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High Culture in San Juan (Spring 1990)

It is commonly known that the hotels in San Juan, Puerto Rico, have gambling casinos and night clubs in which one can hear slick popularizations of Latin culture, but what is less familiar is the city's many venues for music, dance, and film, at times of international quality. Even if you don't gamble and don't like night clubs, you can usually find something interesting to do in the temperate evenings. Like any other metropolitan center its size, 1 1/2 million, San Juan has a Fine Arts Center, also called Centro de Bellas Artes, that was constructed in the late-1970s. With three performance halls (called salas), seating respectively 2,000 people, 750 and 450 seats, it is actually located in Santurce, which is the larger city surrounding Old San Juan and its Condado beach and hotel district, and thus only a short taxi ride away from where tourists normally stay. In the San Juan area are also universities that sponsor cultural performances open to all, much as universities do everywhere else in America, and numerous independent cultural organizations.

Remember that the legendary cellist Pablo Casals in 1956 settled in Puerto Rico, his mother's birthplace, and there has since been an annual festival of chamber music bearing his name. This now takes place in the middle of June, and customarily attracts musicians from around the world. This year the programs included performances by the pianist Horacio Gutierrez, the cellist Janos Starker, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Washington, conducted by Mstislav Rostropovich and joined by soloists such as the pianist Peter Serkin and the violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg.

The Casals festival will open Saturday June 9 with the San-Juan-born operatic bass Justino Diáz performing Verdi and Wagner with the Puerto Rico Symphony Orchestra conducted by its resident director, the Spanish-born Odon Alonso. On the following Saturday, June 16, the local orchestra will perform J. S. Bach's St. Matthew Passion (known here as "La Passón según San Mateo") along with such soloists as the tenor Nigel Rogers in the role of the Evangelist and the bass Ruud Van der Meer as Jesus. On the following day will be a guitar concert with two of the world-famous Romeros, Angel and his son Lito. Most of these performances take place in one or another of the two larger theaters at the Fine Arts Center--Antonio Paoli or Rene Marques. This may not be Salzberg, but here you can get a tan.

This coming spring the Fine Arts Center will also house such programs as the musical Sugar, the singer-guitarist Jose' Feliciano (also Puerto-Rican-born) and Fernando Bujones with his Ballet de Brasíl and a festival of Puerto Rican theater, in addition to various pop singers who are better known in Latin America than here, most of them known by only one name: Lunna, Lisette, Wilkins, Alberto Cortez and, of course, Menudo. From March 26 to March 30, as well as April 1, Maricusa Ornés, Dominican-born but long a Puerto Rican favorite, will present her production of La Cenicienta, or Cinderella, which a mainlander can probably appreciate if he or she already knows the plot.

From time to time at the Fine Arts Center you can find zarzuelas, which is a Hispanic kind of operetta similar to what the Repertorio Español regularly does in New York; you can also find local comedians. The smallest venue, Sala Experimental Carlos Marichal, will present the Phoenix Players, directed by Nancy Graffam, in "Acting Shakespeare" from Thursday through Sunday over the last two weekends in April and then Spanish theater on other weekends until the Phoenix Players return in late September. For the weekend of May 4 to 6 all of its theaters will celebrate the ninth anniversary of the Centro.

In the early fall is San Juan's other annual affair, the Inter-American Festival of the Arts, which generally runs from three weeks over September and October. Pan-American in its outlook, it customarily includes performers both classical and pop, in theater and music as well as dance, from North as well as South America. A full program for the coming year should be available by summer. Another annual event for one week in October is the Puerto Rican International Classical Guitar Festival. Previous soloists have included the New Yorker Sharon Isben and Ana María Rosado, a Puerto Rican guitarist presently residing in New York, as well as the Canadian Guitar Ensemble.

San Juan is no different from other Puerto Rican cities in having a patron saint whose birthday becomes a folkloristic event. The celebration of St. John the Baptist Day on June 24 customarily includes barbeques down by the water and late night revelry--much like New Year's Eve but without that firing of guns into the air that plagues the mid-winter holiday. For San Juan Bautista Day a local tourist calendar promises, "At midnight of the 23rd, sanjuaneros walk into the sea backward three times to renew good luck for the coming year." Remember that since Puerto Ricans are friendlier than mainlanders, don't turn down an invitation for the party. For illustration of the last principle, simply take a public bus anywhere in San Juan and you will see strangers talking to one another across the seats and saying goodbye whenever anyone disembarks.

In Old San Juan, also called Viejo San Juan, is the Tapia, a magnificent nineteenth-century theater named for the Island's first playwright, Alejandro Tapia y Rivera. Though it once presented touring American theater companies, nowadays all productions there are in Spanish, from one or another Puerto Rican company. Also in the old city is the Institute for Puerto Rican Culture, Instituto de Cultura Puertorriqueña, housed in a sometime Dominican convent. In addition to art exhibitions, it presents the annual Semana de la Danza, this year from May 13 to 19, a celebration of native dance, as well as occasional concert music both international and local, such as jibaro, which comes from a string ensemble and a native singer.

