In 2023, the public is already used to the lights that announce the numerous musicals on the Gran Vía in Madrid, in front of which the Vigo actor Alejandro Jato posed on the morning of last Tuesday. But in 1975 the major Broadway and West End productions did not reach Spain. And it was even less likely that Jesus Christ Superstar would do it, a rock opera that told the Passion of Christ in a way that was too modern for a country still ruled by a dictator. In some ways the city hasn’t changed that much. Members and supporters of the far-right terrorist group Guerrillas of Christ the King besieged the box office of the Alcalá Palace Theater (now Nuevo Alcalá) night after night in an attempt to intimidate spectators who came to purchase tickets for the show written by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice. None of this stopped singer Camilo Sesto. The Alicante artist managed to put together the ambitious installation he had seen in London years before. He achieved this two weeks before Franco’s death.
This performance is precisely what Camilo Superstar is about, the new original Atresplayer series from Buendía Estudios, which arrives this Sunday in the platform’s catalog. The four-part fiction is therefore not a biography of the musician, who died in 2019, explains Jato, who plays him on the screen. “To relieve the pressure, I focused on exploring who Camilo was, away from the stereotype we have of him, that of his final phase. “I wanted to know who this twenty-year-old was, what happened to him back then, something that is not so close to the public’s memory,” says the actor in the center of Madrid. The resulting Camilo is the one born with the surname Blanes Cortés. Also the one who risks his fortune and his career to bring the biggest music show to date to Spain as part of his production and investment. To achieve this, he surrounded himself with other idealists like himself and distanced himself from those who did not believe in his artistic vision. The main cast of the series is completed by Adrián Lastra as Teddy Bautista, Natalia Reyes as Ángela Carrasco and Elena Rivera as Paloma San Basilio, the big musical star of the time, from whom Sesto had to withhold the role of María Magdalena.
Alejandro Jato recreates the moment when Camilo Sesto brings the musical “Jesus Christ Superstar” to the stage. @Mario Martin
Alejandro Jato plays Camilo Sesto in a scene from the first episode of “Camilo Superstar”.@Mario Martin
Just before, during the audition, Jato didn’t feel pressured to play a legend of Spanish music. “At first I didn’t see myself in my role, so I was very reassured because I thought they wouldn’t invite me for a second test,” says the Galician. From the person he discovered behind the character, he is left with the courage and intuition of someone who was aware of it. He knew how to listen to his surroundings, but only just. “I had a lot of intuition,” he says.
“What the series tells often made me think about how important culture is for a country. Especially for someone who has been oppressed for 40 years. How it is shaped by the theater he sees, the cinema he sees and the music he listens to…” comments the actor. As a teenager, Jato attended a performance by Tamzin Townsend in his city and knew that he wanted to dedicate himself to the stage. The next day, his mother, a theater lover, signed him up for a small classical theater group in her neighborhood. He was the youngest of the fifty-plus students he responded to in productions such as Shakespeare’s Othello. At 26, the former student of Juan Carlos Corazza’s school has already worked with the biggest names on the Spanish scene: from Miguel del Arco, who remains his advisor, to Àlex Rigola and Marta Pazos.
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As with the actor, the series’ writing team’s research yielded an unexpected result regarding the artist they had in mind, explains Tatiana Rodríguez, who is in charge of the writing process. “Camilo Sesto was an incredible artist, the only one who was a performer, composer and producer at that time. For this reason, we weren’t too worried about falling into parody as it was at its peak at that time, as we were concerned with finding out the story behind the events and their true motivations. “We were looking for a story that was so interesting that it would work even if Camilo Sesto wasn’t its protagonist,” says the screenwriter by phone this Thursday.
To document the arrival of Jesus Christ Superstar in Spain, they resorted to the information published by the author Marta García Sarabia in her dissertation on the Spanish adaptation of the famous musical. And in the audiovisual archive of those 1970s they found many moments from his first tour of Latin America, which they supplemented with the enormous number of articles about him that were published at the time in the print press. Sesto, a professional in promotion, appeared very tense and measured in his interviews and public interventions, which is why those responsible for the series explored the most intimate aspect of music through the mother of his son, Lourdes Ornelas. Using their statements and those of other people close to them, they reconstructed the young man who was “passionate, non-conformist, courageous, who took everything to the last consequence; the artist who didn’t want to be a product,” says Rodríguez.
It is precisely at this point that the Atresplayer series inevitably ties in with Bosé, another of the many fictions that have recently portrayed Spain through its pop idols. Camilo Superstar shows the special relationship between friendship and love that the mature Lucía Bosé (in this case played by the model Eugenia Silva) lived with the twenty-year-old Camilo Sesto. “For him she was a very important support in a moment of intimate discovery,” says the screenwriter. The series shows the Italian actress as a reference for the musician, who at that time is looking for an unparalleled artistic personality in a Spain isolated by Francoism. In Bosé’s chapters, written by Boris Izaguirre, Ángeles González-Sinde and Isabel Vázquez in parallel with those of Rodríguez, the viewer sees a woman who forgoes the intellectual stimulation she enjoyed in Italy in order to cope with the Bullfighter Luis Miguel Dominguín living in gray Spain. But the influence he exerts on his son makes him look into the mirror of the great international artists and, like Camilo Sesto, tries to escape the prefabricated product that the music industry wants to make of him. In fact, it was Camilo Sesto who produced Miguel Bosé’s first album.
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