It was an improvisation to begin with. In 1996 a recording session was scheduled in Havana between Cuban and Malian musicians, but the Africans had visa problems and did not arrive. Instead, a brotherhood of veteran Cuban musicians recorded a collection of classic Cuban songs. This was the “Buena Vista Social Club,” which became the best-selling Cuban album in history and a defining artifact of Cuban culture.
More albums followed: outtakes, offshoots, live recordings of performances like one at Carnegie Hall. Wim Wenders made a documentary. And now, almost 30 years later, there is a musical on stage: “Buena Vista Social Club,” in preview at the Off Broadway Atlantic Theater Company.
This new project began a few years ago, when a producer with the theatrical rights to the album approached Cuban-American playwright Marco Ramírez (“The Royale”).
“The first question,” Ramírez said, “was: ‘Do you know this album?’ And for a Cuban kid who grew up right around the time the album came out, the answer was: ‘Of course.’ The next question was, ‘Do you think there’s a play here?’”
The search for an answer sent Ramírez to Cuba, where he interviewed some of the surviving participants.
Through flashbacks, “Buena Vista” recreates Cuba before the revolution, the Golden Age of the 1950s, of the musicians’ youth, full of nostalgia and regret. The dialogue is in English, but the songs, drawn from the broader “Buena Vista” catalog, remain in Spanish.
The show, which runs through January 7, is directed by Saheem Ali and choreographed by the married team of Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. Casting was a challenge, doubly so because the flashback structure required finding two people (one older, one younger) to play each of Buena Vista’s distinctive real-life personalities.
The common denominator, Ramírez said, is that everyone has a link to the “Buena Vista” album. His comes through his Cuban grandparents, who played the songs in their house in Miami, so when the album came out he already knew them.
Mel Semé plays the older Ibrahim Ferrer, who bowled shoes for money when he was recruited to provide his golden voice to the boleros for the Buena Vista recordings. He was a teenager in Cuba at the time of the album’s release.
“It first became popular outside of Cuba,” he said. “But then we fell in love with this music again and it became the music that many of us aspired to play.”
Renesito Avich plays Eliades Ochoa, the cowboy hat-wearing musician who brought a more rural sound to the original Buena Vista group. Music “has been the backdrop of my entire life,” he said.
Among the non-Cuban cast members, Natalie Venetia Belcon is a Broadway actress who does not speak Spanish. But when she was preparing to audition for the role of Omara Portuondo, the Buena Vista diva, her songs generated a flood of memories from her musician parents from Trinidad and Tobago. Kenya Browne, the Mexican-born singer who plays young Omara, knew the music as something her grandmother used to play. Her mother told her that “Dos Gardenias,” a bolero she sings in the musical, is one that her great-grandmother often sang.
Peck remembered walking through Havana, listening to music and seeing people moving to the rhythm of it. “And then, as soon as that sound starts to fade, there’s another sound in the distance brushing against it,” he said. “That energy is something we want to transmit.”
Ali said the goal was to “let the music guide and let the songs dictate how the story should evolve.”
Ramírez compared the process to that of Juan de Marcos González, the musician behind the original recording of “Buena Vista”: “He was the one who arranged everything, the guy who knew everyone involved, who knew where to find Omara and the bassist appropriate”. Like many young Cubans in that period of economic collapse, he “was not going to let an opportunity slip away. For me, he is the hero.”
“I’m not a jazz musician,” Ramírez added, “but I feel like we’ve been improvising, making this up as we go, building it as we go. “I can’t think of anything more Cuban to have done.”
By: BRIAN SEIBERT
The New York Times
BBC-NEWS-SRC: http://www.nytsyn.com/subscribed/stories/7015367, IMPORTING DATE: 2023-12-05 20:40:07
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