Review: Buena Vista Social Club, a Wild Cuban Dance Party Trapped in a Broadway Musical

The band takes the final bow in Buena Vista Social Club, the new musical at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway—and that’s as it should be. The music is so good, the performances so alive, and the band so sexy that I frequently found myself wondering: Couldn’t this just be a concert?

It was in 1998, when the original Buena Vista Social Club (the ensemble of Cuban musicians assembled by Ry Cooder and Juan de Marcos to record the 1997 best-selling album of songs from the pre-revolutionary Cuban nightclub scene) played Carnegie Hall, an event that would have been unthinkable just a decade earlier. That feat of cultural diplomacy at the end of history is the climax of Wim Wenders’s 1999 documentary about the group, as well as Marco Ramirez’s book, which invents the interpersonal drama the film notably lacks.

Omara Portuondo (a commanding Natalie Venetia Belcon) is elevated to the central role despite singing just one track on the album. She’s a living legend when Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) attempts to recruit her with an aggressive sales pitch: “…one day, with the right record, this island might remind the world that Mozart’s got nothing on us,” he tells her with typical Cuban humility. And it works.

She enters the studio with Compay Segundo (a charming Julio Monge), Eliades Ochoa (a magnetic Renesito Avich), and “Picasso on the keys” Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling), who is by now quite senile but is present as a “good luck charm.” Ever the diva, Omara initially bristles at de Marcos’s arrangement of “Candela,” which features a flute solo. “It’s not the right sound,” she scoffs. But, after crossing himself and going for it, the magnificent Hery Paz proves her wrong with the greatest flute interlude since Jethro Tull—to which Omara assents with a little ass shake (the multi-talented Paz also drew the lovely illustrations in the program insert).

Such recording studio squabbles have proven the stuff of Tony Awards, but Ramirez goes further: “Be careful,” Compay warns Omara, “Sometimes these old songs… they kick up old feelings.”

Suddenly we are transported back to 1958, the eve of the revolution, when young Omara (the powerfully expressive Isa Antonetti) had an act at the Tropicana with her sister, Haydee (Ashley De La Rosa). Their accompanists, a young Compay (Da’Von T. Moody) and Rubén (Leonardo Reyna), entice Omara out to the Buena Vista Social Club, a Black-run establishment decidedly not on any tourist maps. That’s where she meets a honey-voiced busboy named Ibrahim Ferrer (Wesley Wray in the 50s, Mel Semé in the 90s) who seems like the perfect collaborator. But with the sisters on the verge of signing a record contract and taking the last flight out of Havana before the commies roll in, Omara has a choice to make.

Ramirez has revised his book since the 2023 off-Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, excising a subplot about gunrunning (a possible sacrifice to that enemy of Dionysus, the God of positive representation). But it still feels both overstuffed and malnourished, providing only superficial context for this music while declining to touch any of the third rails that still electrify debate within the Cuban diaspora. A great work of musical drama it’s not, but does that matter?

Director Saheem Ali partially succeeds in distracting the audience from the actual play with top-notch production values, including a multi-level set by Arnulfo Maldonado that portrays the salt-eaten masonry of old Havana. Dede Ayite’s costumes artfully conjure two historical periods, the 50s and the 90s, and the color of the fabric explodes under Tyler Micoleau’s lighting, which feels directly connected to the percussive heartbeat of this music. So does the choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, which references traditional Cuban forms without being hemmed in by them. Most importantly, Jonathan Deans delivers pristine sound design so that we don’t miss a note.

Thank goodness, because music director Marco Paguia is serving up a feast for the ears, breathing new life into a well-known album with his clever arrangements and resourceful orchestrations. Some of the best moments in the show feature Avich on tres and David Oquendo on guitar leading the band, like in the second act opener “El Cuarto de Tula,” which invites band members to improv both musically and lyrically with what contemporary drag queens might call shade. Every song is its own little story, with a beginning, middle, and end—which again prompts the question: Why can’t this just be a concert?

Among the many quaint artifacts of the American century is the expectation that absolutely every square peg story and musical style fit into the round hole of the book musical, a distinctively American form we treat as timeless but which really only emerged in the last century. Why are producers so averse to deviating from that form, years after David Byrne has proven that it really can be done successfully? Are they creating for the Tony Award category without regard for what is best for the source material? In the case of Buena Vista Social Club, I suspect it’s primarily the fear of leaving a Broadway audience alone for two hours without the benefit of the English language.

That thoroughly banal explanation still doesn’t justify the mediocre book musical before us—a gorgeous night of sound and color that really could have just been a concert.