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The Buena Vista Social Club Gets Bigger and Smaller on Broadway
Revising Cuba’s past with a trimmed book, but more thrilling dance.
Back when my colleague Sara Holdren reviewed the musical, very loosely based on the true-life stories of the sensational Cuban supergroup, she noted that “the play side of Buena Vista feels like it’s been carefully assembled by committee.” It had a convoluted, rushed, and generically inspirational narrative about how these players met, weathered the revolution, and returned to each other. Belcon brings the house down with “Candela,” maybe the most famous entry in the album, with more than a little help from Buena Vista’s band — in character, Omara disproves of a flute solo, until she hears the show’s flautist Henry Paz wail away on the instrument (a moment that wows the audience, too). To that end, the Buena Vista has inserted a pamphlet of mini-histories of each of the songs into its Playbill (for the sake of immersion, the introduction says those notes are by the character Juan de Marcos, but the text is credited to Hugo Eugenio Perez).
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