Salva Rey
El Rey del Ukelele is a show halfway between Broadway and academicism. A show that takes the audience on a time journey that goes from 1879, when the ukulele was born, to the present day, demonstrating how this instrument has impacted popular culture since its appearance. Salva Rey will go through stories and songs to understand how the ukulele has accompanied some key moments in Contemporary History. Since the arrival to Hawaii of three Portuguese carpenters in 1879, they brought with them small Portuguese guitars that were redesigned there, adapting to the local material (Koa, a type of acacia). Since then, Hawaiian music began to be known, its process of reinvention throughout the 19th century. XIX, and how the ukulele appears at the right time and just defined the sound of that new music, just before it spread throughout the world. The opening of the Panama Canal in 1914 made Hawaii and its music fashionable. This is how the ukulele arrived on the American continent and already in 1916 one of the most renowned brands in the history of the guitar was producing ukuleles and ragtime musicians began to use it to play non-Hawaiian music. With the First World War the first ukuleles arrived in Europe because the American Red Cross sent several hundred instruments to the front. And so we arrive at the golden era of the ukulele that coincides with the “roaring 20s”, where it is the co-protagonist of several historical moments in the development of the technologies that will most mark the popular culture of the 20th century: the future of the industry musical, the rise of Broadway and musicals, the conversion to talkies and finally TV, which will take him to unimaginable heights of popularity, until he dies of success at the end of the sixties. He will be accompanied on stage by some of the most representative ukuleles from his spectacular collection. He will reveal curious stories about the instrument and play us a selection of songs that accompany each of the historical moments, starting with a baroque piece, to highlight the link between the reentrant tuning of the ukulele and some plucked string instruments such as the baroque guitar. This show will give us the possibility of enjoying the entire spectrum of music that can be produced with a ukulele and a voice, making us travel.
