.

Attendees are technically free to roam four rooms of the house, though even that proves largely unnecessary, as most of the action unfolds in the living room and kitchen. Nonetheless, upon entering the residence, audiences instantly feel as though they’ve wandered into the middle of an actual family gathering, complete with the small tensions, unresolved dramas, and overlapping conversations that accompany such events.

The production draws much of its inspiration from Canciones de Mi Padre, Linda Ronstadt’s landmark 1987 album that remains the best-selling non-English-language album in American history. Thankfully, the cast does the material proud. The singing is marvelous from first note to last, with many of the performers also playing instruments throughout the evening, lending the production a welcome warmth and immediacy. Among that accomplished ensemble, Sara Ornelas stands out not only as one of the strongest vocalists, but also the production’s most compelling actor; she grounds the evening’s loose structure with genuine emotional specificity.

As with most such gatherings, dinner is served. Tamales, specifically, and they’re delicious. In fact, the dramatic highlight of the evening may well have been watching one audience member attempt to smuggle two extra tamales out by hiding them in his shoes.

The fact that an unscripted moment witnessed by only a few audience members proved to be the evening’s dramatic high point reveals the production’s major drawback. As you discover what the stakes are for these characters, it rapidly becomes clear that they are far too low. More conflict is needed from every angle to make the experience more than an intensely intimate concert by an immensely talented family of crooners. (Consider The Sound of Music, which similarly has a large family very fond of sing-a-longs. Without those Nazis dropping in on Maria and Captain von Trapp, the treacle would be unbearable.)

As a result of the lack of tension, Canciones never fully coheres as drama, and at times feels more like an atmospheric gathering than a fully realized play. As an intimate communal experience centered around music, food, and family, it is enjoyable, but with stronger narrative drive and more conflict, it could more fully meet its impressive ambitions.