#PickoftheWeek | Family-friendly Frida Kahlo show to dazzle on Saturday
BY QEDC It's In Queens
It’s a bilingual, one-woman show. It combines storytelling, live music, art, puppets, and audience participation. It explores the life of a famous artist. It’s geared toward youngsters ages six and up.
And it’s simply marvelous.
Flushing Town Hall will offer The Colors of Frida/Los Colores de Frida on Saturday, July 14, at 10 am and again at noon.
Paola Poucel, who won an ATI Award for Best Children’s Theater Actress, is Frida Kahlo in this roughly 70-minute piece. And she certainly looks the part with the mono-brow, braids, embroidered blouse, flower-covered hair, and chunky necklace that the Mexican painter and cultural icon rocked in the early-to-mid 1900s.
Poucel, an American Musical and Dramatic Academy graduate, sings, plays guitar, interacts with a monkey hand puppet, and even paints as she takes the audience through Kahlo’s life by telling the stories behind some of her most famous works.
Born in 1907, Kahlo began her career by making mostly self-portraits. She married world famous muralist Diego Rivera in 1929, and added him to her “selfie” pieces. Avowed communists, both were extremely active in hot button political issues of the day, and they garnered international attention for their artistic talent, tumultuous open relationship — which featured a divorce and remarriage — and advocacy for Soviet leader Leon Trotsky and various feminist and LGBTQ causes.
Kahlo became larger than life after her death in 1954, especially in the early 21st Century, when “Fridamania” swept through Mexico and the United States. She has been portrayed in various books, plays, movies, and even a 2002 Hollywood biopic starring Salma Hayek.
Tickets are $14 for adults and $8 for children. Plus, anybody between 13 and 19 years of age can attend for free as part of Flushing Town Hall’s ongoing Teen Access Program.
Poucel, who hails from Mexico’s Puebla, offers this play through Teatro SEA, a Manhattan-based, bilingual arts-in-education organization that was established in 1985.
Photos: Teatro SEA/Paola Poucel