The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people.
Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.
Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic” takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show’s Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.)
As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album “Buena Vista Social Club,” on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”) identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater’s notoriously loose relationship with facts.
The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he’s brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the “Buena Vista Social Club” album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn’t mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos’s role in putting together the band and singers.)
The show’s de Marcos brings in the vocalist Compay (Julio Monge), who in turn helps lure Omara (Natalie Venetia Belcon) out of self-imposed retirement.
Compay and Omara’s original meeting is explored in the flashback scenes, along with its decades-long repercussions on Omara’s life.
In 1956, Omara (the charismatic Isa Antonetti), then 19, and her sister Haydee (Ashley De La Rosa) sing tunes like the fast-paced “El Cumbanchero” that are palatable to the visitors flocking to the fancy Tropicana club. The young Compay (Da’Von T. Moody) and the virtuoso pianist Rubén (Leonardo Reyna) take her to the Buena Vista Social Club, a smaller, rougher spot that draws a very different audience and moves to a different beat.
“There are no tourists,” an excited Omara tells her appalled sister, “they’re playing for us!” It doesn’t hurt that a doe-eyed and velvet-voiced busboy, Ibrahim (Wesley Wray), hangs out at the Buena Vista, too.
Eventually, Omara will have to make a decision that will have grave consequences for her future, and Haydee’s.
The real Omara Portuondo was actually 26 and already an experienced performer in 1956. She was also almost 25 years younger than Compay Segundo, but the show suggests a generation coming of age together — not to mention romantic sparks between Omara and Ibrahim Ferrer. Ramirez cooked up this back story to create more emotional links, and thus more stakes, between the singers in 1996, but it’s weighed down by clunky dialogue (especially between the sisters) and heavy-handed exposition.
What does work in the 1950s sections are the songs, of course, but also the movement. Since much of that action takes place in clubs where dancing was primordial, the show can incorporate diegetic numbers that set your heart racing. A major improvement in the transfer to a Broadway theater is that the choreographers Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck have more space to play with, and they make the most of it. Dede Ayite’s vibrant costumes have a life all their own and flow beautifully with the dancers’ bodies. Arnulfo Maldonado’s two-tiered set elegantly evokes not only the wrought-iron balconies of Havana, but also the clubs and the recording studio.
The book scenes set in 1996, when the actual album was recorded, have a lot more spark, mostly thanks to the easygoing rapport among the cast members. In particular Belcon, who, as the older Omara, excels at dropping dry cut-downs with the hauteur of someone who does not suffer fools or amateurs.
Throughout, the show touches on who and what is revered as standards of excellence, underlining that Cuban musicians belong in that exalted realm. De Marcos tells the older Omara that his professors would ramble about “‘important’ composers, about Mozart and Bach and Rachmaninoff, as if the greatest music always comes from somewhere else, never from here.” (The show now ends with the Buena Vista Social Club group performing at Carnegie Hall, which is presented as a place usually reserved for those three European composers.)
But this latest iteration of the “Buena Vista Social Club” franchise makes its point by making music instead of spelling things out. The older Compay introduces Eliades Ochoa (Renesito Avich) by saying that he “plays the tres like a Cuban Jimi Hendrix,” referring to a kind of Cuban guitar. He does, too: Avich is onstage the entire time, and when he takes a solo, by God, he shreds.
And after the stone-faced Omara pooh-poohs the suggestion of a flute solo in “Candela,” she cannot help but break into a huge grin when Paz brilliantly proves her wrong. Case closed.
Buena Vista Social Club
At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater, Manhattan; buenavistamusical.com. Running time: 2 hours.