In the old city is also Casa del Libro, or the museum of the book, which has a worldclass collection of first editions and illuminated manuscripts. Adjacent to it on Calle Cristo is the Museum of Puerto Rican Art, by which is meant not folk art but paintings and sculptures produced to the highest international standards. Nearby is the Pablo Casals Museum which displays memorabilia from the cellist's career and has a library of videotaped Casals Festival concerts. In the Old City you can also find jazz venues, such as Tony's the Jazz Club on Celle San Sebastian or the Place, owned by the mainlander Bob Bowers on Calle Fortaleza, where the pianist and electric keyboardist Fritz Kersting often plays. Both of them present shows at 10:00 p.m. and midnight. While in Viejo San Juan, don't neglect the trolleys and minibuses that loop through its narrow streets; they are free.

San Juan has three universities. The largest and most famous is the University of Puerto Rico, customarily called UPR, in Río Piedras, a suburb of Santurce, that is no further away from the Condado, the central hotel strip, than, say, the international airport. (Or you can take the number 1 bus directly to its front gate for a quarter.) On a campus that is as beautiful at night as by day, its theater shows music and dance, especially from Latin America and elsewhere in the Caribbean, in addition to art-house films, throughout the school year. In past years, it has sponsored a John Cage festival, a Merce Cunningham program, an international avant-garde arts festival, and a premiere by the Puerto-Rican-born New York choreographer Manuel Alum. The programs for this spring include a festival of Latin-American theater with eight companies from South America, Spain, New York and the University itself. Don't forget the Sacred Heart University, locally called Universidad del Sagrado Corazón, and the Inter-American University. Both present mid-day concerts, usually of emerging classical musicians.

One fact distinguishing San Juan from mainland American cities is its cultural proximity to Europe. As can be observed in a single tour through the international airport, many European airlines fly there directly--Iberia, Air France, British Airways, Alitalia, Lufthansa--sometimes on their way to and form South America. That means that major European and Latin American performers can come to Puerto Rico without setting foot in the fifty states. It follows that the University of Puerto Rico seems more continental than any comparable American institution. Many of the professors have European degrees, as well as European birth; and at the faculty dining club it is not uncommon to see a gathering of professors talking French or German or even Hungarian. As a result, I've seen Alicia de la Rocha, the Spanish pianist, as well as the Argentine protest singer Mercedes Sosa, perform to full houses in UPR's largest theater. Those preparing to visit San Juan next season should know that Peter Schickele (aka P. D. Q. Bach) is scheduled to perform there on January 13, 1991; Ravi Shankar will follow him on 14 April. Sleeping these sponsors are not.

One or another of these performance spaces are used by independent producers. The Puerto Rico Symphony presents its concerts at both the Fine Arts Center and the University theater, customarily favoring familiar international repertoire, often with guests soloists, over a dozen times a year. The American violinist Elmar Olivera is scheduled to play on March 17, the French pianist Philippe Entremont on April 14 and the French cellist Paul Tortelier on April 28; the pianist Yefim Bronfman will join the Puerto Rico Symphony in September. On March 3, the composer Morton Gould will guest-conduct a "Symphony at the University" concert of his own music and Leonard Bernstein's.

Pro-Arte, a private promoter of classical music, has recently sponsored such world-class fare as the pianist Vladimir Feltsmann and the Polish Chamber Orchestra. Among its forthcoming presentations will be the British guitarist Julian Bream on April 8, at the Fine Arts Center. The Latin-American Foundation for Contemporary Music presents several concerts every year, basically of new music from the Americas. Directed by Rafael Aponte Ledee, a professor at the local conservatory, its recent programs included music by Mario Davidovsky, an Argentine currently teaching at Columbia, and Francis Schwartz, a Texan long in residence at the University of Puerto Rico, in addition to such standard moderns as George Crumb and Alberto Gianestera. Besides the standard venues, these concerts are sometimes held at the music conservatory in Hato Rey, near the Plaza las Américas.

On February 4 and 10, Opera de Puerto Rico mounted a production of Verdi's Othello that includes Placido Domingo and Justino Diáz recreating their roles from the Franco Zeferelli film of the opera. On May 8 will be a concert featuring the soprano Eva Marton. The other opera-producing company, Teatro de la Opera, will be doing Ponchelli's La Giaconda in March. There are likewise three dance companies, Ballet Teatro, Ballet Concierto de Puerto Rico, and Ballets de San Juan, all of whom favor classical works, often staged with internationally renowned soloists. (There once was a local mime company, but it no longer exists, alas.) For ballet, as well as opera, translations are unnecessary, needless to say perhaps.

