Every fall, the dead are commemorated in a lively show of dance, music and theatre in Portland’s longest-running Day of the Dead celebration. This year, los muertos return singing old-time tunes that harken back to another era when times were tough and tradition was one of the few things folks could call their own. In the middle of the Great Depression, at a camp near where WPA workers are constructing Oregon’s Timberline Lodge, five strangers arrive from different parts of the country in search of work and a place to call home. Even as they must shed one way of life for another, and though they have lost everything they hold dear, optimism lives on. Funny and irreverent, Canta y no llores (Sing and Don’t Cry) reminds us all that the only thing to fear — in life or death — is fear itself.