Leaning close to his friend with a swell of emotion and a wag of the thumb, he asks: “You know the words to this song?” And as the small band plays in the dingy saloon, Carlos Gardel cracks a sad smile, settles in, and sings himself into eternity.
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Manuel Romero
Manuel Romero wrote a one-act titled El bailarín del cabaret in 1922 for a comic actor named César Ratti, who was the head of the Apolo theater in Buenos Aires. The ephemeral show did prove to hold one major attraction, but it was destined to showcase a different talent: the gifted fair-haired singer Ignacio Corsini, who performed the tango “Patotero sentimental” onstage as part of the action.
The 1926 tango “Tiempos viejos” is a classic song for a few different reasons, whose intertwining tells us some important things about the tango’s backstory…
The tango “Dime mi amor” might seem like the prototypical popular song. And that’s because, with its sentimental mood of hopeful simplicity, it was created to represent on stage precisely such a showtune, in the 1941 movie Yo quiero ser bataclana (I Want to Be a Showgirl), starring the great comic actress Niní Marshall.