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Little city, big vision4 December 1996 Little City Reviewed by Kim Linden Little City (Pequeña Ciudad) is a choral musical combining the talents of the very progressive Melbourne Workers Theatre and the community based choir, Canto Coro. The story at the heart of the production is one of the struggle of a community to gain dignity. A child goes missing and is found dead, drowned, in a canal that has become a sewer. The drowning occurs because there is no rail to prevent people from falling into the sewer-canal, symbolising the breakdown in the community, a community that music/lyric writer Irine Vela says could be anywhere. The mother of the child becomes obsessed with blaming the government for the death of the child, and the community unites to struggle for the mother's cause, ultimately the cause of everyone in the community. Vela, who has spent 10 years with the Melbourne Workers Theatre, says the inspiration for the work was drawn from the experiences of past struggles, including the 1973 coup in Chile, the Spanish Civil War and the occupation by students and workers in Athens of the Polytechnic in 1973 in protest against the military junta. Vela says there are two messages in Little City. "The first is the message (printed on the leaflet for Little City) that if people's voices are not heard in a nation's institutions, then they will be heard in the streets. That is paraphrased from the records of an occupation in Chile during the coup in '73. The second is the message of where apathy can lead, the extent to which society can decay before people take action to stop it." 
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