Buena Vista Social Club
Opening Night: March 19, 2025
Theater: Schoenfeld Theatre
Website: buenavistamusical.com
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March 19, 2025
The interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.
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March 19, 2025
A terrific ensemble transforms Buena Vista Social Club into a dazzling feast for the eyes and ears. This music has been enchanting audiences for decades, and now a whole new generation will get to dive head first into this world, and for that, we should all be thankful.
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March 19, 2025
The band takes the final bow in Buena Vista Social Club, the new musical at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre on Broadway—and that’s as it should be. The music is so good, the performances so alive, and the band so sexy that I frequently found myself wondering: Couldn’t this just be a concert?
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March 19, 2025
You don’t have be Cuban to feel the nostalgia, romance, loss, liberation, joys and pride in such well-lived music.
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March 19, 2025
With her absolute command of the stage, Belcon galvanizes and grounds the production in a performance that fulfills all the demands of August Wilson’s greatest female role, Ma Rainey.
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March 19, 2025
All that adds up to a rousing evening at the theater, if also something less than a great musical. With its book whittled down so much and its careful hedging to only speaking the broadest generalities about Cuba’s history, Buena Vista Social Club only aims modestly high, just above the level of a tribute concert.
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March 19, 2025
Buena Vista Social Club offers an irresistible tropical vacation. A celebration of Cuban musical history, it’s a getaway and a gateway.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
As a band and a brand, “Buena Vista Social Club” has been gold from the get-go… “Buena Vista Social Club” is now an even better Broadway musical, opening tonight at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
They masterfully deliver variously swinging or sorrowful or sensual arrangements of vintage heartbreakers like “Dos Gardenias” that illustrate and/or decorate a nostalgic, at times dramatic, storyline set mostly in mid-1950s Havana as the coming Cuban Revolution smolders. I am no authority on Afro-Cuban anything, but it is wonderfully easy to drown in the dreamy music lovingly being made by the artists who light up the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
Having marshalled a stunning troupe of singers, dancers, and an amazing house band, the Atlantic Theatre Company production recaptures the magic of that reunion live and in person — and irresistibly, too.
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March 19, 2025
I really felt whisked away — a feat many shows set in international locales fail to achieve. The crowd audibly inhales when the windows slowly open on Arnulfo Maldonado’s set to reveal a spectacular ocean. Obviously it’s not real. But at “Buena Vista Social Club,” for a couple hours, you’re lulled into believing you’re drinking a mojito in 90-degree heat.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
If that sounds more like a few juicy scenes than a full-on epic, well, you’re on to something; this Buena Vista Social Club is more involving than a typical concert, but substantially thinner than a truly great play, despite great production work all around.
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March 19, 2025
It is a privilege and treat to hear these musicians play; the whole theater vibrates with their collective energy and mastery—sound design is by Jonathan Deans—and each are accorded individual moments to shine.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
The question of the night is the choice between selling out their souls to the vapid American tourists at the Tropicana nightclub (bad) or singing for their own people on the wrong side of the tracks (good). They try to make both work even as this relentlessly preachy show wants them to learn to pay more attention to their backup singers.
READ THE REVIEWMarch 19, 2025
It’s easy to like a show that knows itself. Between the first words of the script — a stage direction, “We begin with music” — to the final bow — by the onstage band — the infectiously exuberant and joyous Buena Vista Social Club tells and shows exactly what it’s about.
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