Miriam Moukhles also knows how to do cabaret

Abecedari is the second creation work by a young tandem of artists who made an impact with their first show at Maldà and who are residents at La Beckett this season. Nodi: de gossos i malditos already looked back, specifically at the counterculture of the seventies of the last century, and this Abecedari continues to focus on the past. In this case, on the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze. This, at least, was the starting point of the show. But in the process, things got tangled up and very little remained of the alphabet of that philosopher who, at seventy, jumped from the window of his Paris apartment and left the recording of a long interview where each letter evoked a concept.

A fleeting but attractive image at the beginning of the play announces what, after all, is the core of its content. The actress Miriam Moukhles, on a podium enveloped in smoke and golden light and with the air of a star, sings a song in Arabic and Spanish. Immediately afterwards, the performance seems to get serious with two young researchers who work and discuss the philosopher's legacy. Pure mirage, because then Fred Galiana, European featherweight champion residing in Mataró, appears; the daughter, here a pianist, of the Russian painter Nicola de Staël, a close friend of Georges Braque and who, like Deleuze, one day jumped from the window of his home in Antibes; a Maghrebi griot storyteller, Mrabet, and, above all, Juanita de Tánger, a Tangier star imagined by the writer Ángel Vázquez in the international Tangier of the mid-20th century.

Juanita will eat it all up. An elegant cabaret singer with the air of El Molino who sings – and sings well –, tells stories, and even socializes with the audience. Voluntarily or involuntarily, this Abecedari becomes a vehicle for Miriam Moukhles to show everything she is capable of doing, which is a lot. Along the way, the other characters, and with them the performers, get lost wondering what they are doing in this mess. It doesn't matter, because the one who plays and wins with resolution and authority is Moukhles, an unrestrained actress who gives us and will give us nights of theatrical joy. Certainly.