In addition to staging some European operas and operettas, Cuban composers gradually developed ideas which better suited their creole audience.
Radio, which began in Cuba in 1922, helped the growth of popular music because it provided publicity and a new source of income for the artists.
[5] The troupe included Andrés Prieto (a famous actor), Manuel García (who played the villain), the singer María del Rosario Sabatini, Antonio Hermosilla and others.
The life of some of these players was theatre itself: Marina Galino provoked her husband to jealousy, whereupon he stabbed her and left her for dead, finally slitting his own wrists.
But the lady was not dead, and eventually recovered to give exhibitions of European dance styles, such as the bolero (Spanish style), minuets, gavots polkas, folías (Canary Islands), cachuchas (Andalusian solo song and dance), manchegas (from La Mancha), el pan de xarabe, el caballito jaleado and so on.
Starting off with imported Spanish content (List of zarzuela composers), it developed into a running commentary on Cuba's social and political events and problems.
A string of front-rank composers such as Gonzalo Roig, Eliseo Grenet, Ernesto Lecuona and Rodrigo Prats produced hits for the Regina and Martí theatres in Havana.
Great stars like the vedette Rita Montaner, who could sing, play the piano, dance and act, were the Cuban equivalents of Mistinguett and Josephine Baker in Paris.
[8] Cuban Bufo theatre is an example of a form of comedy, ribald and satirical, with stock figures imitating types that might be found anywhere in the country.
A mulatta is like fresh bread You gotta eat it while it's hot If you leave it till she's cool Even the devil can't get a bite!)
Formats rather like the British Music Hall, or the American Vaudeville, still occur, where an audience is treated to a pot-pourri of singers, comedians, bands, sketches and speciality acts.
The experiences were (and some still are) private to the initiated, until the work of the ethnologist Fernándo Ortíz, who devoted a large part of his life to investigating the influence of African culture in Cuba.