Amanda Las Heras: Actress and Singer of Canaro's Revues

Amanda Las Heras

Amanda Las Heras was an actress and cancionista of the revue stage who sang with Francisco Canaro and Roberto Firpo and shared the bill with Tita Merello in the 1932 hit La muchachada del centro.

At a glance

  • Actress and cancionista; died in Buenos Aires on 18 December 1974
  • Sang with the orchestras of Francisco Canaro and Roberto Firpo
  • In Canaro's revue La muchachada del centro (Teatro Nacional, 1932) she sang the waltz El jardín del amor and the tango Rosa de amor with Abelardo Farías

Fuente original: «Efemérides tangueras (diciembre)» (Efemérides tangueras, Club de Tango) · Resumen en español ↓

Amanda Las Heras belongs to the generation of women who brought tango to the theatre in the 1920s and 1930s, when the revista, the Buenos Aires musical revue, was one of the main stages where new tangos were heard. She was both an actress and a cancionista, a female tango singer, and she worked with two of the great bandleaders of the time, Francisco Canaro and Roberto Firpo. The old Club de Tango anniversary calendar, Efemérides tangueras, records only her death. Little else about her is documented in reliable sources, so this page is short.

Francisco Canaro – Rosa de amor (1932) · Uploaded to YouTube by “Antonio Gaspari”, not an official release. The player loads from YouTube only after you click.

What the calendar records

Under 18 December the calendar notes that the actress and cancionista Amanda Las Heras died in Buenos Aires in 1974. It gives no date or place of birth. We have not found one in an independent source either.

With Canaro and Firpo

The tango historians Néstor Pinsón and Ricardo García Blaya name her in their Todotango histories of two major orchestras. In their article on the orquesta típica of Francisco Canaro, she appears among the female singers who performed with it. In their article on Roberto Firpo’s orchestra, she is listed among his singers after Teófilo Ibáñez and Carlos Varela. Neither article gives dates for her.

La muchachada del centro

Her best-documented role is in a theatre hit. In his chronicle of Canaro’s musical shows on Todotango, Néstor Pinsón describes La muchachada del centro, which opened on 17 June 1932 at the Teatro Nacional, on Avenida Corrientes. The book was by Ivo Pelay, who went on to write several more of Canaro’s shows. The leading players were Tita Merello, Elsa O’Connor, Sara Prósperi and Amanda Las Heras. According to Pinsón, the show reached 900 performances, and Elsa O’Connor stepped in for Tita Merello several times during the run.

In the show, Amanda Las Heras sang two duets with Abelardo Farías, Dringue Farías’s brother, whom Pinsón calls the singing leading man of the company: the waltz El jardín del amor and the tango Rosa de amor. Pinsón notes that Rosa de amor was based on a theme from the tango fantasy Halcón negro.

For dancers who know Canaro mainly from his instrumental recordings of the 1930s and 1940s, the revues are a reminder that much of his repertoire was first written for the stage, to be sung by actors and actresses like Las Heras.

What is not covered here

Other accounts credit her with the premiere of Enrique Delfino’s tango Araca corazón in 1927, a stage debut in 1923 and a long career on radio and in revues at the Teatro Maipo. We could not confirm these points in an independent source and have left them out. She is one of many tango artists of the revue era whose careers are known only in fragments. If you know of a reliable source, such as a theatre programme or a newspaper notice, we would like to hear about it.

Sources