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    A ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Musical Will Open on Broadway Next Year

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    The show, which had a previous run at Atlantic Theater Company, is scheduled to begin previews in February at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Twenty-seven years ago, “Buena Vista Social Club,” an album of prerevolutionary Cuban music that became an unexpected best seller, was released, spawning tours and documentary films and a burst of interest in the Afro-Cuban sound.Now a stage musical inspired by the making of the album is heading for Broadway.“Buena Vista Social Club” is scheduled to begin previews Feb. 21 and to open March 19 at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.Set primarily in Havana, the show depicts a group of aging and often overlooked musicians gathering in a recording studio, and recalling the tumultuous era decades earlier when they were young and the Cuban Revolution was gaining steam. The narrative loosely tracks with the history of the album, but contains songs that were released separately and elements that are fictionalized.The show had an Off Broadway run, at Atlantic Theater Company, that opened in late 2023; Jesse Green, the chief theater critic for The New York Times, described it as “full-of-riches,” praising the song and dance elements but expressing concerns about some of the storytelling. The Broadway cast will include many of the same performers and musicians as the Off Broadway production.The songs are all attributed to the Buena Vista Social Club, and the show has a book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”). The director is Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) and the choreographers are the married couple Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck.The musical is being capitalized for $17 million, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The lead producers are Orin Wolf, John Styles and Barbara Broccoli, who previously worked together on “The Band’s Visit.” Among the co-producers are the comedian-actor John Leguizamo; Luis Miranda, a founder of the Hispanic Federation and the father of Lin-Manuel Miranda; and LaChanze, the Tony-winning actress. More

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      ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Review: Bringing a Classic Record to Life

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      A new Off Broadway musical adds the thrill of intimacy and the weight of history to the Cuban songs popularized on a 1997 album.The boleros, sons, danzóns and other popular Cuban song forms captured on the hit 1997 album “Buena Vista Social Club” — and in a 1999 Wim Wenders documentary about the musicians who made it — are a marvel: diabolically catchy, lively yet poetic, mesmerizingly complex beneath their seeming simplicity.Those are qualities that few jukebox musicals have going for them. Usually, if the borrowed tunes are catchy, they’re prosaic. Or if poetic then dreary. Or if complex then irrelevant.But the full-of-riches jukebox musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Tuesday at the Atlantic Theater, avoids all those problems. Particularly in its rendition of the “Buena Vista” songbook — including eight numbers from the original album and seven from later iterations — the production, directed by Saheem Ali, enhances (instead of merely exploiting) the music with the thrill of its liveness. The social dancing that accompanies some songs is often just as exciting. And if the narrative draped over those high points is a bit droopy, and the staging a bit choppy, they also give contour and context to what would otherwise be just a concert, albeit a joyous one.Like the documentary, the musical’s book, by Marco Ramirez, uses the “Buena Vista” recording sessions, at a Havana studio in 1996, as its framework. There we efficiently meet the veteran musicians who have gathered under the direction of a young Cuban producer, Juan De Marcos (Luis Vega), to make an album of “songs from the old days.” These musicians include the singer-guitarist Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), the pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), the tres player Eliades Ochoas (Renesito Avich) and the singer Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé). Together they will prove, as De Marcos puts it, that “Mozart’s got nothing on us.”So far, so semi-true. But Ramirez soon begins his departure from the facts by establishing the singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon) as the star of the sessions and thus of the show. (In reality, though she was already a Cuban national treasure, she sang just one track on the original album.)Accurate to life or not — and perhaps it’s better to think of the