Laughing through life

The interview has barely started when Mexican performance artist Astrid Hadad suddenly breaks out in a loud belly laugh, a crescendo of ha-ha-has that swells to a hoarse, lusty cackle reminiscent of Phyllis Diller. The controversial cabaret singer leans back and really relishes her laughter, interrupting the genteel flow of her otherwise proper and cultured conversation.

They’re jarring, these constant carcajadas, or guffaws. They get more frequent as she sips one glass of Jack Daniel’s, then another. But the laughs rarely come where you expect. Hadad doesn’t need a joke to find life amusing.

There’s nothing funny about the long delay she and her entourage faced at airport immigration when they arrived Tuesday from Mexico City for a four-night stand that began Wednesday at Disney Hall’s REDCAT space.

The band was held up for more than two hours while they waited for security-conscious authorities to question the Cuban-born timbal player. Hadad and her excellent quintet, Los Tarzanes, finally settled into their rooms at downtown’s trendy Standard hotel, late, tired and frustrated.

“The arrival can become a kind of Way of the Cross,” she says in Spanish, retiring to the hotel’s dramatic rooftop lounge, “especially for a certain type of people, let’s say, the Mexicans.”

And here comes the first cackle: A-a-a-h, ha, ha, ha, ha.

“You have to take everything with a sense of humor,” she explains as sunset bathes the surrounding high-rises. “That’s why my shows are so playful. They are a song to life, and I say I’m a pleasure giver. So I can’t allow the small things to throw me off track.”

Hadad, who declines to give her age but is reportedly in her late 40s, has made an unconventional career by finding humor in unexpected places -- in heartbreak, domestic violence, underdevelopment, machismo and corrupt politics.

At Wednesday’s opening night performance, she skewered the villains and victims of her pet topics in a 90-minute concert that delighted her ethnically mixed audience.

The pioneering satirist uses a trademark array of outlandish costumes and running commentary to turn traditional Latin American music and values inside out. The songs -- rancheras, boleros, sones -- are all in Spanish. But wisely, she delivers her mini-monologues in English, for the sake of the majority in her capacity audience.

As if to symbolize the cultural deconstruction she’s about to undertake, Hadad at first appears in a lovely traditional dress with a white rebozo, or shawl, for a straight version of a Mexican ranchera. But for the bawdy second number, “La Mesera” (The Waitress), her silky red skirt falls away to reveal another one underneath made from a gaudy vinyl tablecloth. She tops the coquettish waitress outfit with a hat made from a serving tray complete with glasses and napkins sticking out of her head.

As the show goes on, Hadad’s costumes and commentaries get increasingly outrageous. At one point, she emerges as a virgin flower girl straight out of a Diego Rivera painting who dons a ridiculous mustache to become a foul-mouthed macho masher. Later, she appears as a sad prostitute dressed as the Statue of Liberty holding a flashlight for a torch.

“Visit the United States before the United States visits you,” Hadad deadpans as the Lady Liberty hooker.

Her awkward, heavily accented English actually works in her favor. It makes her observations about U.S. pop culture -- including a crack about the Janet Jackson incident during a touchy costume change -- sound funny for a foreigner. And her ingratiating apologies for speech difficulties help buffer remarks that may otherwise seem offensively anti-American, especially in time of terrorism and war.

During the interview, Hadad reveals that her fellow Mexicans have warned her to watch what she says in the U.S., to avoid upsetting Americans on sensitive subjects. Still, she introduced a particularly violent song called “La Cuchilla” (The Razor Blade), about a murderous, possessive lover, by saying the main character is like some president who declares war if he doesn’t get his way.

Her fear of free speech becomes part of the act when she coyly declines to name the president “because I’m afraid that tomorrow I take the first plane back to Mexico.”

That hardly fits the image of the outspoken, daring woman who was once so feared for what she might say that she was banned from Mexican television. Off stage, the tiny performer looks smaller and more harmless than her theatrical alter egos, with their high platform shoes and 3-foot headdresses.

The real Astrid Hadad -- wearing black cargo pants and a black coat with just splashes of red on her shoes and shirt -- is much more reserved than her extravagant stage persona.

“I’m actually timid, ah-ha ha ha,” she says, ordering another whiskey as night falls. “I’m like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, ooooh, ha ha ha ha. It’s a transformation, and that’s why I always say I don’t have to pay for therapy because I get everything out on stage. Aaaahh, ha ha ha.”

Hadad didn’t always find life so funny. At theater school in Mexico City, she says, she was trained to plumb the depths of the dramatic, exploring the expression of pain and tragedy.

Then she suffered real drama. She lost several loved ones -- a friend, some of her 10 siblings, and her father, the son of Lebanese immigrants whom she remembers fondly as a sweet, affectionate man. Paradoxically, that’s when she found the laughter inside.

“Theater schools always make you think profoundly and see things as dark and more terrible than they are,” she says. “But after what I lived through, with all that pain and loss, I realized I had to live life, not lament it. It’s strange that through death I discovered the joy of life.”

Hadad doesn’t laugh at that.

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Astrid Hadad

Where: REDCAT at Walt Disney Concert Hall, 2nd and Hope streets, L.A.

When: Today-Saturday, 8:30 p.m.

Ends: Saturday

Price: $32-$34

Contact: (213) 237-2800