‘Aguardiente: Where Magic Transcends Borders’
Through May 24
GALA Hispanic Theatre
3333 14th St., N.W.
$25–$65
Galatheatre.org
(surtitles in English and Spanish)

With its latest musical offering “Aguardiente: Where Magic Transcends Borders,” GALA Hispanic Theatre has cast its net wide in gathering a blend of talent including the production’s diverse 18-person cast. 

Commissioned by GALA, the spanking new musical is about best friends Alberto and Alejandro (two New York writers from Puerto Rico and Colombia respectively). Together, within a short timeline under unrelenting pressure, they struggle to write the project musical of their dreams. 

Along the way, the friends rediscover their Caribbean heritage through cumbia, bomba, currulao, and the magical realism of García Márquez.

Offstage, the work has been created by Luis Salgado (book), and Daniel Alejandro Gutiérrez (music), also respectively from Puerto Rico and Colombia. Multiple Helen Hayes Award-winning Salgado is directing and choreographing the GALA production. 

In the role of Alejandro, out actor Sebastián Treviño is making his GALA debut opposite Samuel Garnica who plays librettist Alberto. Alejandro is the music composer who doesn’t come from a musical background. He’s simply a lover of Latin music.  

Is Alejandro recognizably similar to Gutiérrez?  

“Oh yeah,” says Treviño, 36. “Like Gutiérrez, Alejandro doesn’t necessarily follow musical theater rules and etiquette, and it’s his uniqueness that brings a spark to their partnership. 

“I got to know him and Luis [Salgado] while touring with ‘On Your Feet!’ in 2022. You really get to know people by spending endless hours together on a bus.” 

Language and voice are intertwined for Treviño, and fortunately for the amiable New York-based actor, he enjoys the challenge of a new way of speaking. To play Alejandro, it helps to sound Colombian.

As a native of Monterrey, Mexico, Spanish and Mexican dialects are Treviño’s first languages. He attended American school starting in kindergarten, consequently acquiring flawless English; and because his mother is Colombian, he is familiar with that accent too.

GALA Spanish speaking patrons can be a tough crowd. For instance, when a Mexican actor is playing a Cuban character, they know at once. And while they may embrace the performance and the production, there sometimes remains a niggling dislike for what feels a vocal inaccuracy.

“Since I’ve arrived in D.C., I’ve been practicing my Colombian accent at restaurants and other places. When a Spanish speaking server asks if I’m from Colombia, I know I’m doing something right.”

 “Aguardiente” (translates as “Firewater”) is composed of several layers of reality. He explains: “First it’s us creating the show, the work, and all of those pressures and limitations that the industry places on Latino centered projects; and then there’s the fantasy layer.”

A talented tenor, his lengthy bio includes Mexico City (“Wicked,” “Rent”), Off Broadway (“Kowalski”) and North American national tours (“On Your Feet!”).

He says his “Aguardiente” solo specifically feels like ‘80s Latin rock. Also, he enjoys a fun medley number where they’re playing around with “Tropipop” (Colombian pop), classic Broadway sounds, and there’s even a Beatles moment. 

In this show, we meet two determined friends, one is holding an American passport because he’s Puerto Rican, while the other, a Colombian, struggles to secure a visa.

 “It’s not a stretch for me to relate to that. I’m here on a working visa, so I know all about the stress and costs that comes with that,” says Treviño.  

“So much reflects their own story. That includes the setbacks and obstacles faced when trying to build something from very little, and writing about themes that aren’t considered mainstream to white American audiences.” 

At just eight years old, Treviño saw “A Chorus Line” at Mont Tecnológico de Monterrey, the same college that he’d later attend. He remembers, “Seated in the second row, the young actors were rock stars to me. When I asked my father who loved the arts if one day I could perform onstage, he said yes, instantly his son’s new dream.”

Looking forward, is there a role he yearns to play? Treviño ponders the trite query with some seriousness before answering “I think it’s yet to be written.”

Books about Fashion and Style
By various authors
c.2026, various publishers
$19.95 – $29.95

Don’t look now, but your legs are showing.

It’s OK, it’s almost summertime and you want to show both skin and style. So how about a few hints for looking your best? Check out these great books and get stylin’.

Who says there are rules about fashion? Wearing white before Memorial Day is OK; socks with sandals not so much? Fine, but in “Bending the Rules: Fashion Beyond the Binary” by Camille Benda with Gwyn Conaway (Princeton Architectural Press, $29.95), you’ll see that any guidelines that hint about gendering clothing are oh-so-last century.
Along with lively, fun narrative, there are lots of photos in this book, ads for how clothing used to be worn along male-female lines, and short biographies of some of today’s best designers. Here, you can check out prom dresses from the 1950s and new haute couture gowns practically right off the runway – and see how one parallels with the other. The timeline reaches back centuries, so you get a nice idea of where certain kinds of clothing originated and how it’s relevant today – making what’s inside here perfect for browsing.

Pick up this book, in fact, and you might also pick up some ideas for filling your closet and creating your very own style.

The fashion you wear on your body isn’t all you’ll find in “Pretend to Be Fancy: A Field Guide to Style and Sophistication” by Whitney Marston Pierce (Chronicle Books, $19.95). You’ll also read about other nice things you can have.

So you’re not a pinky-in-the-air kind of person, whatever. You can easily hang with those who are, once you read and absorb this book.

