Entertainment | BROADWAY REVIEW: ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ is fast-paced celebration of old-time Cuban music

Jukebox Broadway musicals need conflict and the evil suits at Capitol Records are a perennial villain for artists who just want to be themselves. In “Buena Vista Social Club,” the venerable label even gets slapped with the ultimate slur, “Capitalist Records,” notwithstanding its long association with Cuban artists and, frankly, the strong interest of many of the mid-20th century Havana greats in finding stateside success in the entertainment business and avoiding the cultural chill of what here is a very sanitized version of the Castro revolution.

That’s not too surprising given that the new Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is written by Marco Ramirez from the point of view not of the famous South Florida conservative Cuban expats but younger, progressive Cuban-Americans more interested in the “purer” musicians who stayed on the island. This Broadway transfer from the Atlantic Theater Company to the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre is, of course, based on the group of great and mostly older Cuban artists recorded on the Grammy Award-winning 1997 studio album in Havana, as produced by Ry Cooder, and also on the related 1999 Wim Wenders documentary of the same name.

The titular social club was in the Buenavista quarter of Havana, at its peak in the 1940s and early 1950s and once the go-to, prerevolutionary place for hot dance music genres like son Cubano, bolero and the venerable social form known as danzón, as fun to watch on a Broadway stage in 2025 as in a Havana or Miami nightery more than half a century ago.

The show flits back and forth between the 1950s and the 1990s, when most of the 1950s artists were still very much alive. Scenes in the first era follow the careers of a talented pair of young Cuban sisters, played by Isa Antonetti and Ashley De La Rosa, who have to make a variety of moral decisions, including whether or not to leave the island.

The question of the night is the choice between selling out their souls to the vapid American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub (bad) or singing for their own people on the wrong side of the tracks (good). They try to make both work even as this relentlessly preachy show wants them to learn to pay more attention to their backup singers.

By the 1990s scenes, one of the sisters (the one who left Cuba) is dead and the older survivor, Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon), is being courted by a young producer (played by Justin Cunningham). In this mostly fictional version, the reclusive Omara has to decide whether or not to come back from retirement and record with her old colleagues from the fervent Cuban years, thus confronting those ghosts. You can probably guess where she ends up.

The story is predictably moralistic and, frankly, more worried about conforming to contemporary mores than accurately representing what was going on in Cuba in the 1950s, dramatically speaking anyway. Still, few people in the house are there for the story. They bought tickets to hear the great music and watch the thrilling dance, here rendered as an ebullient social form with balletic flourishes, as skillfully crafted by co-choreographers Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Bravura performances flow to the ear and eye from pretty much the entire company. 

Much of the onstage band is made up of old-school Cuban musicians, doing their sophisticated yet seemingly effortless thing, essaying semifictionalized real-life figures, such as the charismatic singer Ibrahim Ferrer (Mel Semé), the singer-guitarist Compay Segundo (the dryly laconic Julio Monge), the pianist Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling) and the tres player Eliades (Renesito Avich), among others.  

For many in the audience, including me, when combined with arrangements and musical direction  of this quality (Marco Paguia gets the main credit), that’s enough to make the show a consistent pleasure, notwithstanding the lack of any bona fide surprises. 

As today’s Broadway goes, “Buena Vista” is a modestly scaled show. The company of dancers is smaller than some might expect, although still mighty in execution. Given the roots of this material in the social contexts of the music and dance it celebrates, and the implicit disdain for the “Guys and Dolls”-like version of Cuban midcentury showbiz, that’s probably just as well.

As conceived and directed by Saheem Ali, the show concentrates on celebrating the musical artistry of performers and, despite the improvisational nature of this material does not overstay its welcome, bopping along at a swift two hours, even with an intermission to catch your breath.