Policias y Ladrones

2022 | Assistant director

Music - Opera

The premiere of the Zarzuela Policias y Ladrones should have taken place on April 5, 2018 at the Teatro de la Zarzuela in Madrid. The announcement of a strike prevented this premiere.

The contemporary piece Policias y ladrones is the Teatro de la Zarzuela’s latest commission of Tomás Marco, who returns with a zarzuela, almost half a century after the creation of Fuenteovejuna de Moreno Buendía; a means to update, in a way, the genre. For the composer, this new production is "an artistic adventure that, I think, was worth trying", because it is about attempting a new creative project about political corruption with the intention of showing it as "a singular farce, without the gravity of demoralizing criticism, with the weakness and levity of an intriguing argument that incorporates suspense by displaying characters, probable hypothetical links, and absurdities".

This new zarzuela, with its tragicomic tone and sarcastic skepticism, seduces musically. The conductor, José Ramón Encinar, is a master who deeply understands the contemporary music of his country. Carme Portaceli's staging is like a kind of atonement, through the irony of scenic language, which allows us to represent the horror of this story, like a fire in the night of San Juan, maintaining a distance from what weighs like a slab and that of which we are ashamed every day: corruption.