A brief scene in the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is as harrowing as anything in the most serious drama on Broadway: a group of terrified workers in a small Los Angeles dress factory, hiding in the dark as they listen to an immigration raid taking place next door.
When the raid is over, the first sounds to break the quiet are soft weeping and breath laden with fear.
It’s a jolt of somber realism in a show that opts, ultimately, to lean in a feel-good direction. Yet such is the balancing act of “Real Women Have Curves,” which opened on Sunday night at the James Earl Jones Theater.
Based on Josefina López’s play of the same name, and on the 2002 HBO film adaptation starring America Ferrera, it is a bouncy, crowd-pleasing comedy about female empowerment, self-acceptance and chasing one’s ambitions. It is also a tale of immigrant life in this country, and the dread woven into the fabric of daily existence for undocumented people and those closest to them.
At 18, newly graduated from high school, Ana García (Tatianna Córdoba) is the only American citizen in her family, and the only one with legal status. An aspiring journalist, and the daughter of immigrants who came to California from Mexico, she is spending the summer of 1987 doing an unpaid internship at a neighborhood newspaper.
Then the dress factory owned by her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), receives a huge order that needs to be turned around fast. Their fireball of a mother, Carmen (Justina Machado), ropes Ana in to work there, too.
“So instead of getting paid nothing by strangers, you can get paid nothing by your family,” says Carmen, who is also part of the sewing crew there. “You’re welcome.”
Córdoba, in her Broadway debut, is an appealing Ana, but Machado — best known for the Netflix reboot of “One Day at a Time” — is an astonishment as Carmen, essentially slipping the audience into her pocket the instant she walks onstage. In a charismatic comic performance, the radiant Machado makes utter emotional sense of Carmen’s swirl of contradictions, including the contempt for Ana’s weight that spikes her boundless well of love.
Carmen wants her family to be together, safe. For the Garcías — including Raúl (Mauricio Mendoza), who as husband and father gets to play good cop more often than Carmen does — an important part of that is having Ana to serve as an envoy in situations where the others’ undocumented status leaves them vulnerable: paying taxes, dealing with a landlord.
You can see why Ana is scared to tell her parents that Columbia University, on the other side of the country, has offered her a full scholarship. They don’t even know she applied.
At her newspaper gig, which she juggles with the factory job, she does tell her fellow intern, Henry (Mason Reeves), with whom she tumbles into a cutely geeky romance. He loves that she’s so skillful at reporting, and he declines to indulge her self-deprecation about her curviness. Bonus: these two earnest brainiacs can dance.
Directed and choreographed by Sergio Trujillo, with music and lyrics by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez and a book by Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin, this production is much tighter than the 2023 version audiences saw in its world premiere at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.
In the first act, the braiding of plot strands is smooth, with comedy (some charming, some cheesy) gracefully coexisting with gut-gripping drama. But after a bleak start to Act II, the show opts for upbeat the rest of the way. On the one hand, that means some fun musical numbers, as when the women at the factory strip down to their undies, and deliver rap solos, during the body-positive title song. On the other, substance yields to banalities, leaving the show feeling somewhat empty.
What buoys it is an extremely likable cast, riding the waves of a hummable score that sounds variously of Mexico, Broadway and American pop. (The music director is Roberto Sinha.) And it doesn’t hurt that the show has a luscious color palette, or that its version of a disco ball is shaped like a dressmaker’s mannequin. (The set is by Arnulfo Maldonado, lighting by Natasha Katz, video by Hana S. Kim and costumes by Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young.)
At Estela’s factory, each employee makes a distinct impression — particularly Pancha (Carla Jimenez), peppering the place with wisecracks. Mostly they’re in English, but when Estela accepts that giant order and promises to have it ready in a mere three weeks, you don’t need to know Spanish to understand Pancha’s response: “Estás completamente loca?” You can read the meaning in her incredulous face.
The worker who swoops in and steals our hearts, though, is Itzel (Aline Mayagoitia), a 19-year-old woman newly arrived from Guatemala, who is the most petrified at hearing the Immigration and Naturalization Service raid next door. Afterward, up on the roof with Ana, Itzel is wise, determined and funny in an offbeat way. When they sing of freedom in “If I Were a Bird,” one of the show’s most playful songs, they dance together with childlike abandon.
And when, sometime later, Itzel is rounded up for deportation, the force of the plot twist is only intensified by our own awareness of recent headlines about the hardening of U.S. immigration policy.
One of the strangest things about seeing “Real Women” in this moment is the distance between the United States as it is now and as it was in 1987. During the second term of President Ronald Reagan, the country offered amnesty to certain undocumented immigrants.
That policy is a significant plot element; in the show, amnesty has just become available. Ana encourages her colleagues at the factory to apply. Her sister is ineligible, though, because of a minor scrape with the law when she was 15. In Estela’s song “Daydream,” we see how squelched her prospects are because of her immigration status, and what she would try to do with her dress-designing talent if she were not so circumscribed.
Still, the creators of “Real Women” are playing by Shakespeare rules: This is a comedy, and it will have a happy ending. Resilience and resourcefulness will factor in. Love and liberty will triumph. Ana will head east.
Carmen asks: “What kind of daughter leaves her family?”
The kind who’s going after an American dream. Just like her mom did, when she came from Mexico.
Real Women Have Curves
At the James Earl Jones Theater, Manhattan; realwomenhavecurvesbroadway.com. Running time: 2 hours 20 minutes.