musical as an adjacent story in the Buena Vista universe — she’s a fine theatrical creation: a musician of great emotion (Compay calls her “the Queen of Feeling”) and a woman of commensurate hauteur. When Juan tries to introduce an unexpected woodwind riff to her “scorching rendition” of the song “Candela,” she cuts him right down — and you don’t want to get cut down by the regal Belcon. “No one ever recorded a ‘scorching rendition’ of anything with a flute,” she says.Omara is the musical’s portal to the past, which Ramirez, best known for another quasi-historical work — “The Royale,” inspired by the prizefighter Jack Johnson — traverses at liberty. We thus meet Omara not only in 1996 but also 40 years earlier, as a young woman on the edge of stardom in a double act with her sister, Haydee (Danaya Esperanza).But while the Portuondo Sisters perform kitschy numbers for American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub, musical and political changes are brewing beyond its palmy grounds. Both can be found at the namesake Buena Vista Social Club, “a space where smoke and sweat fill the air,” according to a stage direction, and “where beer bottles keep clave rhythm.”The musical’s fizzy club dances, choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, are a delight, our critic writes.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesRamirez overburdens this past tense with heavy subplots: gunrunning, colorism, revolution, betrayal. The more contemporary scenes are correspondingly haunted by regrets and ghosts. (The main characters are all represented by younger versions of themselves; Omara and Haydee get dance doubles as well.) It’s too much story for a two-hour show, especially in the second act, when the weight of Cuba’s painful history threatens to smother the songs. They don’t need help to bare the sadness in their souls.Still, even if you don’t understand their Spanish lyrics, the songs prevail. Never forced into literal service as signboards for the plot but instead performed atmospherically by characters who would actually sing them, they lend coherence and depth to the story with their exquisite harmonies, delirious polyrhythms and raw brass. The exceptional music production — the work of a team led by Dean Sharenow and Marco Paguia — enhances that effect with arrangements appropriate to the new contexts and the intimate space of the Atlantic’s Linda Gross Theater. The blessedly live-sounding sound design is by Jonathan Deans.And though I was less impressed by a series of balletic duets for the young sisters, which feel labored, the fizzy club dances are a delight. As choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, they match and heighten the music with intricate close partnering as limbs find ever more intricate ways of closing the space between bodies.Ali’s staging, on a unit set by Arnulfo Maldonado that aptly suggests some of the cramped spaces in which the story transpires, does not yet reach that level. It is too often difficult, with 17 cast members and nine core musicians on the small and flatly lighted stage, to tell which location we’re in: studio, club, hotel, esplanade. Sometimes which era, too, though Dede Ayite’s taxonomy of caps and fedoras, high-waisted pants, flowy tunics and sock-hop skirts (not to mention showgirl kitsch) offers delightful clues.Cramped, too, is much of the action between the songs, lending a hectic feeling to material that wants more thoughtfulness or less bulk. Seeming to acknowledge that, the show ends weirdly and abruptly, as if cut off in mid-thought by a proctor’s stopwatch.But when the staging, singing and playing come together, whether in exuberance or sorrow, I was happily reminded of another musical about music that originated at the Atlantic: “The Band’s Visit.” (David Yazbek, that show’s songwriter, is credited here as a creative consultant.) In such moments — the hypnotic “Chan Chan,” the ear-wormy “El Cuarto de Tula,” the heartbroken “Veinte Años,” the gorgeous “Drume Negrita” — you really do feel the past harmonizing with the present. What Compay says is true: “Old songs kick up old feelings.” Even, as in the showstopping and, yes, scorching “Candela,” with a flute.Buena Vista Social ClubThrough Jan. 21 at the Atlantic Theater, Manhattan; atlantictheater.org. Running time: 2 hours. More

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      in Movies

      ‘Buena Vista Social Club,’ Gets Another Life as a Musical

