There are cultural infrastructures that suffer from the jinx syndrome. From being one of the most renowned café-concerts on the Old Continent, epicenter of the undisciplined and rowdy Paral·lel of 19th century Barcelona, El Molino has been gradually dying in recent years, because it has been condemned to become a cheap replica of the culture of the music hall and cabaret in which it had excelled at the beginning of the ill-named Transition to democracy. Each new Barcelona cultural administration has regurgitated the mantra of "recovering the Paral·lel" and revitalizing theaters like El Molino, an impossible task because, as colleague Andreu Gomila has reminded us, the ancestral Paral·lel had an environment of now-closed theaters (the Pompeya, the Talia, the Bataclan, the Nou Teatre or the Arnau) and ancestral cafes (Español Rosales, Tranquilidad and so on) that have been replaced by kebab restaurants.
The problem, in short, is that this "recovering the Paral·lel" is a recurring phrase that no one knows exactly what the hell it means. The fact is regrettable, because the city has sufficient mechanisms to connect the concerns of the present with its history. I recommend to our cultural actors, for example, that they review the catalog of the wonderful exhibition El Paral·lel: 1894-1939, curated by my dear Xavier Albertí, where it is perfectly explained that the cultural explosion of the neighborhood was the product of an urban change derived from the Cerdà Plan (who, apart from inventing the Eixample, made the old ravalero district V and the theatrical shantytown of the pasen y vean explode towards Montjuïc) and a cultural change from which a new Barcelona working class demanded an altar of civic representation in Catalan that moved away from the bourgeois artisan theater of the Liceu or the Tívoli.
Refloating El Molino or Paral·lel does not imply that current theaters like Victòria or Condal have to program Rosend Llurba's couplets daily. But the theatrical effervescence of this nostrat Broadway will not take off if its infrastructures do not connect in some way with the past and seek new forms of representation that have some continuity with that working-class theater of popular ideology. This week, we learned that the production company Barcelona Events Musicals ---organizer of Cruïlla, magnificently led by Jordi Herreruela--- will be in charge of El Molino's musical programming with a plan of "minority music" (I don't know if the expression refers to programming Stockhausen quartets or Catalan rumba recitals); in short, it will continue copy-pasting a cultural model that has nothing to do with its legacy.
Cities change and their neighborhoods are products of the usual predation of the globalizing phenomenon. However, at the risk of being repetitive, history is a value and tradition weighs heavily because it is precisely what we cannot alienate from our memory. Unfortunately, most of our facilities absolutely ignore their deep roots in the history of Barcelona: this is how Catalan opera is only a sad footnote in the programming of a public theater like the Liceu, or that we have the misfortune of contemplating how one of our most brilliant playwrights, Àngel Guimerà, will have no singular weight in our theaters during the year of the centenary of his death. The question that arises, therefore, is whether Paral·lel can establish a connection between the theatrical-musical production of working-class Barcelona and similar or concomitant phenomena of our present.
Unfortunately, I would say that these reflections escape the concerns of our cultural programmers. I wish I were wrong, but if the future of El Molino involves reproducing concerts that we could find at any other festival in the country, this new attempt to refloat will end in yet another shipwreck. It's a shame, because we have plenty of musical heritage. I quote again my dear Albertí who, in a recent article in the digital Núvol, recalled: "Experts tell us that the dimensions of the heritage of what we can call musical theater in Catalan are as considerable as the dimensions of the heritage generated by neighboring linguistic cultures. We should not, therefore, play at a disadvantage in this game. But we would like to play at a disadvantage. The problem is that we don't play at all." Well, alas, there's nothing more to add.