You know there has to be a script. After all, someone tucked away in a control booth is cueing sound and light effects at specific moments. But the thing about a Marga Gomez solo show - a form distinct from her standup comedy routines - is that it sounds so much like a spontaneous creation. There is no sense of a sequestration in the bubble of a spotlight; Gomez could as well be telling you her stories over a cup of Cafe Bustelo as in a venue with a stage and chairs.
"Latin Standards" is her newest smartly honed klatch, and she has adamantly declared that this will be the final solo show she will write. It is her 12th show, after all, most of them delving into aspects of her family and rocky romantic life, and accompanied with generous doses of everyday observational humor. Fortunately for audiences, if not always for Gomez back in the moment, she grew up in a showbiz family of wondrously rich dysfunction.
In her new show, now at Brava Theatre Center, she totes her inherited baggage through long-ago reminiscences and into contemporary life, where she is still unpacking all those carry-ons. "Latin Standards," a title filled with subtext, uses as its focal point her father's briefly successful songwriting career that came as his time as a celebrity in New York's Latino nightclubs was waning. Most of his songs had lyrics about love affairs gone horribly wrong, but the lively melodies proudly landed him a contract with Muzak, with instrumentals that could lull passengers during elevator rides.
Playing off the fact that "Latin Standards" is her final solo show, Gomez packages the performance as if it were a farewell concert of songs by Willy Chevalier, which, as you might suspect, was a stage name. As Gomez points out, the best thing she likes about an Adele concert is the talk that comes between the songs, and she takes the same approach to the handful of her father's compositions that she performs.
Actually, she recites the lyrics in English as vintage recordings are played, with the translations liberally amping up the histrionics that her father had originally provided. They also provide context for loose parallels to contemporary conversation about her revolving-door love life and the heartbreak of seeing the seminal gay Latino nightclub Esta Noche, where she had developed a following, closing in 2014.
Through the tightly packed 90-minute show, Gomez offers delightful digressions into the minutiae of life with father. There are his sacred coffee-making rituals, chronic tardiness made excusable by his debonair charm, the slacks-loving Marga's horror at having to wear those "creepy Spanish-girl dresses with the puff sleeves and a slip made of crinoline and barbed wire," and even her father's mean-spirited taunts about a daughter he has with another family whom he claims he likes better.
Directed with a smartly honed casual flair by longtime collaborator David Schweizer, "Latin Standards" is the debut attraction in Brava's new cabaret space. It is now basically a black-box space waiting for some more trappings, and this inaugural attraction lacks the visual enhancements of its New York run last year. But, as she says, "Mi cabaret is su cabaret."
Gomez is an expert at holding focus in the barest of circumstances, and in "Latin Standards" she transports us without accouterment into a magically messed-up childhood that becomes, briefly but poignantly, a love letter to the father she abandoned for the last years of his life.
"Latin Standards" will run through June 28 at Brava Theatre Center. Tickets are $25-$30. Go to brava.org.
Marga Gomez's showbiz-obsessed father is the subject of "Latin Standards," her newest solo show now at Brava Theatre Center. Photo: Fabian Echevarria