The musical Buena Vista Social Club, inspired by the story of the Cuban supergroup and its best-selling 1997 Latin music album, is a feast of cultural dualities. Far from a jumble of disparate elements—this is not your average jukebox—the show is a poignant, rousing evocation of a country caught in the crosshairs of history and of the art that can heal its wounds.
Written by the Miami-born Cuban American Marco Ramirez, the ensemble piece has a fluid relationship to time and space. While its plot is anchored in the album’s Havana recording sessions, it also reaches back into the final moments of the city’s prerevolutionary era, when so many had to choose between fleeing for security or staying for continuity. To quote one of its characters, the bandleader Juan de Marcos González, who gathered most of the group’s musicians: “These old songs, they kick up old feelings.”
When Ramirez was approached by producers interested in staging the album’s music a few years ago, he was excited by their openness. (“They were just like, ‘Okay, cool, we all love this music…. What do we think the show is?’”) After a research trip back to his homeland, he chose to foreground the singer Omara Portuondo, turning her into a sort of prodigal daughter returning to this bygone sound. “In doing so,” Ramirez tells Vogue, “this kicks up a bunch of emotions and feelings and stories from the past. And so as an artist, in order to move forward, she has to look back, and that became the thread that we hung everything else on.”
As he wondered who would be able to help shepherd his loose ideas to fruition, Ramirez caught a performance of Fat Ham and thought its director, Saheem Ali, an ideal fit. For his own part, Ali, who is Kenyan, knew the album but says he would not have come on board had he not taken his own solo trip to Cuba earlier, one which gave him the insight and encouragement to tackle a cultural experience outside his own. In a show with a book in English and a music catalog entirely in Spanish, he also followed the sound of the claves—percussion instruments as elemental to Afro-Cuban music as to the West African songs he grew up hearing—into the heart of the material.
As the show prepares to open at the Schoenfeld after a sold-out run at the Atlantic Theater downtown, Ramirez and Ali speak to Vogue about their collaboration.
Vogue: The piece operates as a diptych of the ’90s, when the album was recorded, and of prerevolutionary Cuba, and there’s a line in the show about how there are only two types of Cubans: “those who stayed and those who left.” It’s striking to see a show that speaks to emigration when most narratives here tend to focus on immigration.
Marco Ramirez: I’ve seen a lot of stories about immigration, about people who arrive in a new land, but this was a story about people who all stayed and continued to work in Cuba. That was an active choice that they made as artists, so it always felt right for this story to take place entirely in Cuba. This is their music, the music of this culture, so we kept the focus on, specifically, Havana and the people there who’ve lived in both time periods. It’s about people who commit their lives to music, about artists who say, “This is what I want to do forever,” and who made that decision in their very early 20s.
How did you each experience emigration growing up?
Saheem Ali: I’m the one who left, right? I had the privilege to leave, and I left, very specifically, because I wanted to be an artist. So I have my own guilt about not staying and not contributing artistically to the place where I was born because that drain is one directional if you never return. I empathize so deeply with Omara, who feels drawn to stay in her country, because it’s not the version that I chose for myself. It’s so beautiful to show a story where young people decide to stay and invest and then have that second chance in the future. What I love about Marco’s perspective [is his centering of] the homegrown Juan de Marcos, someone who actually had their foot on the ground, as the engine of this particular story.
Ramirez: I grew up around a lot of people who were experiencing a kind of shared nostalgia. For my grandparents, specifically, music was their connection to this place I grew up hearing about as if it were never-never land. As the years passed, their memories of it seemed to just get brighter and nostalgia seeped in. In a way, the memory part—the ’50s part—of this show has been purposely written and designed and performed to feel like it’s being remembered—not too grounded, because it’s not a docudrama. Every time we go to the ’50s, we see it as how this woman remembers things. I think I grew up like that. My own connection to the island was almost entirely through music, and it wasn’t until later in life that I actually got to visit and realize these people are living a shared experience. This is a whole other perspective. This is a whole other place. It was magical being able to do that and realize these people want their story to be told from their point of view because it’s very often told from the outside.
Were you excited, through this project, to explore the parallel versions of yourselves that stayed behind?
Ramirez: One hundred percent. I grew up around a lot of political conversations held around pig roasts and domino games, but I also just heard very human stories. “Did you hear who got sick? Did you hear who got married?” And once in a while, people would have relatives come visit and we would see these people pop into our lives and then go back, and it was like, Well, whatever happened to that aunt? And I would hear my grandparents on the phone talking to these people or hear them sobbing when someone passed who they hadn’t seen in 10 years. I was very excited to tell a story about the kind of disconnect that happens between people who really love each other but are living in almost different dimensions. Though, in some ways, they’re living in the exact same dimension. Those connections never go away.
How did you work to create a book and a production primarily meant to honor music while still delivering a strong story?