Tongue-tied at fancy soirees? Not anymore, there are tips for talking here. What do you know about canapes, hors d’oeuvres, and the kind of foods you don’t get at the corner c-store? How do you make a charcuterie that everyone will Ooooooh over? And how do you give a gift for the person whose taste seems scads better than yours? That’s all in here, along with what to drink, how to dress, and how to make every corner of your home look like something right out of a high-end magazine.

Will this book make you chic? Possibly, yes. Will it help you get invited to all the best parties? Maybe, but for sure, it’ll make you laugh, it’ll make you feel fabulous, look fabulous, and live your best life with the surroundings you deserve. Out May 5, so put it on your list.

But let’s say you need more ideas. You have questions or thorny issues with fashion that you really need answering. That’s when you ask for a talented fashionista at your local bookstore or library, that knowledgeable someone knows books and knows how to get what you need to be your most dazzling, best-dressed, finest-appointed self in a home you can be proud of, with comfortable furniture that will be the envy of everyone who sees it.

In the meantime, grab the above titles, because these books got legs.

Something important recently happened in Tennessee — and it demands far more scrutiny than it’s getting.

The Tennessee state House passed a bill — HB 754 — that requires clinics and insurers to report data on patients receiving gender-affirming care to the state. On paper, it is framed as a neutral effort: a way to “study trends,” “understand outcomes,” and bring clarity to a politically charged area of medicine. That is how its supporters describe it.

But laws are not judged solely by their stated intent. They are judged by their structure, their context, and the foreseeable ways they can be used.

And in structure and context alike, this bill edges dangerously close to something far more unsettling: a system of tracking a politically targeted minority.

The mechanics matter. Under the legislation, providers must submit detailed information about transgender patients — data that will ultimately be compiled into state reports and made public in aggregated form.

Supporters emphasize a key safeguard: the data is supposed to be “de-identified.” No names, no Social Security numbers. In theory, no direct link to any one individual.

But that reassurance collapses under even minimal scrutiny.

Because data does not need to contain a name to identify a person. In smaller communities—rural counties, tight-knit towns—granular data points like age, treatment type, and geography can easily narrow a dataset down to a handful of individuals. In some cases, to one.

Privacy experts have been warning about this problem for years. Re-identification is not a hypothetical risk — it is a well-documented reality. And when the dataset concerns a stigmatized population, the stakes are not abstract. They are personal, immediate, and potentially dangerous.

That is why critics of the bill are not calling it “data collection.” They are calling it what it resembles: a registry in all but name.

And history gives that word weight.

Governments have always justified registries as tools of order and knowledge. Lists of dissidents. Lists of immigrants. Lists of the sick, the criminal, the different. They begin as bureaucratic exercises — tidy, rational, even boring. Only later do we confront what those lists enable.

To be clear, HB 754 is not a list of names published online. It is not, at least yet, a direct catalogue of individuals. But the architecture it builds—centralized data collection on a specific, politically contested group—is the same architecture that makes such lists possible.

And that is where context becomes unavoidable.

This bill does not exist in isolation. It comes after years of escalating legislation targeting transgender people in Tennessee—from restrictions on healthcare to limits on public expression. The trajectory is not ambiguous. It is cumulative.

When a government repeatedly singles out a group for legal scrutiny, and then begins building systems to track that group—even indirectly—it crosses a conceptual line. It moves from regulating behavior to mapping people.

Supporters argue that none of this is the point. That the bill is about medical evidence, not identity. That policymakers need data to evaluate treatments.

But this argument collapses under its own selectivity.

If the true goal were neutral scientific inquiry, we would expect similarly aggressive data collection across other areas of medicine—cosmetic surgery, psychiatric medication, fertility treatments. We do not see that. The focus here is narrow, targeted, and politically charged.

That selectivity reveals something important: this is not just about healthcare. It is about governance—about which populations the state chooses to monitor, and why.

And once that monitoring infrastructure exists, its use is not fixed.

Data collected today for “research” can be repurposed tomorrow for enforcement, litigation, or exposure. Laws change. Administrations change. What remains is the dataset—and the precedent that it is acceptable to build it.

That is the real risk embedded in HB 754. Not necessarily what it does on day one, but what it normalizes over time.

It normalizes the idea that transgender people are a category to be tracked. It normalizes the idea that their private medical decisions are of special interest to the state. And perhaps most dangerously, it normalizes the idea that the boundary between public policy and personal identity can be quietly, bureaucratically eroded.

There is a tendency, especially among lawmakers, to view policy as modular—each bill evaluated in isolation, each provision defended on its own terms. But for the people living under those laws, the experience is cumulative. It is the pattern that matters.

And the pattern here is becoming harder to ignore.

A state that restricts your care, debates your existence, and then begins compiling data about you is not neutral. It is not merely studying you. It is defining you as a subject of governance.

That distinction—between citizen and subject—is subtle. But it is where the stakes of this bill ultimately lie.

Because once a government begins building lists—even partial, anonymized, “harmless” ones—it is no longer just making policy.

It is deciding who counts.

Isaac Amend is a writer based in the D.C. area. He is a transgender man and was featured in National Geographic’s ‘Gender Revolution’ documentary. He serves on the board of the LGBT Democrats of Virginia. Contact him on Instagram at @isaacamend.