Real Women Have Curves
Opening Night: April 27, 2025
Theater: James Earl Jones Theatre
Website: www.realwomenhavecurvesbroadway.com
Ana García dreams of flying away. But when her family’s East Los Angeles garment business receives a make-or-break order for 200 dresses, Ana finds herself juggling her own ambitions, her mother Carmen’s expectations, and a community of women all trying to make it work against the odds. Based on the play by Josefina López that inspired the iconic hit HBO film, with music by Grammy® Award-winning composer Joy Huerta and directed by Tony Award® winner Sergio Trujillo, REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES: THE MUSICAL “makes us feel we can all soar!” (WBUR)
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April 27, 2025
What buoys it is an extremely likable cast, riding the waves of a hummable score that sounds variously of Mexico, Broadway and American pop. (The music director is Roberto Sinha.) And it doesn’t hurt that the show has a luscious color palette, or that its version of a disco ball is shaped like a dressmaker’s mannequin.
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April 28, 2025
We gossip, stitch and sweat alongside them, fully immersed in director Sergio Trujillo’s heart-expanding, joy-swollen production — yet another landmark expansion of the “Real Women” canon.
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April 27, 2025
Cordoba, with her sweet, expressive face, is the kind of ingenue who’s easy to root for, and builds easy rapport with her family, chosen and biological. The musical trusts her to deliver, and she more than heartily rises to that challenge. Thankfully, despite some tonal flaws, so do these women.
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April 27, 2025
As pertinent as that notion is, it’s just one empowering theme in this triumphant musical. While some might find the plot to be all-over-the-place, it’s about Ana’s experience. Serving as a slice-of-life, it is desperately needed now, at a time when so many women like her are dehumanized on a daily basis, whether because of their body, race, or immigration status. Just as beauty is so much more than meets the eye, Real Women Have Curves offers far more than just its body-positive title. It may not be the flashiest musical of the season, but it’s real. The realest thing Broadway has seen in quite some time.
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April 27, 2025
But politics comes most alive through the personal, and the heart of the musical lies in its characters’ dreams: those that conflict with others, those that are deferred and, most poignantly, those that are never realized. The show astutely depicts the mixed emotions of grappling with obligations and expectations of one’s self, family and culture.
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April 27, 2025
Directed and choreographed with plenty of energy by Sergio Trujillo, this is a musical that does what it sets out to do and, by weight of circumstance, then some. It’s got plenty of bubbly, cheeky joy and big-dreaming sincerity, but it pulls back before crossing the line into either treacle or fluff.
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April 27, 2025
While the hardship and terror of living in constant fear of a knock on the door or a tap on your shoulder is repeatedly conveyed in Real Women, the musical somehow flattens the experience with triteness, cliche and lack of real surprise. Ana’s coming-of-age-follow-your-dreams story is trite and familiar, with no real stakes at play, and the racism and cruelty that fuels U.S. immigration policy feels watered down here, save for one moment of blunt bigotry that seems to come from a grittier production than this often light comedy.
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April 27, 2025
In a time when immigrants are being actively dehumanized throughout the United States, Real Women Have Curves provides a vital counterpoint—partly by depicting the dreams and fears of immigrant workers in specific terms, but mostly just by being lovable. This show is a bona fide crowd pleaser: a warm hug that pulls you into its generous bosom. With a little luck, it could turn out to be a sleeper hit. Go now and get ahead of the curve.
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April 27, 2025
The show’s vibe of joy and strength is crystallized in a final parade of Estela’s winningly glamorous creations (designed by Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young), underlining again the affirming sentiment of the show’s title. Unsurprisingly, the audience rises again to applaud with delight.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
The show is an absolute joy to witness with its vibrant scenery and lively choreography. It also pulls off a crucial balancing act, immersing us in the real, textured world of their East Los Angeles locale, leaning into the detail and intimate moments, and then, in the right moments, embracing fantasy by whisking us into the character’s minds and letting their dreams be visualized onstage.
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April 27, 2025
In scene after scene, Lisa Loomer and Nell Benjamin’s book for the new musical “Real Women Have Curves” is a vast improvement on George LaVoo and Josefina Lopez’s screenplay, which is based on Lopez’s play. Where the 2002 film dawdles, the musical defines and drives with great narrative precision its timely tale of Latina immigrants who make dresses in a Los Angeles shop.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
Amid all the celebrity hype on Broadway this season, Real Women Have Curves arrives with an outstanding cast of mostly unknowns, as incomparable as they are unlikely to star in a major Broadway musical. They are performing their hearts out in a production that is all heart. It is also funny, touching, tuneful and refreshingly original packed with a timely message. Put it all together and you have one spicy Mexican feast of a show – as savory as a hot tamale, smooth as flan and irresistibly tasty as a deep-fried churro.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
A number that connects like that is a rarity, and RWHC has two—the other being the triumphant title song celebrating cellulite, stretch marks, loose skin, and the other everyday realities that women are taught to hide. Not surprisingly, it routinely earns a mid-show standing ovation—and not just from the women in the house.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
Trujillo, an old pro, understands his material and his lively choreography is both created for the bonafide dancers in the cast and designed to make everyone else look and feel good. So they do.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
The production offers other crowd-pleasing elements, notable among them Arnulfo Maldonado’s typically vibrant set design. During the course of its roughly two hours, though, this real woman, at least, felt more patronized than entertained.
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April 27, 2025
Don’t expect a taste of medicine beneath the heaping spoonfuls of sugar: It’s a laugh-out-loud musical comedy with a massive dose of heart. If that combination sounds unlikely, the creators pull off an impressive balancing act in relishing joy and humor amid striving and strife.
READ THE REVIEWApril 27, 2025
For how much the show is about the characters’ status as immigrants or citizens, and how frequently they distinguish themselves from white Americans (from their treatment in society writ large to the justice system more specifically), it’s curious that, particularly in today’s political environment, the show loops back to a relatively unquestioned idea about the meaning, value, and reality of the American dream. It’s like Real Women Have Curves can’t figure out which story to care about more: the one about a teen following her passion, or about the complexity of immigrants trying to make it in an America where their ambitions are sometimes kept out of reach.
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