Ramirez: For me, it was about letting the music lead the way and understanding that these songs are about heartbreak and longing, looking back and regret—for lack of a better word, missed connections, the potential that the past has. We’re not using the songs to push the story but using the story to push songs. From day one, my intention was to allow this music to be framed, as incredible as I think it is, but also story-wise, to get out of the way. The show’s band always gets this wonderful, rousing ovation at the end, and it’s so deserved. It’s all for them and the music. That was always rule number one: making sure that the music sounded authentic, presented in Spanish and with the traditional arrangements and instrumentation.
Ali: I took my cues from Marco and his book because that reverence is what I sensed from the page the minute I came on board. So it was all about figuring out the architecture to support that in a physical production: music and music making. There’s gonna be no faking of music instruments, no relegating the band to the corner, but we had to figure out how, with fluidity, to also place them at the periphery when something else needed to be at the center. How could we design a physical landscape to allow that to happen and storytelling fluid enough that we didn’t need to wait for a big scene change to get to the next scene? How could we hint at different spaces or periods without a projection saying, “Now you’re in 1959”? It was about how the poetry of the music could translate to a poetic way of telling the story.
Tell me about calibrating the show so that English speakers don’t feel alienated but Hispanics don’t feel sold out.
Ali: The guiding principle was that if the songs are in Spanish and beautiful in their own right, then how can the storytelling support them in a way that’s more emotional, in a way where the setting tells you what’s happening? The songs are performed either onstage, in clubs, or busking on the Malecón, so how can you provide a circumstance where the audience understands where the song is being performed and is not wondering where in time and space they are? The only song that doesn’t have a performer who we know as a character is “Chan Chan.” That’s the one song embedded within the story that the band sings, but the storytelling continues with movement. The person singing that song, as Marco put it the other day, is the song itself.
What did you learn, or want to change, from the Atlantic Theater production?
Ali: We felt like we had found a structure that supported the bilingual nature of the piece and a design that had fluidity, but there were some relationships where we wanted to sharpen the conflict and stakes. We spent some time working on those storylines and revisiting some of the numbers, like “Chan Chan,” which is completely different now. Off-Broadway, it was very abstract, with two dancers interpreting the heartbreak and separation of the sisters, with a bit of story embedded within it. Now it’s all story, in terms of movement and design that’s nonverbal. This is the second time I’ve had to size up a show that was delicate and beautiful off-Broadway, and you’re constantly wondering how to keep what worked while taking the opportunity to revisit some things.
The dancing seems more integrated now. What kind of conversations did you have with choreographers Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck after that run?
Ali: Just unpacking each and every number and asking again and again, What are we trying to say? Are we doing it successfully? With “Bruca maniguá,” the first number we see the Ibrahim Ferrer character sing at the Buena Vista, we always knew it was about his virtuosic singing, and we wanted to touch on the African roots of the song, but we wanted to go further. How could we go deeper so that Omara is witnessing something that is primal and deeply rooted in them? So we added a section that cuts everything else but the batá drums that he responds to in a kind of ritualistic dance. Growing up in Africa, my friends and I would do that. We didn’t have theater, but we had performances where we danced to drums. Watching that moment now on a Broadway stage gives me chills down my spine because it feels so rooted in something familiar from the content where I was born.
I appreciate that the show deals with colorism and the racial aspect of Latin identity, which I feel is an unexplored topic even within the community.
Ramirez: Yeah, I mean, that originated just from the fact that the Buena Vista Social Club was a Black club back in the day. It felt like something very organic to the telling of the story. The idea that it affected Ibrahim Ferrer’s actual career because back then he was considered a background singer, no matter how absolutely breathtakingly gorgeous his voice was.... It just felt honest, and the Afro-Cuban nature of the music, that cultural influence, was an organic part of everybody’s story. Saying the quiet parts out loud, as opposed to leaving them quiet, felt right.
What have you noticed from the response to the show?
Ali: I’m really proud because we set out to do a thing, and I think we’ve done it beautifully, and the audiences have been just rapturous. Hearing people applaud at the opening chords of a song…. I can’t remember the last time I was on Broadway and heard people applauding not the star coming out but the song. So to have created a piece that allows these songs to just exist and then to feel that adulation for the music, I feel immensely proud.
Ramirez: It’s particularly moving to see the band’s reaction to it because these are some of the best musicians I’ve ever seen and many of them were not playing Broadway stages a year ago. And an unexpected thing for me, watching the audience, are the moments when a song is mentioned—“We’re gonna sing ‘Dos gardenias’”—and it’s a line I never thought could get a response but, to my shock, some nights people start clapping just at the mention of a song. That’s not us taking credit for anything, but when I think of the whole project of the original album, and people like Juan de Marcos saying, “These are old songs, written 60, 70, 80 years ago, and I just want the world to remember them for a little bit longer,” that’s the reason that record was made, and it pushed the music forward. That was now 30 years ago, so the thought that we get to push it one more time, just a little bit, just to spin the plate once more, feels like we’re helping the collective memory remember the music.
This conversation has been edited and condensed.