‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Review: Exuberant New Broadway Musical Celebrates the Soul of a Nation

variety.com:

Frank Rizzo Entering “Buena Vista Social Club” is like stepping into a heady world of the senses, of heightened emotions, and of passionate music and dance.

The Social Club was a real place for locals in Havana in the ’50s. Decades later, its music became the source of a Grammy-winning album, then a popular film — and now it’s the most intoxicating and rapturous show of the Broadway season.

The celebratory musical — with a book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”), developed and directed by Saheem Ali (“Fat Ham”) — takes its inspiration from Wim Wenders’ 1999 Oscar-nominated documentary on the making of the album “Buena Vista Social Club.” “Some of what follows is true,” says Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham), the show’s young record producer and musicology student who is making an album of “songs from the old days,” using veteran Cuban musicians whom time had almost forgotten. “And some of it only feels true.” Feeling is everything in Ramirez’s book, in Ali’s staging and for the astonishing ensemble cast, as the story shuttles between an Old Havana recording studio in the ’90s and the city a week before the 1959 revolutionary takeover.

The framing device has the principal characters represented by their younger selves with the two eras intertwined in a sort of kinder, gentler, Latin “Follies.” Among them is the club’s busboy singer Ibrahim (Mel Seme as the elder, Wesley Wray as his younger self); guitarist-singer Compay (Julio Monge and Da’von T.