Osvaldo Cattone leaves a very powerful legacy to peruvian theater as an actor, director and promoter, giving it a business sense that is key to its sustainability.
He came to Peru in the seventies for a telenovela, and stayed until his death at 88, always vital, thinking about the next project, giving his opinion with a provocative style and openly about what he wanted, with a spirit and air of divo, because he always felt, wherever he was, center stage.
From his Teatro Marsano, in more than four decades he put on wonderful and remembered works, with which many of us learned to see theater, summoning a frequent audience who knew what they were going for and who always left satisfied.
The last play that Cattone put on and directed was a funny Good Neighbors, whose ad is still on the front of the theater. Before he had a replacement, a decade later, Respira, and then he put on an endearing Vivir es formidable in which he acted with the great Carlos Gassols. He was preparing to act in El rey se muere, by Eugene Ionesco, but he could no longer because the pandemic came that put the Peruvian theater in bed ICU.
His performance that I liked the most, in which he was great and unforgettable, was El Padre, directed by Juan Carlos Fisher, on the advancement of Alzheimer’s from the patient’s perspective.
It was first performed in La Plaza de Larcomar in 2017 – the first time I had performed outside the Marsano – and one night I was invited to moderate, at the end of the performance, a discussion with the audience. I asked him if it affected or wasted him doing this complex work, and he replied that “no, I’m very professional, every night, when I finish, I go to the dressing room, urinate, change, and then eat a steak with a glass of wine” .
The Father recovered in the Marsano Theater in 2019, where I found it to be even better. I mentioned this to Cattone at the Grand National Theater one night when we had a seat together in the second row to see an impressive Shakespearean Macbeth in Sardinian (Macbettu) at the 2019 Birthplace Festival. “Why? He asked me. , and I told him that it felt like I was at home. “Could be,” he told me. At the end of the play he stopped to applaud, euphoric, with the remarkable spectacle, while everyone around him looked only at him.
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