Popular Art and Propaganda for Export: The Tangled Backstory of the Failure of the Broadway Musical Revue Upa y Apa/ Mexicana (1939).

The musical revue Mexicana, billed as the first Broadway production by a foreign government, faced formidable challenges. Its origin as part of a scam by aspiring film producer Sam Spiegel, who took advantage of German political theatre director Ernst Piscator's proposed move to Mexico, was only one. Despite its inauspicious beginnings, it was at the insistence of President Cárdenas's Director de Bellas Artes, Celestino Gorostiza, that the revue aspired to the status of fine art, which was its downfall. The Cárdenas administration was accustomed to employing rural popular culture, not its unruly urban counterpart, to promote itself as a virtuous regime. Unpublished scenarios for the revue by the likes of poets José Gorostiza and Javier Villarrutia in the Piscator archive demonstrate just how far removed Mexicana was from Mexico's boisterous, audience-pleasing musical theatre tradition, as well as the commercial revues of Broadway. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]