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      The best-selling album turned veteran Cuban musicians into global stars and inspired a documentary almost 30 years ago. Now it’s an Off Broadway musical.It was an improvisation to begin with. In 1996, a recording session was scheduled in Havana combining Cuban and Malian musicians, but the Africans had visa trouble and didn’t arrive. So instead, an assemblage of veteran Cuban musicians, some coming out of long retirement, recorded a collection of classic Cuban songs. This was “Buena Vista Social Club,” which became not just the best-selling Cuban album ever but also a defining artifact of Cuban culture beloved around the world.More albums followed: outtakes, offshoots, live recordings of performances like the one at Carnegie Hall. Wim Wenders made a documentary film. And now, almost 30 years later, there is a stage musical: “Buena Vista Social Club,” in previews at the Off Broadway Atlantic Theater Company.This newest project started a few years back, when a producer with the theatrical rights to the album approached the Cuban American playwright Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”).“The first question,” Ramirez recalled after a recent rehearsal, “was ‘Do you know this record?’ And for a Cuban kid who grew up right around the time the record came out, the answer was, ‘Of course.’ The next question was, ‘Do you think there’s a piece of theater here?’”The search for an answer to that question sent Ramirez to Cuba, where he interviewed some of the surviving participants. “It was about finding the emotional truth at the center of it,” he said. “To me, it’s ultimately about a bunch of people who were given a magical opportunity to do a second take on their past, to make something right or just relive their youth.”Center from left, Mel Semé, Natalie Venetia Belcon and Renesito Avich performing in the musical, about veteran musicians recording a collection of classic Cuban songs.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesThat’s the story that this “Buena Vista” tells. It dramatizes the making of the album in getting-the-old-gang-back-together fashion, but also, through flashbacks, recreates the pre-revolution, Golden Age 1950s Cuba of the musicians’ youth, suffused with nostalgia and regret.This is “the emotional truth behind the factual truth,” Ramirez said. “It’s all inspired by real people and events, but I’m definitely taking many, many liberties in order to tell the best possible story.”Where no liberties are taken is with the music. The dialogue is in English, but the songs — drawn from the broader “Buena Vista” catalog — remain in Spanish. “Old songs bring up old feelings,” a character in the show says. “Given these lyrics, given the moods evoked by this music, what is the story that can emerge?” Ramirez said. “At the beginning, I felt that I was communicating with the songwriters, who have been dead for 80 years or more, that my collaborators were ghosts.”Eventually, living collaborators joined him. The show, scheduled to run through Jan. 7 at the Linda Gross Theater, is directed by Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) and choreographed by the married team of Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck (Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story”). Casting was a challenge, doubly so since the flashback structure necessitated finding two people (one older, one younger) to play each of the distinctive real-life Buena Vista personalities.“We had to find performers who could sing and play like the originals,” Ali said. “But the Venn diagram of who also needed to act or dance was quite intense. They each do something with excellence, but they’re having to challenge themselves to do something different because of the thing we’re building together. We put on an international search for people who can embody the music in a way that felt truthful.”The common denominator, Ramirez said, is that everyone has a connection to the “Buena Vista” album. His comes through his Cuban grandparents, who played the songs in his Miami home, so that when the record came out he already knew them; it was exciting for several generations of his family to talk about a new album together. “The bittersweet irony is that they were nostalgic for Havana, and now I listen to this record and I’m nostalgic for them,” he said.“Our responsibility is to make the audience feel something through the universal language of dance,” the choreographer Patricia Delgado said. Marielys Molina, left, and Angélica Beliard dance to songs performed in Spanish. Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesPlaying the older Ibrahim Ferrer — who was shining shoes for money when he was recruited to supply his golden voice to boleros for the Buena Vista recordings — is Mel Semé. He was a teenager in Cuba at the time of the album’s release.“It became popular outside of Cuba first,” he said. “But then we fell in love with this music again, and it became the music many of us aspired to play.”After graduating with a degree in classical percussion from the University of Arts, Semé moved to Europe, slowly building a career as a drummer, guitarist, singer and bandleader. Since his acting experience was limited to commercials, he initially told the Buena Vista musical team that maybe he wasn’t the person they were looking for.