Theatre in Review: Buena Vista Social Club (Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre)Buena Vista Social Club is packed to the rafters with sizzling musical performances, both vocal and instrumental, and dances to match. The opener, "El Carretero," strikes a party atmosphere, with the entire company leaning in and bouncing back with the song's rhythm; after that, the good times rarely let up. Choreographers Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck have devised an original and dramatic salsa-meets-ballet style that fills the stage with exuberant movement. The action is supported by gorgeous, authentic scenery and costumes, colorful lighting, and a sound design that offers rare clarity, especially with a large complement of musicians performing onstage. It's a crowded, teeming, electric evening of entertainment, except for one aspect, which, alas, reveals much about where musical theatre is right now. Most jukebox musicals rely, lazily, on existing pop catalogs, their easily identifiable hits designed to make a show into an instantly salable proposition. Buena Vista Social Club faces a different, and thornier, problem. In paying tribute to the artists lionized in Wim Wenders' 1999 documentary, everyone is committed to the authenticity of their music. It's commendable -- the sound is distinctive, the melodies irresistible -- but, in so doing, the show's creators paint themselves into a corner. Because the music and lyrics are, rightly, not to be altered or adapted -- the Spanish lyrics are retained, without translation -- they can't be put to any specifically dramatic use. The book and songs exist on separate tracks, rarely, if ever, meeting. If a show must coast on its songs, Buena Vista Social Club is uniquely poised to do so. Consider the number "Candela:" Juan, a young record producer, has lured the troubled, troublesome diva Omara into the studio. It hasn't been easy: A living legend who mysteriously gave up the stage some years earlier, Omara approaches the idea of a comeback with something close to outright hostility. (As played by Natalie Venetia Belcon, she is an imperious queen-in-exile, her upswept hair transmuted into a crown with the addition of a headband and tropical flower, her military bearing swathed in colorful muumuus.) Gingerly running through the arrangement with her, Juan mentions a flute solo. Omara, who looks ten feet tall when her back is up, issues a dictate: no flute. After a brief tussle, Juan gracefully withdraws. The number begins. Omara and the musicians start cooking; at the appointed moment, the flautist Hery Paz steps in. Omara shoots a murderous look, then, little by little, gets into the idea; soon, she and Paz are riffing off each other. Next, Omara gets into it with the percussion section, with bongo solos further kicking up the excitement. It's a perfectly simulated jam session, sweet, hot, and bursting with the joy of music-making; moments like these are why many in the audience will be levitating out of the Schoenfeld. But Buena Vista Social Club has a story, addressed in fits and starts, shoehorned in and around the songs. In most jukebox musicals, the plots are so airheaded that the less we get of them, the better, or, in the case of star musical bios, we already know when the divorce or crack-up is coming, leaving little room for surprise. But Marco Ramirez's book has an urgent, even haunting, story of exile and betrayal to tell. In its evocation of a lost era of show business, the depredations of time, and the price paid for survival, it sometimes carries hints of Follies; too bad nobody has any time for it. As flashbacks reveal, in 1959, Omara and her sister Haydee are a popular act, the "songbirds of Havana," at the Tropicana, a tourist-trap nightclub. Omara chafes at their hokey "exotic" routines; Haydee, worried about getting out of the country before the impending revolution blows it up, is busy charting a future for them that includes a recording contract and a move to the United States. Omara passively goes along with the plan until musician acquaintances Compay and Ruben take her to the title venue, where the clientele is heavily Black, and the music reflects the voices of everyday Cubans. (Adding to the appeal for Omara is the club's busboy/singing star Ibrahim Ferrar, an enticing musical partner who looks like boyfriend material.) Events accelerate rapidly when Fulgencio Batista's government falls, and fateful decisions must be quickly made. Omara makes her choice, abandoning Haydee, only to learn that the days of the Buena Vista Social Club are also numbered. There's enough material here for a non-musical play, or even a novel, but Ramirez reduces it to a series of lead-ins and crossovers, dropping telegram-like updates between the songs. The dialogue runs along the