San Juan's better private art galleries tend to be located in one of two areas, both easily accessible to most tourists--the Condado or Viejo San Juan. In the first area is Casa Candina and one branch of Galeria Botello, as well as Libreria Hermes, at 1372 Avenida Ashford, which is not a library but a bookstore with the most elaborate stock on the island of literary and art books in both Spanish and English, as well as an art gallery that is open daily. In the old city are Galería Polomas, Galería Luiggi Marrozzini, and the other branch of Galería Botello.

For films, the mainland visitor has one advantage not available in Europe. The latest American films are not dubbed, as they are in France and Germany, but presented with subtitles, which means that the English is there to be heard. At the beginning of 1990, for instance, moviehouses in the "Zona Metropolitana," which is to say Santurce, were showing Look Who's Talking, War of the Roses, Kickboxer, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Back to the Future II, "Family Business," and "We're No Angels." Many of the same films were screened in the suburban moviehouses of Hato Rey, Río Piedras, Guaynabo, Bayamón and Carolina; the last town is near the beach resort next to the airport, Isle Verde, which differs from the Condado in having only the entertainment offered at the hotels.

Two problems in my experience of San Juan moviegoing are that sometimes the theater's sound system can be fuzzy or its volume too low, because most of the viewers are reading the Spanish. Another time I heard the characters in Sophie's Choice switch into Polish while the sub-titles continued in Spanish. For the first problem, I simply asked the theater ticket clerk to adjust the sound; for the second, there was no solution short of watching the film again in America, where English sub-titles appeared while Polish is spoken. Those who can understand Spanish often find at the three theaters of the Cine Arte in Hato Rey (respectively the Renoir, the Buñuel and the Ford--big league names all) consequential films from Spain, France, Italy and Latin America well before their release on the mainland.

To find schedules of films and other cultural events, the best source in English is the cultural pages of the daily San Juan Star, but a fuller list, including telephone numbers and starting times, appears in the far larger Spanish-language paper, El Nuevo Diá, which thankfully keeps English film titles in English. The other useful guide is the monthly Qué Pasa?, best translated as "what's happening," a thick small-format monthly magazine that is available free at the airport and in most hotels. Cultural events for the coming month are listed on its opening pages. Remember, in telephoning places, that the English competence here is roughly equivalent to that in Germany, which is to say that though Puerto Ricans have learned and heard English most of their lives they prefer to speak something else. So you may need to speak slowly and listen carefully, especially for Latino pronunciations of familiar words.

If your sense of culture includes sports, as mine does, don't forget the complex in Hato Rey that includes the Roberto Clemente Coliseum, an indoor arena, and the Hiram Bithorn stadium, which houses both the San Juan Metros and Santurce Crabbers of the Puerto Rican Winter (baseball) League. Seating nearly 20,000 on a single level, it has all the comforts of home, including vendors who sell cotton candy, beer (called cerveza) and piña colada with or without rum. The teams mix high minor leaguers with locals, some of whom have played in the majors (Edgar Fernandez, Rey Quinones, Rey Palacios, for three). High season runs from late October to December, with games played mostly at night. By early January, the top four teams begin a playoff, whose winner will face the best teams from the winter leagues in Mexico, Dominican Republic, and Venezuela at the end of January.

The stadium itself is a short cab ride from the Condado, but be sure to pronounce it correctly: Ee-ram Bee-thorn, after a Chicago Cubs pitcher who was in the 1940s the first Puerto Rican to play in the major leagues. If your pronunciation isn't understood, say "baseball next to the Plaza Las Américas," which everyone knows, because it is the largest shopping center in the Caribbean. You can ask the cab driver to return at the end of the game, which he can hear on local radio (though it is not televised), or telephone a radio taxi when the game is over. For $4.50, I got a fifth-row box seat directly behind home plate; general admission is $3.00.

In my opinion, the Puerto Rican Winter League offers the real thing, baseball as it used to be, without background music, video replays or commercials between innings. (At a game I attended recently, San Juan vs. Mayaguéz, there was also no national anthem, oddly, and no seventh-inning stretch; the San Juan fans sat behind the plate and out toward first base, while those from Mayaguéz sat on the third-base side, with everyone trying their hardest to win--much like a mainland college football game. The game played continuously through a brief mild drizzle.) The schedule is published in the sports pages of both major newspapers. You can wager donuts against dollars that the weather will be warm.

San Juan is no beach resort in the middle of some Caribbean nowhere; it is a city like any other North American metropolis its size, say Kansas City, in having an sophisticated public that wants first-rank music, dance, and film and, thus, a wealth of activities to suit their tastes. Thankfully, these events are also available to tourists from the mainland, if they are adventurous and know where to find them. Add to this wealth other activities, beginning with baseball in mid-winter and including jibaro and saints-day festivals, that are not available back home.