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A year ago now, Antonio Banderas received rapturous applause at the Teatro Albéniz in Madrid when he finished a dress rehearsal of the musical Company before its premiere in Madrid. It was a special performance for friends and in one of the seats was Glenn Close. An old acquaintance of the Malaga-born actor since his early days in Hollywood in the 90s, the two posted a photo together and the legendary star of Fatal Attraction and The Good Wife met the entire cast.
Banderas told her about his adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's musical and, of course, about his stage project in Malaga, where the play had premiered and had been running for months. And he told her that she had to come and meet him. A turn of the calendar later, the actress has taken her friend at his word and has shown up at the Soho Caixabank Theatre. The paradox is that her host was not in Malaga.
Banderas is in New York preparing his new film with Nicole Kidman, Babygirl, an erotic suspense thriller by Dutch director Halina Reijin. There he received a call from his friend Glenn Close, with whom he starred in The House of the Spirits almost three decades ago, telling him that she was returning to Spain and that she would stop by Malaga to see his theatre. And although Banderas could not accompany her, he called his brother Javier, who, with director of the Soho Theatre Aurora Rosales, acted as cicerone last Wednesday afternoon for the Hollywood actress.
A producer as well as a performer, Close took a special interest in the management of the company.
"She asked a lot about the staging of our own productions and how to organise a tour of Spain of the projects and musicals we had premiered," explained the Caixabank Soho Theatre.
Glenn Close couldn't resist stepping on stage and, from there, she put the acoustics to the test and was surprised by the excellent sound of the theatre in Malaga's Calle Córdoba. The stage was already set up for Imagine, the circus show that opens next Wednesday 6 December and which displays a highly technological set-up based on 200 square metres of screens on which any kind of backdrop can be projected.
The American actress was fascinated by the sense of reality of these virtual backdrops and recalled that years ago she took part in a Broadway play with a circus touch for which she also had to learn to juggle. And once on stage, she did not hesitate to have her photo taken with the set that brought back such fond memories.
The eight-time Oscar nominee - although surprisingly, she has never won - also stopped by the large mural by Malaga painter José Luis Puche, Todos los Mundos Posibles, which hangs in the foyer on the first floor of the Soho Caixabank Theatre and which caught the actress's eye.
A great tribute to the performing arts, two and a half metres high by almost five metres long, it also includes a blue square on one side showing an audience. But they are not random spectators, they are Antonio Banderas' own family, a detail that delighted Close, who picked out the Malaga-born actor's parents, his brother Javier, his daughter Stella del Carmen and Antonio himself.
Glenn Close also got to know the details of the Soho Theatre's next musical, Gypsy, which will star Marta Ribera and Lidia Fairén, whom the American performer remembered from the cast of Company.
Finally, to complete the guided tour, Antonio Banderas invited his old friend from New York to dinner and reserved a table for her at one of the star restaurants of his group of catering companies, Doña Inés, in Soho itself and just a few metres from the theatre.
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