Remember “Buena Vista Social Club,” the album? Even if you don’t, now there’s “Buena Vista Social Club,” the musical, an exuberant blast from the past – old Cuban music for a new audience. The Broadway version is a stand-in for the city’s corroded grandeur, and for the studio where, in 1996, a group of old, mostly forgotten Cuban musicians recorded the album.
Justin Cunningham, as Juan de Marcos: “What follows is the story of a band. Not ours, though we will do our best. Some of what follows is true. Some of it only feels true.”
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The true part: the real person this actor is playing, Juan de Marcos Gonzalez, had already located and brought together the old musicians before music producers Ry Cooder and Nick Gold showed up in Havana. When their plan to make an album pairing Cuban and West African performers fell through, they went with Plan B, and recorded with the group Juan de Marcos had assembled.
“I was so happy, because they were my idols,” Juan said. “You know, I grew up with, you know, listening to their music. And then suddenly, I was the bandleader.”
I asked, “Did any of the people involved, including you, have any idea that what became ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ would be something big?”
“No,” he replied. “They became pop stars. It was like an unbelievable thing.”
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The unexpected and irresistible phenomenon that resulted is the subject of the Oscar-nominated 1999 Wim Wenders documentary.
“It was just ubiquitous; I mean, you would hear this music everywhere,” said music journalist and Substack contributor Judy Cantor-Navas, the author of “Cuba on Record.” “To say that, ‘Yes, we’re listening to this old Cuban music that is suddenly selling millions of albums,’ seemed like something that was very unlikely.”
I asked, “Why do you think people loved the music so much?”
“Cuban music has really appealed to so many different kinds of people,” said Cantor-Navas. “They say that it has, you know, the perfect combination of the Afro-Cuban rhythms and the Spanish melodies that came together in Cuba. It’s just this very infectious music that, like, gets in your soul.”
It wasn’t just the music they loved. It was who the musicians were – the improbable last act of their careers. The album won a Grammy, and has sold more than 8 million copies worldwide.
“And they were so happy, you know, because they came back to the stage,” said Juan de Marcos. “Because if you are a musician, and you are an artist, you are always an artist, you know? And even when you’re retired, you have this small candle in your heart.”
Singer-dancer Omara Portuondo was 67; singer Ibrahim Ferrer was 70. Other band members were as old as 90. They began touring the world, even singing to me for a “Sunday Morning” story 25 years ago. “I still have to pinch myself to make sure I’m not asleep and dreaming,” Ferrer said then. “I never thought I’d have so much success.”
From the archives: Buena Vista Social Club on its U.S. tour (2000)
The play tells the imagined origin story of the musicians, their careers, and their personal struggles, with hints of romance, decades before their fame late in life.
Marco Ramirez wrote the Broadway show. “I’m Cuban American. I was born and raised in Miami, but my parents and my family’s Cuban,” he said. “And so, for me what brought me to this was the music. It was music that I was raised around my entire life.
He was 14 when the album came out: “This was a moment of intense pride, of us realizing that the world cared about our music, and that these songs that I was used to hearing on my grandfather’s little yellow Sony boom box above the washing machine, these were songs that suddenly the whole world cared about. That meant everything to me.”
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Saheem Ali, the director of the show, grew up in Kenya. His father, an airline pilot, brought the album home. He became obsessed with it. “I kept listening to it on repeat,” he said. “Something about the lyrics spoke to me. I learned the lyrics without knowing what I was talking about, ’cause Swahili’s my first language.
“I knew nothing about their stories, absolutely nothing. The first time I knew about the stories was reading Marco’s script. That’s what excited me about this musical. People are gonna know about them now in a way that young people like me never had a chance to.”
Brought to life on a Broadway stage, the old songs as they were played in the 1940s and ’50s at the actual Buena Vista Social Club, a members-only Havana nightclub for working class Black Cubans. It was shut down after Fidel Castro came to power in 1959. The events of the Cuban Revolution lurk at the edges of the show.
Playing yesterday’s Cuban music on Broadway are some of today’s finest Cuban musicians, most of whom now live outside Cuba, because making a living there is tough.
Juan de Marcos said, “The people going to see the real Cuba, they are going to get a piece of our country when they attend the musical. We have nothing in our country. We don’t have oil, we don’t have gold, but we have the music, beautiful ladies, good coffee, the best cigars, and the best rum. And the music, which is the most important thing, like food for us.”
Served up on Broadway: a feast.
To hear a performance of “Chan Chan,” from the musical “Buena Vista Social Club,” click on the video player below:
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Story produced by Reid Orvedahl. Editor: Carol Ross.
