Calle de Loreto Prado y Enrique Chicote

Ninety-six metres are enough to honour one of the great duos of Madrid’s popular theatre. The street runs from calle de la Ballesta to the Corredera Baja de San Pablo, and already in 1656 it appeared on Texeira’s map under the name San Joseph. Loreto Prado and Enrique Chicote embodied the city’s comic theatre through the first third of the 20th century. They joined forces in 1896 and made the Teatro Cómico their home; between them they studied nearly two thousand works, almost always the local sainete and género chico. Their greatest hit was Alma de Dios (1907): more than seven hundred consecutive performances to full houses. The council dedicated the street to them in January 1936, both still active. The ceramic street sign depicts a Madrid tenement courtyard.

During rehearsals of a play in which her character died of angina pectoris on the way to church, Loreto Prado studied the symptoms so minutely that when the scene came at the premiere she lost consciousness on stage. The curtain fell with her lying senseless on the floor; the audience applauded, believing it was theater, while the actors tried to revive her. The explanation was that she had physically absorbed the illness she was feigning.