Original show ‘Muerto de Risa’ pays tribute to Cuban comedy legend Álvarez Guedes
The legacy of Cuban comic Guillermo Alvarez Guedes is no laughing matter.
He was a stand up comic and television and film actor with a rare blend of talents for physical and linguistic humor. He managed to turn “¡ñó!,” an abbreviated version of a four-letter-word Cuban expletive, into his signature flourish without entirely diluting its power or making it sound offensive. He was a skilled storyteller, the voice of home for a wounded exile community, while also making his streetwise cubaneo popular throughout Latin America.
But Guedes, who died at his home in Kendall in July 2013, at the age of 86, was also a writer, a visionary entrepreneur, and the co-founder of Gema, considered one of the most important record labels in Caribbean music. Its catalog includes the work of figures such as Lena Burke, Bebo Valdés, Rolando Laserie, Rafael Cortijo, El Gran Combo de Puerto Rico, and a young, unknown but promising singer and songwriter, Willy Chirino, who recorded his first three albums with the label.
Now “Muerto de Risa El Último Show de Álvarez Guedes,” an immersive theatrical experience, opening at a custom-built space in Tropical Park on Thursday, April 30 to Sunday, May 31, summons the words and spirit of the comic to celebrate his legacy in one last run.
“His impact on preserving Cuban culture, on preserving the exile and immigrant story in a funny, happy, joyful way, and the impact he had on music, is felt to this day,” said Nelson Albareda, co-producer, co-writer and co-director along with co-writers and co-directors Héctor Medina and Robby Ramos.
Albareda compares Guedes’ place in Latin comedy to that of Celia Cruz’s in Latin music.
“The same way that Celia opened the way for Gloria and for Shakira, Alvarez Guedes opened up Latin Comedy for today’s comedians whether it be Fluffy (Gabriel Iglesias), Paul Rodriguez, Marcelo Hernandez, or George Harris,” says Albareda. “I think of Guedes as the father of Latin comedy.”
Even academia took note of the reach of his work. In “Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America,” Yale scholar Albert Laguna examines the place of Guedes’s stand-up comedy in Cuban life in the United States.
And yet, notes Albareda, Guedes, who left Cuba in exile in 1960, “never got a proper tribute recognition on his legacy while he was alive,” adding that he’s been working on the show for close to eight years.
Written in Spanish, sprinkled with Spanglish references, and featuring Cuban actor Ariel Texido in the lead role, “Muerto de Risa” sets Guedes coming from the heavens to Miami to put on one last show. For it, the production has built a custom space in Westchester’s Tropical Park. “Think Cirque du Soleil,” says Albareda. It’s outfitted with a bar, a cabaret performing space, and a patio.
“We thought it was fitting to do this show in Westchester, because it was a key Cuban neighborhood for a lot of Cubans,” explains Albareda.
“Muerto de Risa” comprises three distinct experiences. A pre-show bar área, a cabaret setting, where the play takes place as well as a show with music and dancers, and then a post-show experience in the form of a patio.
“We want . . . it to be something that people would want to talk about with their children afterward— to connect across generations and have a good time with food and drinks,” says Ramos.
It’s an idea that mirrors what emerges as a ritual of sorts among Guedes’ fans. Ask about him to your Cuban or Cuban American friends, and chances are they will have a story or two of listening to his comedy albums — he recorded more than 30 throughout his career – as part of a family get-together. Albareda remembers his entire family, “30 or 40 people, including grandparents and my parents, cousins, listening on Christmas Eve, after dinner. We would all sit around and listen to it.”
Ramos speaks of knowing “all Guedes’ jokes by heart” after hearing his uncle reciting them at parties and having his parents and grandfather “always listening to Alvarez Guedes’ records and talking about him. He was truly part of my childhood.”
Even in Cuba, long after he was gone, his humor and storytelling brought people together, notes Medina, a Cuban actor, writer, director, and producer who moved to Miami in 2015.
“As a kid, I’d always see groups of people in Cuba listening to the radio in secret,” recalls Medina. “And when I’d ask, I’d find that there were two things they had to listen to very quietly: one was Radio Martí, the other was when they played the cassettes by Guedes. He was funny and said all those swear words but so elegantly — and he also said many things that many of us wanted to say. That was my early experience with Alvarez Guedes.”
Texido reminisces about listening to the cassettes his grandmother owned.
“I don’t know where she got them, but she had about six or seven of his cassettes that I listened to over and over again. For us in Cuba, it was a relief amid all that tension and pressure and repression and everything else. Still, I only came to realize what a big deal he was when I came here.”
But Guedes made a point in not taking things too seriously — including his place in the cultural landscape. Fittingly, “Muerto de Risa” keeps nostalgia at a distance.
“If we choose to make it like a biopic, or to make it nostalgic, I think we’d be failing him,” says Medina. Instead, “Muerto de Risa” stays true to the spirit of its subject, suggests Texido.
Texido says that there’s a moment in the show where Guedes says, “For me, leaving Cuba . . . really hurt me a lot. It made me so angry.”
A silence.
Then the character says, “But I never let the pain — that pain and that hatred — consume me. From then on, joy was my only mission.“
“I believe that when he said that, he wasn’t talking about just his own joy—it was the joy of the people,” says Texido.
If you go:
WHAT: “Muerto de Risa – El Último Show de Álvarez Guedes”
WHERE: Tropical Park, 7900 SW 40th St., Miami
WHEN: Opening Thursday, April 30 through Sunday, May 31. Shows Thursday through Sunday. 8 p.m., Thursday and Friday; 6 p.m. Saturday and Sunday; 9:30 p.m. Saturday.
COST: $79.99, $119, and $139
INFORMATION: https://alvarezguedesmiami.com/
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