If you’ve ever been lucky enough to listen to a live band inside a small club or restaurant in Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood, you already know the electrical atmosphere Cuban music can conjure within an intimate venue. The fact that the charismatic cast of Buena Vista Social Club brings that same joyful sense of close-up connection between artist and audience is only the first of many miracles wrought by the superb Broadway touring production, running now though Sunday at downtown Orlando’s Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts.
Inspired on the Grammy-winning 1997 album of the same name, which also spawned an Oscar-nominated Wim Wenders documentary, this stage musical incarnation of Buena Vista Social Club shifts back and forth in time between the 1996 recording sessions that reunited legendary Cuban jazz musicians Omara Portuondo (Karmine Alers & Isabel Gonzalez), Ibrahim Ferrer (Mauro Castillo & Jaleel Battles Jr.), Ruben Gonzalez (Robert M. Jimenez & Irving Aday O’Connor) and Compay Segundo (Frank Rodriguez & Aidan Olmo); and the eve of the Castro’s 1959 revolution, which split them apart.
Music director Juan de Marcos (portrayed by the mononymic Holiday) serves as the show’s de facto narrator and frames it as a “feels true” tale. And although the central plot line following Omara’s estrangement from her ambitious sister Haydee (Liana Morales) plays fast and loose with the facts of her life, there’s nothing inauthentic about Gonzalez’s infectious energy as the newly liberated young singer, nor Alers’ regal reticence as her scene-stealing older self, who gradually warms up to the reunion with Earth Kitt-like sultriness.
The book by Marco Ramirez has a few solid laughs but few surprising plot twists and entirely sidesteps issues of political ideology or its ongoing impacts, aside from expressing generic solidarity with the lower classes. Fortunately, the mercifully brief dialogue scenes are mostly there to bookend the songs, which spring off the CD to glorious life under show developer Saheem Ali’s kinetic direction. Pianist Nicolas Perez conducts the killer band, which is fronted by fleet-fingered San Miguel Perez on tres and features a hotter horn section than Chicago. As an added bonus on opening night, Congressman Maxwell Frost sat in with the sizzling rhythm session for the entr’acte, holding his own on the drums.
Best of all, Ali’s smoothly transitioning staging and Arnulfo Maldonado’s unobtrusively evocative scenery leave ample room for Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s choreography, which blends the best of their classical ballet backgrounds with lithe, loose-limbed Latin elements and propulsive, grounded Afro-Cuban gestures. All of the music is sung in Spanish, — fair warning for those who walked out of Hamilton early because you couldn’t understand the lyrics — but even if you don’t entiendo a single syllable, the emotion-laden songs’ heartbreak and longing come across clearly through the impassioned vocals and expressive movement.
No matter whether you’re a longtime fan of Cuban jazz or are only hearing these Havana classics for the first time, Buena Vista Social Club will have you dancing in your seat (like the family seated in front of me, who knowingly responded to every inside island reference), before sending you home with a smile by 10 p.m. — a rare and welcome gift in this era of bloated, downbeat musicals.
Various times and dates through Sunday, Oct. 25; Walt Disney Theater, Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts, 445 S. Magnolia Ave., 407-358-6603; drphillipscenter.org; $74-$215.
