Spice of life David Gonzalez brings ¡Sofrito! toTrinity Rep BY JOHNETTE RODRIGUEZ

When David Gonzalez was seven years old, his great-uncle José made him a puppet theater, his mother hung red velvet curtains on it, and he’s been telling stories ever since. As an adult, Gonzalez has performed at hundreds of elementary, middle, and high schools across North America, as well as in prestigious theaters and museums from coast to coast. He earned a doctorate in music therapy at NYU and, for eight years, he hosted an award-winning interactive radio program called New York Kids.

But it wasn’t until 1997 that Gonzalez began to tap into his Afro-Cuban/Puerto Rican heritage. When he did, he came up with the award-winning Broadway show ¡Sofrito!, which he’ll bring, along with his collaborators Larry Harlow and the Latin Legends Band, to Trinity Rep’s Family Fun Series next week (March 19 and 20).

"I didn’t want to be pigeonholed into a multicultural shoebox," Gonzalez explained in a phone conversation from his home in Rockland County, New York. "It wasn’t until my career was established and the passing of my grandmother that I felt it was time to do it."

Gonzalez started collecting myths from Latino and Puerto Rican culture and put together a program of cuentos that he did at schools. Then the New Victory Theater, on 42nd Street in Manhattan, underwrote a project using Gonzalez’s stories and music and Larry Harlow’s band, and they had themselves a Broadway show that sold out its run: ¡Sofrito!

"Harlow wanted to keep the classic salsa sound alive, that sound that comes of the melding of Afro-Cuban and big-band jazz," Gonzalez remembered, "and he saw this as an opportunity to inform a whole new generation. For me, to tell stories within that tradition and with the lushness of that musical environment was a dream."

¡Sofrito! alternates between catchy songs and enticing stories, flashes of dynamite musical chops, and vibrant, nuanced tale-spinning.

Gonzalez includes two Afro-Cuban orishas, or creation myths, in the show; a Puerto Rican tale about the healer/trickster Milomaki; and a story from his own childhood, about his Tio José introducing him to the magical world of music. Gonzalez is still in awe of the stories in ¡Sofrito!, of the basic human truths they unfold, and of the thread of music in all of our lives.

"The creation myths remind us that life came out of the earth," Gonzalez reflected, "and that’s why when we go into the woods, we feel like we belong. With Chango’s story about trading his ability to see the future for the beat of a drum, it’s also very powerful stuff. He sings a song called ‘The Beat of My Heart,’ because he always plays with the beat of his own heart, which is also the pulse of his people. All our hearts are beating to the same pulse. The song says, ‘From mother to daughter, from father to son / The rhythm of life will set us free.’ "

Gonzalez peppers his stories with comic sound effects and spices them with Spanish phrases. Sofrito is, after all, a Latin-American mix of onions, garlic, tomatoes, and peppers, both sweet and hot. So, too, in ¡Sofrito!, Gonzalez may sing a soft, alluring ballad one moment, and the drummer may launch into a "meringue attack" the next.

Almost all of Gonzalez’s cadences are rhythmic, and at certain moments his speaking turns into a chant or a beat which the band picks up and runs with. As Gonzalez begins to clap or dance, he urges the audience to join in.

"The show is very participatory without being hokey," Gonzalez stressed. "What cuts that is that the grooves are so heavy."

Indeed, it’s hard to keep from swaying your shoulders, tapping your feet, or nodding your head when the band swings into action. Partway through the show, Gonzalez introduces each musician, laying down the percussion first of all: the clave and congas (Chembo Corniel), drums and timbales (Bobby Sanabria), bass (Guillermo Edghill), and piano (Larry Harlow); then the 10-stringed guitar-like cuatro (Yomo Toro), the trumpet (Pete Nater), and vocals (Luiscito Rosario). Larry Harlow and the Latin Legends Band have been together since 1994, putting out albums (and winning a Grammy) and touring Latin America, Europe, the US, and Japan.

Since the success of ¡Sofrito!, Gonzalez has presented his one-man shows in England at the Royal National Theater), at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, Lincoln Center, the Smithsonian Institution, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Cleveland Playhouse Square, Santa Fe Stages, and many other performing arts venues around the country. Gonzalez returned to Broadway in 1999 with MytholoJazz, based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and he was featured on Fooling with Words, Bill Moyers’s PBS documentary about poetry and spoken-word performance.

Other original shows by Gonzalez illustrate the wide-ranging commissions he has received as a storyteller: Double-Crossed: The Saga of the St. Louis, about a ship of 900 Jewish refugees who were refused entry to the US and were sent back from Havana harbor to Hitler’s Europe; The Frog Bride, a Russian folk tale accompanied by the music of Prokofiev and the art of Kandinsky; The Secret of the Ceiba Tree, based on interviews with Latino immigrants in the US; and Finding North, about the underground railroad, which will debut in April in Cincinnati. In 2002, Gonzalez released City of Dreams, a Latin jazz/spoken word project with the Poetic License Band.

Asked about the response to this current tour of ¡Sofrito!, Gonzalez noted: "The Latinos are thrilled that they’re being represented. The stories really join people together, and they really identify with them. For non-Latinos, that other culture out there making noises becomes friendly, familiar, delightful, and rich, and not so foreign after all."

¡Sofrito! will be at Trinity Rep, 201 Washington Street, Providence, on Friday, March 19 at 7 p.m. and on Saturday, March 20 at 2 p.m. Call (401) 351-4242.