At the Head of the Line: The Life of a Samba Queen

Christiane Callil comes on stage like a tropical whirlwind. Dressed in the colorful feathers, G-string and sparkling platform shoes of Brazilian carnival, she is a study in kinetic motion, legs, arms and torso shaking in all directions.

Before she finishes work for the evening as the director, producer and star of “The Girls From Ipanema” at the Century Club in Century City, she will make four or five costume changes--from leather to beads, in every hue of the rainbow--sing a few songs and wind up the show by leading the audience in a conga line.

“I know, I know,” she tells a reporter the next day in a conversation in her Westside apartment, her husky voice tinged with the melodious rhythms of her native Portuguese, “the conga line’s not Brazilian. But do you think it’s all right anyhow?”

Assured that nightclub audiences in Century City are far more concerned with entertainment than with cultural authenticity, Callil leans back, smiling, as she brushes aside her dark, wavy hair.

“That’s good,” she says. “I thought a lot about it before I put it in the show.”

The question is typical of Callil’s persistent drive to excel, a drive that has driven the twentysomething performer from a youthful career as a choreographer and dancer in Rio de Janeiro to the audition studios of Hollywood. For the last year and a half, she has been the driving force behind “The Girls From Ipanema,” a colorful, high-energy display of Brazilian singing and dancing that began at Tatou in Beverly Hills and New York and, since August, has been running on Friday nights at the Century Club in Century City.

It hasn’t been easy. If it’s hard to come to Hollywood from Des Moines to make it in show business, trying to accomplish the task when one has little more than a nodding acquaintance with the English language has to be several steps up the ladder of difficulty.

“I came here after I married an American I met at a Club Med in Mexico, where I was choreographing shows and dancing,” Callil says. “Which meant that I had to learn the language pretty fast.”

Then, with a wry grin, she adds, “Not that I had much choice. One day I was at Club Med, two months later I was living in a little street in the Valley, without a car, surrounded by Americans. And I was married to a man who just wanted me to be a good little housewife.”

Not surprisingly, the marriage didn’t last long. After 2 1/2 years, Callil was on her own, face-to-face with the hazards of getting started in show business.

“It was tough,” she recalls. “When I first came here, they told me to go to a speech coach, lose my accent, dye my hair blond. Fortunately, I had taken a dance class with Joe Tremaine, and he liked what I did and gave me a two-year scholarship to study, which helped a lot in terms of self-confidence.”

With an accent that wouldn’t quite go away and a reluctance to dye her hair, Callil soon discovered that the majority of her casting calls were for Latin parts.

“I had to learn all the dances--salsa, the mambo, the cha-cha--and that was OK, because I got parts in movies like ‘Salsa’ and ‘Mambo Kings’ and got to perform on the Academy Awards show.”

Even there, however, typecasting played a role.

“They put me in this huge dress with a big coconut on my head, kind of Carmen Miranda,” Callil says. “And I thought, ‘Oh no, I wanted all my friends and family to see me be beautiful on the live television broadcast, and now look at me.’ ”

More recently, it has become, she explains, “fashionable to be a Latina. Which is good, because it means there are more parts available. And my Spanish is pretty good, so a lot of people don’t even know I’m Brazilian.

“I think,” she adds, with a rueful shrug, “that some of them aren’t even aware that we don’t speak Spanish in Brazil.”

Ironically, somewhere along the way, Callil’s quest for success in American show business began to separate her from her own roots.

“It was strange,” she recalls. “I seemed to lose my passion for being Brazilian. I became so involved in trying to be as American as I could so I could get jobs that I began to forget where I came from.”

But that all changed during the World Cup season.

“I suddenly found myself watching the television,” she says, “jumping up and down with excitement when the Brazil team was winning.”

Her enthusiasm led her to plan celebration parties that eventually expanded to a project for a full-blown Brazilian nightclub show. Initially intended as a one-night festivity, it soon evolved into “The Girls From Ipanema.”

“I called my mother in Brazil to get help with the costumes, and I had to make all the feathered headdresses myself,” Callil says. “I had to choreograph it, and find the performers, and try to get some publicity, everything. It’s dominated my life for a year and a half. But at least I now know that whatever I need to do to make a production happen, I can do. And if it means I have to do the work myself, I can do that, too, and I will.”

Callil’s seemingly boundless energy is supported by a determined optimism about the work she is doing.

“We get so much response for the show,” she says, “and I know that it’s worth all this effort. I know it’s going to grow into something more.

“Of course,” she adds, “every now and then my mother calls and asks me, ‘Christiane, are you saving any money?’ And I tell her, ‘No, Mom. I’m living.’ ”

* Christiane Callil and “The Girls From Ipanema” perform every Friday through January at the Century Club, 10131 Constellation Blvd., Century City. 9:45 p.m. (310) 553-6000. They will also perform at the club’s New Year’s Eve celebration and in special Carnival performances at the House of Blues, Feb. 2, and the Century Club, Feb. 16.