[El podcast”Medio siglo de teatro” puede escucharse clickeando acá]
After 50 years doing theater, in which he presented more than 1,000 works and interacted with hundreds of actors, directors, authors and choreographers, Carlos Rottemberg ensures that it has “a wonderful relationship with the artists”although he clarifies: “Only a couple of people I came across would I never work with again.”
In the tenth episode of the podcast “Half a Century of Theatre”, Rottemberg tells what the particular bond is like with the most famous stars in the world of entertainment, those that the public sees as very far away and, however, they have daily contact with.
“I learned from a very young age that the raw material of this business is human beings. I realized that, to dedicate yourself to this profession, more than a businessman you have to be a theater artist. And more than a theater player, you have to be a psychologist,” he asserts and explains: “You need to be a theater artist because of going against nature. In schedules, in work days, in problems. In other words, you have to have patience, desire and conviction without having a hard time seeing an artist on a Saturday morning between three and four on Sunday, because he finished working, went to eat and therein lies the problem. The problem was that night, at one in the morning. I can’t ask him to go to the office on Monday at eight o’clock because on Monday at eight that artist will probably be sleeping and so will I, we are going at the same time as the rest of the people.”
To specify the concept of “theatrist” he speaks of Linda Peretz, his ex-wife and mother of Tomás, his eldest son. “My ex-wife never went on winter vacation with her son. We weren’t going to take him outside or inside on winter vacation, because at the time she was starring in ‘The Skinny Shotgun’ in theater, it was when the kids weren’t going to school, so all that led me to realize that you have to be theater artist There are wealthy people who approach this business attracted by the lights, the shine, but they don’t last. “They get bored quickly because they are not theater artists.”
After so many years, he knows how to keep artists happy. In this sense, he tells two anecdotes in which he knew how to put on shows that had an actress and an actor as the main audience.
The first is about the established actress Thelma Biral, one of the cast members of the play “Brujas”, a “tank” that has been on the bill in one of the theaters in Rottemberg for more than 30 years. “I worked throughout Thelma Biral’s career, I know where she lives, and long before ‘Brujas’, she asked the person who posted posters of the plays to place them on the path she walked every day. And she did it because, even if I posted 350,000 posters, she was going to tell me that she had not seen them. Instead, she told me that they saw each other a lot. She showed him her usual route…”
The second anecdote refers to the renowned Spanish actor Alberto Closas, who performed in Spain and Argentina and died in 1994. “We spent time in Mar del Plata and Closas lived in Santa Clara del Mar. Every day I traveled by car between seven in the afternoon and eight, so I would ask the Mar del Plata radio station that would broadcast a good number of advertising spots for the work at that time. The time most listened to by the public was in the morning but the time at night was what Alberto Closas listened to and in that way he noticed that the spots were there.”
There is something he doesn’t like about artists. He says it and gets serious. “I believe that theater is artisanal. I hate the artist who arrives with his backpack hanging while the audience is entering and they see him before the performance begins.. For me, going to the theater has magic. I’m from the school where the artist arrived an hour and a half early and locked himself in the dressing room to prepare his role. I don’t like the one who is going to do a drama and you see him pass by with his little backpack asking permission because he is arriving late. I do not believe in that”.
Its theaters open “inexorably” from Wednesday to Sunday. Actors and actresses who know him know that they cannot ask to cut roles. The businessman has an explanation for this: “If you have a vocation and you also earn much better than what the worker who generally takes two buses to get to work and works eight, nine hours a day plus trips to his house, At least he will work nine hours a week in six hour-and-a-half shows. “If an artist doesn’t do that, I don’t want to work with them.”
In the last minute of the podcast episode, Rottemberg will speak with great respect about Moria Casan whom he defines as a true “all-rounder” of the profession. And first he will tell what the action of “putting your finger on” means in his world, a way of signing a contract with just your thumbs. He marks the level of mutual trust between artists and the businessman who, driven by the vocation that has guided him since he was very young, points out that: “I never felt like I worked in my life, I always went to the theater. You saw how people say ‘I’m going to the theater’, I go to the theater, I never went to work. It is my vocation.”