“I’ve been feeling like a teenager again, learning a new skill,” he said. Echoing a phrase used by many other cast members, he said that playing Ferrer is a “huge responsibility,” but he has been helped by a deep connection with the singer, who found worldwide acclaim in his 70s and died in 2005.“Even though my story is not exactly his story, I also found a little bit of success late in life,” he said. “I always saw Ibrahim as a role model. No matter how late in life he got his chance, it was done with such grace.”Ibrahim Ferrer, center, and other musicians in Wim Wenders’s 1999 documentary portrait of the Cuban ensemble and its concert performance in New York and Amsterdam.Artisan EntertainmentRenesito Avich plays Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy-hat-wearing musician who brought a more rural sound into the original Buena Vista group. The music, he said, “has been the background of my whole life.” He was born in Santiago de Cuba, Ochoa’s hometown, and even met him once. A successful musician who specializes in the tres, a version of guitar at the heart of Cuban music, Avich is also an acting novice. He said that he feels the musical “is truly honoring what the music means for Cuban people like me.”Or like Leonardo Reyna, who was born and raised in Havana before pursuing a career as a classical pianist in Europe. The “Buena Vista” album “had a tremendous significance for me,” Reyna said, “helping me rediscover forgotten figures like Rubén González” — the virtuoso pianist Reyna plays as a young man.The show feels authentic, Reyna said, “even from a writer and director who are not from the island,” because of its cultural sensibility and an attention to musical details that he finds affecting. “Emotions arise from the distance many of us have had to travel, the separation of families, but also a sense of identity that is being reconstructed somehow,” he said. “It is healing.”Among the cast members who aren’t Cuban, Natalie Venetia Belcon is a Broadway actress who doesn’t speak Spanish. But when she was preparing to audition for the daunting role of Omara Portuondo, Buena Vista’s diva, the songs sprang a flood of memories of her Trinidadian musician parents. Kenya Browne, the Mexican-born singer who portrays the young Omara, knew the music as something that her grandmother used to play. Her mother told her that “Dos Gardenias,” a bolero she sings in the show, is one her great-grandmother sang often.Peck and Delgado — her parents were born in Cuba — have long loved the album. They chose a track from it (“Pueblo Nuevo”) for the first dance at their wedding. As soon as they learned about the musical project, they asked to be involved.“Since the songs are in Spanish,” Delgado said, “a lot of times our responsibility is to make the audience feel something through the universal language of dance, and you don’t even have to understand what’s being said.”“We’ve been improvising, making this up on the fly, building it as we go. I can’t think of a more Cuban thing to have done,” Ramirez (top right) said of his work with his collaborators (Peck, from left, Delgado and Ali).Sabrina Santiago for The New York TimesThe variety of dance in Cuba, Peck noted, includes ballet, contemporary, Afro-Cuban, an array of social dances. “We wanted to create a dance language that honors that, so it’s not one thing,” he said. “And we also want to allow for our imaginations to come into play, our personal touch, so it doesn’t feel like documentary dance but alive.”Peck recalled the experience of walking through Havana, hearing music playing and seeing people move to it. “And then as soon as that sound starts to fade, another sound is in the distance rubbing up against it,” he said. “That energy is something we want to weave through.”Ali added: “It’s not a show where one thing stops and another begins. It all hands off to each other. We’re not following a template of what a musical is, but letting the music lead and allowing the songs to dictate how the story should evolve.”Creating in this fashion required much trial and error, Peck said. “All of us have had this huge process of building a lot and throwing stuff away. But that’s the only way to find the final recipe.”Ramirez likened the process to that of Juan de Marcos González, the musician behind the original “Buena Vista” recording: “He was the fixer, the guy who knew everybody involved, who knew where to find Omara and the right bass player. Like many young Cubans in that time” — the “Special Period” of economic collapse following the dissolution of the Soviet Union — “he wasn’t going to let go of an opportunity. To me, he’s the hero.”“I’m not a jazz musician,” Ramirez continued, “but I feel like we’ve been improvising, making this up on the fly, building it as we go. I can’t think of a more Cuban thing to have done.” More