South-of-Border Singer With Cactus Sound : Pop: Astrid Hadad is an actress-singer who loves to laugh at pain and has no shame in her camp, cabaret-style show.

Astrid Hadad bursts onto stage with glitter on her lips, a pistol on her hip and portraits of the Virgin of Guadalupe on her satin skirt. Waving a bottle of tequila like the Mexican flag, she belts out ranchera songs in a sonorous voice that does honor to the 1930s music, while mocking its macho values.

She is an actress who loves to sing and a singer who thinks there’s nothing more boring than someone crooning over a microphone. Hadad has combined her talents in a camp, cabaret-style show called “From the Ranch to the City or Heavy Nopal “ (Heavy Cactus), her unique tribute to the music and her favorite ranchera singer, Lucha Reyes, who died of an overdose of barbiturates in 1944.

“I was baptized with a bottle of tequila,” Hadad bellows beside a wooden horse.

“I suffer pain like a good Mexicana,” she cries while flogging herself on the back.

She puts a bandage on her head and leans on crutches to sing, “Hit me in the face, hurt me, but don’t leave me . . . I know I have no shame.”

Some who go to see Hadad would say she definitely has no shame. Certainly, she shows no respect. She laughs at pain, makes fun of love and makes some middle-class people very uncomfortable. One woman who heard her recently told her, “You have such a lovely voice, why do you do all those other things? Why do you treat men that way?”

But most of the audience that crowds into the small and smoky downtown Bar Cristal where she performs on Saturday nights is doubled over with laughter. They shout out to her and sing along on with the music.

“All pain has humor,” Hadad explained recently over lunch. “That’s always been an obsession of mine, the duality of pain and humor, love and hate, all the contradictions of love.”

The daughter of Lebanese-Mexican merchants, Hadad is 5 feet tall with long black hair, an aquiline nose and wide mouth. Offstage, she wears fire-engine red glasses with fins like an old Thunderbird, and red lipstick to accent her mouth. Her voice is deep.

“My work is almost always a criticism of power and of the unconsciousness of those who have power. It is about the fight for power and the contradictions of love. Those are the two things that move people.”

She declines to give her age, but arts critic Patricia Vega of the newspaper La Jornada describes her as belonging to “a generation of women born in the 1950s” who are doing some of the most interesting theater in Mexico.

“Jesusa Rodriguez in opera, Liliana Felipe in tango and Astrid in ranchera music. They alternate between acting and music. They all throw common values back at the public. Astrid takes up macho, ranchero values and gives them back in a subversive manner,” Vega said.

Rodriguez, who is the best known of the three, directed an all-female production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni” in 1985, in which Hadad performed. Hadad also played a role in the television soap opera “Teresa,” which she wryly notes has brought her more recognition in Mexico than her original work.

Hadad said she tries to appeal to a cross-section of society.

“I like to please the intelligentsia but I want more. I want people from the provinces, people from any class to understand me. Right now poor people like my work and the people who live in Lomas (the wealthy) like it--but not the middle class who are used to television, not normal, married people who watch soap operas and recognize me from ‘Teresa.’ They feel attacked,” she said.

But Hadad seems at home with the style that she has been developing over the last few years. After “Don Giovanni,” she wrote and performed a tamer version of “From the Ranch to the City” and “Suburban Nostalgia,” a show of Spanish bolero music. Later, she and two friends produced “The Useless, or Get Up, Lucha,” an homage to Lucha Reyes.

Now, arts critic Vega compares Hadad to Janis Joplin for her energy and emotion. “She burns up the stage. There are many women singing ranchera and mariachi, but they are very respectful. Astrid uses jazz, harp, violin, rock. She has found her language,” Vega said.

Her language on stage is sometimes off color and mostly very funny. She sings “Me Golpeast Tanto Anoche,” “Bala Perdida,” and her own version of “El Calcetin” that she and her back-up group, The Tarzans, composed.

She asks her audience, “Why do things go so much better for the gringos than for us? In God We Trust. They’re with God while we’re praying to the Virgin of Guadalupe. Who’s higher? God.”

“Nationalism,” she said, “is the last refuge of those who don’t have a parabolic antenna.”