lines of statements like "The president left the country. His soldiers are trying to fight off rebels, but it's only a matter of time," or "I want to make music for us. I'm done doing it for everyone else." The script notes that the sisters are the product of a marriage that crossed racial and class lines, but it doesn't explore what that meant for them. Haydee drops out of the story, her fate reduced to a single line of dialogue. The real Ibrahim Ferrer had a long-running career; here, he is relegated, without explanation, to a sad sack who sings for pennies in the streets. Oddly, a musical that unfolds during a violent nationwide upheaval almost entirely ignores politics. The name "Castro" is never uttered, and the show has little to say about life under a Communist regime. The producer who launches Omara's solo career dismisses his former US employer as "Capitol-ism Records," which gets an easy laugh; still, it is the new regime that shuts down musical establishments like the Buena Vista Social Club, thus wrecking the careers of Omara's friends while she is touted as national "symbol of hope." It feels strange that a show filled with such gutsy and passionate music should be embedded in a book designed to be as inoffensive as possible. "It's not your fault the world made us take sides," Company tells Omara, offering as much commentary as the script will allow. Ramirez's book has been tightened up since its original Atlantic Theater Company engagement, eliminating a subplot about gun-running that added little to the story, and Saheem Ali's direction, aided by Tyler Micoleau's spectral lighting, which moves between time frames with an eerie fluency. But, because the score can do nothing to support the action, the characters remain at a remove: The Omara-Ibrahim romance -- which, to be sure, doesn't come to much -- is a total nonstarter because the show can never get inside their heads. It might have been better to style Buena Vista Social Club as a straight-up revue, or, perhaps, to pace the songs with monologues expressing the characters' stories; it has no time for drama. Still, the numbers sizzle and the dancers add to the heat, especially a gripping sequence in which Omara, in the recording studio, is juxtaposed with a ballet showing the closure of the Buena Vista Social Club. (This sequence has a stunning force absent elsewhere; the simple gesture of slamming a chair on a tabletop shatteringly cues the end of an era.) Belcon is a force to be reckoned with, bringing an earthy vitality to her scenes and songs. As her younger counterpart, Isa Antonetti has a telling moment when, stepping up to a mic for the first time as a solo act, she assumes the posture and attitude of the woman she will become. Ashley De La Rosa brings some welcome humanity to young Haydee, who could come off as materialistic and calculating, but instead is seen as genuinely worried for her (and her sister's) future. Julio Monge's eccentric body language feels just right for the older Copay, who alone knows how to handle Omara because he understands the source of her pain. Arnulfo Maldonado's scenic design is one of his very best, a two-level structure, reflecting classic Havana architecture, with a lower upstage wall that opens to create a recording studio, and louvered windows above that reveal a Technicolor view of the ocean. (The set appropriates architectural details from the Schoenfeld Theatre, thus fitting seamlessly into the space.) Micoleau's lighting is alternately ghostly and red-hot, polishing the dance numbers with unforced skill. Dede Ayite's costumes have a solid grasp of late-1950s styles, her showgirl costumes have the required pizazz, and she gives the older Omara a style you won't soon forget. (J. Jared Janas' wig, hair, and makeup designs provide invaluable assistance.) Moving to a larger theatre, Jonathan Deans' sound design continues to highlight the individual contribution of each instrument in the extensive onstage musical ensemble. The producers have supplied first-class goods in every department, and the audience sensibly responds in a rapturous manner. I don't want to complain too much about a show that has been put together with such care and love. But somewhere, somehow, we've lost the ideal of integration -- blending music, dance, and narrative -- that made musical theatre a sophisticated form of entertainment. Instead, this most American of theatrical genres is, distressingly, headed backward -- in part, I fear, because producers are reluctant to take a chance on material that isn't easy to market; better, the thinking goes, to rely on names everyone already knows. Somehow, we need to turn the clock back to an earlier model so the musical theatre can find a creative way forward. --David Barbour 
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