'Opinião' 50 years after...

On the 11th December 1964, the musical Opinião directed by Augusto Boal premiered at the ‘Teatro Arena’ in Rio de Janeiro. The cast consisting of João do Vale, Zé Kéti and Nara Leão (later substituted by Maria Bethânia), combined songs, narrations and dialogues, with text by Armando Costa, Oduvaldo Vianna Filho and Paulo Pontes. The show was considered a protest against the socioeconomic situation in Brazil and became a reference to what would be known as protest music against the military regime established in Brazil in March that same year. In this paper, I analyse how this show substantiated the various social and political demands at the time, and how it became an aesthetic and political paradigm. At the same time, I will compare the original production with a re-interpretation of the spectacle in 2014, organized by the Moreira Salles Institute, with the participation of the group Casuarina and the singer Joyce. The aim is to understand how, fifty years after the coup d’etat and the show Opinião, Brazilian music and art not only reflect that historical moment, but also its role in the contemporary socio-political context.