Back in 1976, when Hugo and Rebecca Medrano launched GALA Hispanic Theatre out of a gutted Adams Morgan townhouse, D.C. was still coming into its own as both a theatrical haven and a Latino hub.
Yes, Arena Stage was well established. Ford’s Theatre had recently reopened, and the Kennedy Center was five years old. But Shakespeare Theatre Company didn’t exist. The same for Studio Theatre and Woolly Mammoth. Suburban staples such as Signature Theatre and Round House were also years away. And if you were looking for a Spanish-language production anywhere? Buena suerte.
So Hugo, an Argentine-born theater-maker who had immigrated to the United States in 1970, set out to create a company that would honor myriad Latino cultures. “I became convinced,” he wrote in a 1982 column for The Washington Post, “that this was my objective.” As Hugo pooled some $60,000 with his wife, Rebecca — an American dancer with a degree in Latin American studies from Smith College in Massachusetts — the couple bought that 18th Street townhouse and founded GALA as a nonprofit.
After hollowing out the building, they turned it into the kind of “café teatro” that Hugo had frequented in Argentina. Often mounting plays in Spanish and English on alternating nights, the theater lived up to the GALA moniker (short for Grupo de Artistas Latinoamericanos) and began welcoming actors, playwrights and other artists from across the Latin American diaspora. Sure enough, works from Argentina, Chile, Peru, Cuba, Spain and more filled out those early GALA seasons.
“Thinkers, writers, creators — they needed a safe space,” Rebecca recalls. “So our little house became a place for art.”
GALA cycled through many homes over the subsequent decades, with performances at a warehouse near the Washington Convention Center, the Sacred Heart School in Mount Pleasant and what is now the Klein Theatre in Penn Quarter. The company has occupied the historic Tivoli Theatre in Columbia Heights since 2005, and its current show — the metatextual world-premiere musical “Aguardiente” — is concluding its 50th season. One reason for its longevity: a Hispanic population in D.C. that surged from 3 percent in the 1980 Census to 11 percent by 2020.
Yet making it to the half-century milestone also came with heartache and hardship, particularly in recent years. The pandemic closed the theater’s doors for months, then curtailed its capacity. A 2024 cyberattack briefly drained GALA’s coffers. And that crisis came eight months after the most devastating loss: Hugo’s death at age 80 after a respiratory infection.
“It’s hard personally for me, always, because I wanted him here on the 50th and that’s not true,” Rebecca says on a late April afternoon in the Tivoli lobby. “But there’s so many wonderful artists that have come through and continue to come through that keep us going — that really keep this fire going.”
Take “Aguardiente” co-creator Luis Salgado, a performer in the Broadway musicals “In the Heights” and “On Your Feet!” who went on to direct and choreograph groundbreaking Spanish-language productions of both shows at GALA. (The theater has long relished mounting contemporary English classics in Spanish, going back to a renowned 1993 staging of “Kiss of the Spider-Woman” that starred Hugo Medrano.)
Although GALA’s box office receipts and operating budget have never placed it among D.C.’s onstage powerhouses, Salgado posits that the theater has long punched above its weight in awards recognition, critical acclaim and cultural impact. Case in point: Salgado’s work there has repeatedly cleaned up at the Helen Hayes Awards — D.C.’s answer to the Tonys — as “In the Heights” nabbed a ceremony-best nine prizes in 2018 and “On Your Feet!” repeated the feat in 2023.
“When you have 50 years of history, and you have 50 years of nurturing Latin representation, you’re not small,” Salgado says. “It feels like home. It feels like the potential to be truly who I am and to speak truly what is in my heart.”
Salgado has funneled those feelings into “Aguardiente,” which he conceived with composer Daniel Alejandro Gutiérrez. The new show traces its origins to an unrelated theater workshop in Cali, Colombia, where Salgado, a native of Puerto Rico, and the Colombian-born Gutiérrez bonded over a musical parlor game and shots of aguardiente (a sugary spirit popular in Colombia).
Drawing inspiration from that experience, the duo came up with a magical realism extravaganza about two immigrant writers in New York City — a Puerto Rican director-turned-playwright and a Colombian composer — collaborating on a folkloric ode to their Latin roots. In many ways, “Aguardiente” is a musical about the making of, well, “Aguardiente.”
“How do we make theater? And how hard is it to make theater as a Latine artist?” asks Salgado, whose show will be staged in Spanish and English with surtitles. “I started blending all of that into the narrative of what it could be, and it turns out that we created two fictional characters inspired [by] us.”
As a show about creativity, commerce and the challenge of getting Latino art produced in the U.S., “Aguardiente” illuminates the road GALA must navigate as it embarks on its 51st season and beyond.
In addition to the headwinds all theaters face, amid public funding cuts, changing audience habits and a lingering post-pandemic malaise, GALA must wrestle with a fraught political climate. As artistic director Gustavo Ott points out, the Trump administration’s aggressive deportation campaign has only upped the anxieties facing a theater that has long taken pride in employing immigrants and foreign workers.
“The immediate challenges are very, very real ones — like, for example, ICE taking people in front of the theater,” says Ott, a Venezuelan playwright who took the reins at GALA in 2024, referring to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents. “This is a Hispanic theater, so we are there, exactly in the first row of cruelty against the community.”
Under the guidance of Ott, whose work was frequently produced under Hugo Medrano’s leadership, GALA is forging ahead undeterred. Among the shows on tap for its 51st season: the new Ott-penned docudrama “Garbo: The Artist Who Saved the World,” about a Spanish spy in World War II, and a world-premiere musical spin on “The Odyssey.”
“We’re thinking that we’re going to survive 50 more” seasons, Ott says. “We’re here, and you can’t tell the story of the United States in the 21st century without this culture.”
Asked whether she ever imagined GALA reaching 50 years when she co-founded the company, Rebecca Medrano could only cackle and blurt out an unmitigated “no.” But Hugo, who arrived stateside after fleeing political unrest in Argentina, Peru and Spain, had the right vision at the right time. “Our goal for the future,” he wrote in 1982, “is to establish a national Hispanic performing arts center that will unify us while at the same time recognize the diversity within our cultural heritage.”
“Hugo’s no longer with us,” Rebecca says. “But his idea was a great idea, and it’s not going anywhere.”
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