In 1922 Eulogio Velasco’s company presented the vaudeville show “Arco Iris” in the Apolo Theatre. Introducing a new concept to the genre revolutionizing the small-scale Vaudeville scene into a much larger spectacle catering to all types of audiences. It was a great success and in the following years the Velasco Vaudevilles changed the public’s tastes.
In 1926 the producer Arturo Carballo, a businessman who ran the Cine Doré, today the theatre of the Cineteca Spagnola, directed Frivolinas, a fiction film whose thin plot is no more than a pretext for showing the most spectacular numbers from Eulogio Velasco’s three representative shows: “Arco Iris”, “La Feria de las Hermosas”, and “Las Maravillosas”. To ease the transitions between the diverse sketches there are also performances by the most celebrated comedian of the time: Ramper, who also plays one of the principal roles in the film.
Frivolinas is an extraordinary document as it is the only existing film of the vaudevilles of the time and its interest transcends that of mere cinema, as it shows us how the scenes were set, the choreography of the numbers and the performances of the principal vedettes of the time, such as Maria Caballé, Eva Stachino and Blanca Pozas.
Although this is a silent film, it was necessary to reconstruct the original songs and music, which Berriatùa was able to do with the existing incomplete material at SGAE (a project collaborator), the Biblioteca Nacional (National Library), other libraries, periodicals, archives and private collections. Javier Pérez de Azpeitia arranged and orchestrated these materials.