There is no couple’s fight, bedroom fight, attack of jealousy or cuckoldry that does not appear in the repertoire of Pimpinela, a duo that has closed its tour in Barcelona to celebrate 40 years on stage. Although it may seem like masochism, when the last encore arrives, Lucía Galán consults the audience:
–Do you want the song with or without a fight?
–With a fight!!!
The Coliseum theater is a clamor after two hours of marital pugilism between the Galán brothers, the Pimpinela duo. The reproaches have flown and yet the public wants more: “and now what are you missing?”, she despairs, “a flower,” she complains, who scolds her with “you love yourself more than anyone.” Lucía’s counterattack knocks out Joaquín – not very well matched in real life, like the couples in her songs – and lifts the audience from their seats. If the couple is a war, the Pimpinela audience is clear about their side…
The audience is warm and devoted to the effective show. Song after song without pauses, faces and faces, audiovisual fragments, Pimpinela is an arguing machine.
What they don’t unravel…
–It’s pure soap opera!
This is how Israel, 40 years old, and his friend praise them, while they eat popcorn, enthusiastic about the caricature of the wonderful world of the circus, sorry, of the couple. In the same row of stalls, a spectator, wearing shorts, dances, knows the words and backfires. Another notable sector of the audience is the Latinos, an alliance that creates a festival atmosphere despite the successive shipwrecks of the couples staged by Joaquín and Lucía, Argentines, children of Spanish immigrants and an artistic duo due to maternal imperative.
Remembering parents, with photos on the screens, represents a truce. And a mirage. Pimpinela has managed to survive her first great success, Olvídame y pega laturn, number one in the singles in half the world, back in 1982. Thus, Raquel, 47 years old, from Barcelona, ??has come with her co-worker Lourdes, motivated by “ longing and nostalgia. During breaks from work she makes us sing it, feigning anger. As a child I knew them all.”
Pimpinela has not reinvented itself –why lose its personality?–, but has updated the fights and adapted them to the winds. Hence, in Betrayal, the fight between a hurt Lucía and her man for flirting at a dinner with a couple of friends. A little drink, some laughter, those looks, I’m not blind… As the Pimpernel suspected. Joaquín has gotten involved. An unfaithful man, yes, but not with his friend but with… his husband (an outcome that the public welcomed as they welcomed the arrival of the Seventh Knight at the Capitol cinema).
Far from the cocky man of the aforementioned Olvídame – a husband disappears for two years and tries to rejoin the home as if nothing had happened –, the successive successes outline a traditional woman but empowered to the core, of whom she does not miss one and is even willing to cum a love affair with a man twenty years younger (When I see it, sung while the screens broadcast a soap opera video clip with an apotheotic ending).
The performance evokes the lights of El Molino, couples arguing in the Mexico City subway, married and unattached men whom the female Pimpernel unmasks, with the decisive support of the public. Poor Joaquín – former alpha male – even receives an ID card and limits himself to clearing balls.
A Pimpinela show is uniquely distracting: they make a show of dodgy love, fights, “nothing’s wrong with me, I’m tired,” silly jealousy and those soap opera exaggerations with a plucked gallant and a brave woman. It’s not opera, it’s anger.
