Paula Ribó is killing Rigoberta Bandini

BarcelonaThere's a particularly symbolic moment in Rigoberta Bandini's concert. After half a dozen songs and before the performance. In Spain we call it loneliness, takes off her wig. Is the simulation or the nightmare over? With the Palau Sant Jordi packed with an audience caught up in the melodramatic euphoria of the night, the post-pandemic diva began her performance with material from the disc Jesus Christ Superstar (2025)The staging was pure theater, as La Lupe would say, somewhere between the set of a 1960s music show and an old-fashioned game show. In this decadent pop setting, she seemed disoriented and on the verge of existential collapse. Everything was a bit precarious, even the sound quality, but it helped project the anguish and insecurity of CXT (Club Xavalas Tristes), which she played almost like a puppet. It was like Mari Trini realizing she doesn't want to be the diva everyone else wants her to be. And then an absurd character appears, a sort of toxic presenter who escaped from a rehab clinic. "Rigoberta Martínez," "Roberta," "Renata," "Robertita"… "She's a singer-songwriter," she says. It's so much of a simulation that it's almost grotesque. "Don't make us think, make us dance," the presenter shouts, who knows if she's representing the Witch of the West, the music industry, or the critics.

This kind of theatrics made sense when Paula Ribó launched the Rigoberta Bandini project, because the Barcelona artist didn't have enough repertoire and because irony and kitsch allowed her to maintain distance from the character. But things have changed. "This song is a story about the existential void that sometimes pierces me," she said toward the end of the show, when she introduced Miracles never happen after leaving an after-party.This isn't Rigoberta Bandini's saying this, but Paula Ribó's. It seems as if Paula Ribó is killing Rigoberta Bandini to finally be a diva without props. In fact, the concert improved a lot after that. In Spain we call it loneliness, which ended the spirit with which they danced on a float in the LGTBIQ+ Pride parade.

In everything that happened next, Paula-Rigoberta conveyed more genuine emotions the less comedy she added, and when the costume changes (half a dozen in an hour and forty minutes), the stage games of the moving platforms (always with the four musicians on the sides of the stage) and the choreographies of the six dancer-choristers played in favor of the songs, as in The flea on the sofa: electronic darkness danced with the rarefied spirit of the film I sighed while she dramatically admits the imposture of wanting to change the world without leaving the couch. She sang Let's see what happens and You will learn He sang them, living them intensely, and managed to definitively connect with Pamela Anderson, he hit from the new album: "We are all Pamela Anderson. We are all Rigoberta Bandini," she said, addressing an audience that was looking for air by waving their fans.

Joan Manuel Serrat and Massiel

Paula Ribó is a very good singer, committed to intonation and diction, and she shows this especially in her covers, perhaps because she feels more liberated. At the Palau Sant Jordi she did it with A guitar, by Joan Manuel Serrat, and especially with Love, by Massiel, the best and most intense performance of the night. This intensity contrasted with the cheesy romantic moment when a couple in the audience came up on stage and he proposed to her (his partner, not Ribó), and with the histrionics of keyboardist Esteban Navarro (Ribo's partner), as striking as an overexcited fairground worker.

In the final stretch of a concert that went from strength to strength, and in front of an audience that hasn't memorized songs from La Oreja de Van Gogh for a while, pieces such as I'm older (which sounds exactly like a song by La Oreja de Van Gogh remixed by La Casa Azul), Bitch (the great disco moment), KAIMAN, Too many drugs and Oh mom, after which Sant Jordi was a stunning ovation, which Ribó and the dancers acknowledged silently, backlit and with their heads bowed. "It's always very exciting to play at home," she admitted at the end of a good show (especially the final two-thirds) that ended with a tribute to Franco Battiato and a farewell conga line while the song "El Mundo" played. Gimme Hope, Jo'anna, by Eddy Grant.

The most revolutionary part of the musical Jesus Christ Superstar is that it does not include the resurrection of Jesus. Lest Paula Ribó ends the tour of Jesus Christ Superstar with the death of Rigoberta Bandini and denying her resurrection.