All the World's Indeed a Stage...

(I don't know if it's showing up on your screens, but some of the text in this post looks like it's been irrevocably highlighted.  For the life of me, I can't figure out why, but it's not intentional, so just ignore it.)

One of my favorite places that we visited in Alcalá de Henares was the corral de comedias.  It has a very interesting history behind it; apparently, it's one of the oldest theaters in Europe.  Unfortunately, the English language is kind of inadequate to describe what happened to this building.  In English, we really only use one word for theater and that's, well, theater.  However, it sounds kind of stupid to say that this building was once a theater, then became a theater, and finally was turned into a theater, and has now been restored to it's original function as a theater.

This place just really screams "theater" to me.

Let me try that again: Originally, the corral was an open-air theater, then it acquired a roof and became a theater-house in the 1800s and was later adapted into a movie theater.  The construction of a relatively new cinema caused the corral to be closed down until it was (very) recently rediscovered by three university students working on a thesis paper.  It has now been restored and functions much like a theater-house again: it's primarily a venue for musical concerts and plays, although they still unroll the projector screen to show a movie every once in a while.

I think my favorite part of the tour was getting to go backstage (which was actually under the stage).  I don't know why, but ever since high school drama, I've always enjoyed being backstage.  The tour guide showed us the secret trapdoors and the old machines with which they used to produce sound effects.

Another interesting thing that we learned was the Spanish theater equivalent of "break a leg" which is "mucha mierda."  Politely translated, that's...well, there's not really a polite way to translate it.  The phrase dates back to a time before the automobile.  In those days, horses were the primary means of transportation, especially for the rich, upper-class caballeros.  The idea was, if lots of rich people came to your show, there would be lots of horses parked outside.  And where there are horses, there will be fertilizer.  So if you told someone that their performance was "a ton of crap", they'd take it as a compliment.  Obviously, it meant that a lot of people (and, more importantly, a lot of rich people) came to enjoy the show.  Apparently, the phrase has remained fairly popular to this day.  

And yes, I actually did have this information verified by a couple of independent sources to make sure that they weren't just saying it to mess with the ignorant Americans.