Artur Azevedo (1855-1908) was one of the leading figures of Brazilian theater in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Between 1873 and 1908, he wrote over 200 plays and revistas (theatrical revues), as well as poetry, short stories, and journalistic chronicles. Flora Sussekind’s As revistas do ano focuses on those revistas in which Azevedo, often in collaboration with other writers, literally put in parodic or allegorical “review” some of the major political, social, or cultural events of the previous year. República (Artur and Aluísio Azevedo, 1889; opened in March 1980), for example, looks at the events leading up to the declaration of the republic and not only satirizes Dom Pedro II by recreating the gala Ilha Fiscal ball as “O Festim de Baltasar” (“Belshazzar’s Feast”), but also pokes fun at Republicans, in a scene cut by censors shortly after the play’s opening.
Sussekind argues that the revista’s success in the last decade of the empire and the first years of the republic corresponds to a utopian desire for the renovation and modernization of Rio de Janeiro as the nation’s capital. She sees the capital in theatrical terms, not only as the stage of the most important historical events of the period, but also as the mise-en-scène of a Brazil desirous of modernity and of an urban population wanting to substitute the naïf for the chic in the best Parisian tradition. In this sense, the capital is a mirage, an illusion, a utopia. The revista functions as the theatrical representation of this utopia, helping to “invent” Rio de Janeiro by bringing to the stage the scenario and protagonists of the city’s transformation and by offering the public a fictional solution to anxieties caused by modernization. Rio de Janeiro is thus the revista’s central protagonist.
The study, based on an analysis of 19 revistas written between 1877 and 1907, looks not only at the major targets of satire—politicians, bureaucrats, scandals, public opinion, and the press—but also at the way in which the genre, originally deriving from French vaudeville and comic operetta, evolved into a popular national theatrical form. In this sense, the book is of interest not only to literary and cultural historians, but also to those concerned with popular culture and the relationships between dominant and dependent forms of cultural production, especially since parody has, in the past 30 years, become a major strategy of resistance in Brazilian theater, cinema, and popular music.
