If you haven’t yet seen “Titanic”, which is spelled like this, with what ends as a musical satire of the film “Titanic”, stop by and buy your ticket now. This text will continue here, in addition, Lobianco’s interview is also recorded on video, on TV Folha, so you can read or watch it later.
“Titanic,” the musical that brought the best and most unexpected laughs that me and a group of four pre-teens had together at the Sabesp Frei Caneca theater, has only four showings left: two on Saturday (13), at 5 and 8 p.m., and two on Sunday (14), at 3 and 6 p.m. And then, the end.
“The play will have another season in Rio de Janeiro and we are trying to travel around Brazil, but so far we have only guaranteed Rio and we don’t even have dates set yet,” actor Luis Lobianco, who plays the character of Ruth, Rose’s mother, tells me. It’s Kate Winslet’s role in the feature film that the play makes fun of the most.
Well, the same actor who spent many months playing the assistant Freitas – abused by his rude boss Marco Aurélio, played by Alexandre Nero in the last nine-hour soap opera, “Vale Tudo” now wears a dress and a hat with a dove on his head in a hilarious, unmissable, but out of theaters musical comedy.
“At every performance, someone in the audience shouts a comment about the soap opera or about Marco Aurélio, and I stop the play to take advantage of this situation, I love it,” says the actor, who didn’t even shave his beard to play the tough matriarch who bets everything on her daughter’s marriage to a rich husband to save her family’s finances and reputation.
“Titanic” is pretty absurd from the start: In the musical, Canadian singer Celine Dion, who sang the theme song to the 1997 film “My Heart Will Go On,” winner of the Academy Award for best song (one of 11 Oscars for “Titanic”), is played by actress Alessandra Maestrini, who directs the show.
She claims that Dion would be one of the survivors of the shipwreck. So he also witnesses everything that happened on the ship, from the romance between Jack (Leonardo DiCaprio’s character) and Rose to the battle for life jackets and inflatable boats, including the fights between first and third class passengers. And it will tell the story of how things really happened, since the movie version is completely false.
And it is with the greatest successes of the Canadian singer that the story is revisited. “It’s a great absurdity, a very Brazilian theatrical genre, born in the 80s with Miguel Falabella, Ney Latorraca, Miguel Magno, and mixed with the revue theater of Dercy Gonçalves,” says Lapobianco.
“Our production has a bit of everything, it’s an adaptation of an off-Broadway hit, which are always the most mischievous shows, I always say that it’s a show that has a loose spirit, but with text, artistic direction, sharp sets and costumes and an impeccable cast. Each session is an apotheosis, the public goes crazy”, he continues.
I ask him if he doesn’t feel butterflies in his stomach when he walks on stage with a beard, a robe and a dove hat on his head every night, but Lobianco has done so much patrolling in his life that he says he wants nothing more than to see the circus burn. “Humour protects me. And I have no interest in preaching to the converted.”
In 2017, as soon as he left the Porta dos Fundos collective, of which he was part from the beginning, in 2012, to “try a solo career and leave this opportunity to other actors”, Lobianco launched a dramatic monologue entitled “Gisberta”, the fruit of years of research by the actor.
“Gisberta was a transsexual woman from São Paulo who, in the 1980s, after suffering a lot of abuse and prejudice, decided to leave Brazil and settle in Porto, Portugal,” says the actor. “But there, she was also very mistreated and met a horrible and tragic end. She was tortured for several days by a group of teenagers and eventually died. Her body was discovered in the elevator shaft of the building where she lived.”
“In Portugal, Gisberta’s death made news. The Portuguese government even changed the country’s legislation due to the tragedy, to provide some protection to transgender people.” Lobianco learned of this story from a song, “Balada de Gisberta”, recorded by Maria Bethânia. “Bethânia is always ahead.”
Lobianco researched the case extensively, connected with Gisberta’s family, traveled to Portugal to see the place where she died and read about the entire process. “His murderers were acquitted, they served no sentence,” says the actor, who spent a year putting into shape what became the monologue “Gisberta,” one of his most memorable works.
However, upon its release, the play was the target of strong criticism from the LGBT community itself, mainly from transsexuals, but also from specialists of the cause, outraged by the fact that he did not have the right to speak. “All the turbulence came from people who weren’t even watching the show. They thought I was playing Gisberta, and the play wasn’t that. On the contrary, it was a play that talked about her absence.”
“I’m lucky it all happened at some point before the cancellation,” he says. Although, currently, this will not happen. Luis Lobianco is now a well-established name in the collective imagination, an artist with a complete body of work, who has just played a fundamental role in the most anticipated ending of a Globo soap opera. But if it happened again, it wouldn’t even take half an hour of sleep from the actor. “Sorry for the term, but I don’t care what other people think.”
with DIEGO ALEJANDRO, KARINA MATIAS and VICTORIA CÓCOLO