‘Buena Vista Social Club’ review: Electrifying Cuban music and dance on Broadway

nypost.com:

Two hours and 10 minutes, with one intermission. At the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, 236 W 45th St.“Buena Vista Social Club,” the new musical that opened Wednesday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is practically a jumbo jet to Havana.So transportive are the intoxicating Cuban music and spirited dance that it’s easy to forgive the show’s rather wispy and cliched book.

The lush sights and sounds more than make up for all the burdensome exposition and Broadway-style one-liners. Named after and featuring songs from the popular 1997 album, “Buena Vista Social Club” hops back and forth through time — from the days leading up to the 1959 Cuban Revolution to the 1996 recording session at which the lost songs finally became immortalized.We meet characters both in their optimistic youth, scraping by in nightclubs as they nurture dreams of becoming world-famous musicians, and almost 40 years later when some of them have succeeded and others are still busking for loose change on the sidewalk.

No matter where they are in life, everybody longs for the long-gone Cuba they grew up in.Director Saheem Ali, who elegantly weaves together both eras, and writer Marco Ramirez have centered their show around Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon, full of pathos and passion), the “¿Dónde Estabas Tú?” singer who’s being courted by the upcoming album’s producer.

Now a star, she’s prickly and hard to convince. Confronting the past is painful for her. But skeptical Omara eventually dips her toes in and is emotionally reunited at the studio with her old pals from the shuttered Buena Vista Social Club: Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling) and other geniuses.