The Catalan comedian and actor has been facing a solo tour for three years. That, after four decades with his companions Joan Gràcia and Paco Mir, would seem crazy, but the public has responded with open arms to the monologue ‘Finally alone!’ that landed yesterday at the Víctor Jara Theater and travels this weekend to the Leal Theater on Saturday and to the Adeje Auditorium on Sunday, in Tenerife, to make people laugh for a little while longer.
The Carles Sans on and off stage have a common skill: telling stories. For four decades he has cultivated gestural theater with Tricicle through absurd, everyday, bizarre situations, the side effect of which has always been to make people laugh out loud. What happened behind the scenes, in the dressing room they shared, the anecdotes that have shaped him as a comedian and actor are the ones that star in the monologue At last alone! with whom he has been touring throughout Spain for the last three years. He contemplates the line of the Las Canteras bar before jumping into the Víctor Jara Theater, where he will be greeted with applause as the spotlight comes on that follows him in a dialectical dance that he never stops.
“At first I missed them, especially in the moments before acting by always sharing the same dressing room, but this show is in a great moment after all the filming it has had, I know how and where the audience laughs! “, smile. So much so that he asked a technician to write down how many times he heard the laughter: 400 times in an hour, a whopping “four or five times a minute.” He is to blame for the shortness of breath and the horsy howls of squeezing between elastic bands for barely an hour what has happened with Joan Gràcia and Paco Mir since they founded the Catalan theater company in 1979. At that time, they were known as “the bald man , the chubby and the handsome”, of course, Sans was the “handsome”, not “handsome”, as he remembers as soon as he began the Show. That criticism that destroyed them when they first presented Tricicle didn’t matter much, then they would achieve success with productions like manicomic, Slastic, terrifying either Garrick.
Now that he has a voice thanks to the text that José Corbacho has co-directed, Sans goes out of his way to capture the attention of the crowd beyond his hands, his legs, the body that has demanded so much of him, spinning hilarious anecdotes that speak from the beginning as a child who announced the rebellion that meant abandoning his law degree, his job and so many things with the aim of being an actor, trying to fulfill that much-maligned dream that would unite him with a bunch of hallucinated people like him. “These stories are all true,” believe it or not. In this one, there’s a colonoscopy of unexpected twists; in this other one, a leader who approaches to congratulate them without really knowing why; and here, a trip to Japan that teaches them the virtues of learning about a new culture. Life, which sometimes surpasses fiction.
Beyond the controversies
Apart from the controversies in the media landscape, the political joke expires too quickly and “we were more interested in talking about the human being,” Sans confides. So the right hand to the Catalan ex-president Artur Mas was without rancor. TRUE? “The glasses jumped to the other side”, due to a miscalculation of the direct. No hard feelings. The unspeakable goes further by recreating that when a member of the royal family finished seeing a number of the company, he asked himself, “but how many were they?” So, in the face of so much disaster, the first thing is to relativize everything, including yourself. Growing up a hypochondriac, he admits that the first thing is to know how to laugh at oneself before achieving the complicity of others. Despite the doubts, “what will he do without his colleagues?”, Despite the reluctance and muteness, Sans practices a lively and loquacious theater that arouses the sympathy of those who see it with that ironic touch that sprinkles the stories. that says.
The illuminated faces of Víctor Jara revealed the variety of ages with the same wrinkles at the corners of the lips and forehead, “this has been one of our great virtues: reaching very diverse people and making a 10-year-old boy laugh just as much as a another 80”. Sans, who prefers not to put on an eleven-stick shirt, observes and analyzes his surroundings and does talk about the times in which he lives, “each individual, especially on social networks, has become a jury or a kind of court in which who order you what to say and what not to say and how to do it, and among those who make you laugh there is always a point of impropriety”, he assures. He knows that some of his contemporaries would have raised blisters, like the late Pepe Rubianes, “he would have had some displeasure, most likely, given that intolerance, and that Pepe had a very thick way of saying things.”
Enjoy the recognition
To those who accused them of being “posh” comedians when they succeeded, he answers: “We started in a very precarious way where whoever was there was with a vocation to survive in some way, but it was not seen in other countries as a business, as well as trade, and it seemed that artists had to be cursed and live from bohemia. Well, no, all that has passed into history and we want to live with dignity,” he stresses. The national recognition, both from the public, critics and the arts, as well as the award of the 2023 Max Honor Award, gave them sufficient reason to know that they were on the right track, “I say this without any kind of pretension, simply, we have been lucky in our career from the beginning, since there are very few things that have gone wrong”, although he admits that he also learns from mistakes.
The trio agreed to take vacations in the summer season, like any other schoolboys, although this time they feel a greater weight on their shoulders, “I feel like I have the responsibility to defend this show even more”, with something of the nerve of a small child that peeks behind the curtain. The stories evolve and he will continue telling them at the Teatro Leal on Saturday and the Auditorio de Adeje on Sunday, in Tenerife, he will continue writing articles in The newspaper and there is something more on the way to discover. Would you march through the stadium again if there were an Olympics in Madrid? Series. Those of Barcelona in 1992 were incomparable. “We had 60,000 people tucking us in and millions from their homes, well, it was a very nice experience that could have gone well or badly, but you never know until you jump.” What things, because it keeps testing to see where it will land this time.
