Officially, playwright and screenwriter Marco Ramirez began working on the Broadway musical “Buena Vista Social Club” a little more than six years ago. But if you start the clock when the Cuban supergroup’s music first seeped into his soul, he’s been penning it for decades. Like many Cubans and Cuban Americans, the silky crooning of band member Ibrahim Ferrer and the insatiable rhythm of “Candela” wafted through his grandparents’ living room and into his teenage ears. For him, the album represented a bond not just to Cuba, but to each other: “My grandfather is as much of a music nerd as I was,” says Ramirez. “We connected the same way two teenagers would, opening the liner notes and saying, ‘Look at these lyrics, look at this stuff.’ ”
The electrifying new musical began an open-ended run at Broadway’s Schoenfeld Theatre on March 19 and traces the origins of the Cuban music supergroup that rose to international fame after the success of their eponymous Grammy-winning 1997 album and the 1999 Wim Wenders documentary of the same name. The show’s creative team boasts a pedigree on par with the band itself, including Tony-nominated director Saheem Ali, two-time Tony-winner Justin Peck ( (“Illinoise,” “Carousel”) and his co-choreographer Patricia Delgado and Tony-winning producer Orin Wolf (“The Band’s Visit,” “Once”).
Unfolding across two timelines, the show follows the golden age Cuban musicians as they navigate Havana’s segregated social scene at the onset of the Cuban Revolution, and 40 years later during their twilight years as they hurtle toward the Carnegie Hall concert depicted in the documentary. While all of the songs are performed in their original Spanish, the dialogue is completely in English.
“Right now, you and I are a thousand miles away, speaking very different tongues, on a very different island,” explains character Juan de Marcos, inspired by his real-life counterpart. “But a sound like this? It tends to travel.”
Like the “Buena Vista” musicians, Ramirez also followed his dream thousands of miles from home, his artistic pursuits carrying the first-generation son of Cuban immigrants from his Hialeah hometown to New York, where he studied playwriting at NYU and Juilliard. Before he could even accept his master’s degree from the latter, he was off again, this time to Los Angeles, where he joined the staffs of award-winning television series, including “Sons of Anarchy” and “Orange Is the New Black.” More recently, he served as showrunner on “Daredevil” and “La Máquina,” and judging by the multiple projects he’s contractually-forbidden from discussing, he’s cemented his status as one of Hollywood’s most in-demand scribes.
Right now, though, Ramirez and I are thousands of miles away from L.A. in a very different metropolis: New York City,, where we break bread at Margon, a counter serve Cuban restaurant two blocks from the show’s theater on 45th Street. Our conversation lasted just 15 minutes before Ramirez was called back to the theater for a last-minute creative discussion about his Broadway debut. So, like the “Buena Vista” band members, we too took our show on the road, through Times Square, finally concluding at a nearby bar. After all, a conversation like this, occurring just days before opening night? It tends to travel.
You grew up with this music. What does this music mean to you now?
I think it’s entirely about honoring what came before us and also — we live in a world that is fascinated with what’s new and what’s young. Music is the only place where they really respect when an instrument ages. When a laptop ages, it gets thrown away. But in the world of music, it’s like, “This violin is 100 years old. This piano is 200 years old.” Age is seen as a sign of quality because it has endured.
I’m Cuban. You’re Cuban. We grew up with this music. As you started working on this show, did you feel any anxiety or nervousness about holding up the mantle of — I don’t know — our entire Cuban identity?
I felt a responsibility to the music. As a kid having been born and raised in Miami — to me, Cuba was a place where music came from. That was my first real relationship to the island and that culture.
And so I have felt like a protector to some degree of the music throughout this process. … I’ve felt a little bit like Indiana Jones running through a temple where tons of things are being thrown at you and you’re just trying to save the one beautiful thing because you’re like, “This belongs in a museum.” That’s me. And I feel that way about this music really passionately.
Can you take us through the early days? How did you feel when you first heard about [the project]?
It was an immediate yes. It was like I was on “Family Feud” and they asked the question and I was like, WHAM, on the buzzer. A commercial producer named Orin Wolf approached me, and he had done a show called “The Band’s Visit” on Broadway, which was a very successful, very beautiful and very moving musical. He said, “I love this music. I don’t speak Spanish, but I think there’s a theater project here. Can we start talking about it?” And my response was “YES” in all caps. And from that point on, we were in lockstep and walking together on this journey. We went to Cuba several times. We met with a lot of the musicians. We went to Mexico to meet with some of the musicians’ families who lived there. We’ve been kind of globetrotting and we really feel protective over this music. And we’ve been doing it together.
One of the lines that jumped out at me is when Young Haydee tells her sister Omara [Portuondo], basically, “We have this potential deal with Capitol Records, and we need to leave the island. There’s this whole future ahead of us if we just leap and say yes to this.” When you —
(Laughs) That’s actually better than the line.
Ha, thanks. When you were in undergrad, before you had booked a single professional job as a writer, what did you see as your future? What did you hope would unfold?
Broadway was not anywhere in the picture, but I thought, “I want to write plays. I want to get them produced or produce them myself,” which we did. And for some weird, arbitrary reason, I told myself, “And when I’m 40, I can write TV.” It was like a weird rule. Like, “[writing for television] is something 40-year-old people do.” But at the age of 18, 19, 20, all I was trying to do was get a couple productions of my plays done anywhere that would do them. … I got to write for TV before I was 30, which was nice.
What do you have left to do? I guess that means it’s all over for you.
I’m really hoping that next year I’ll get traded to the Miami Heat.
Early on in the play, when Juan de Marcos is trying to get [legendary Cuban singer] Omara [Portuondo] to record the album, he delivers this pretty stunning monologue: “This record, the one you did after it, and the one after that … they changed my life. They’re the reason I went to conservatory. They’re the reason I got two PhDs.” Who was your Omara Portuondo?
In a way, that’s me talking to the [“Buena Vista Social Club”] record, to the legacy of this record. This record for me was the high watermark of what music could do … and proof that Cuban compositions belonged right next to Beethoven. In some ways, that became kind of the rallying cry of the whole piece: We just want to fight for some space and some respect …. Like, when did the Mount Rushmore just suddenly become Beethoven, Mozart, Bach, Rachmaninoff — all the other names that we know? Who’s to say that there aren’t other people from other places, from other continents who deserve to be considered canonically among the best music ever made? … I really do genuinely feel that way about some of these compositions. They are all-timers. The melodies are all up there with the most beautiful melodies ever made.
Toward the end of the play, as Compay [Segundo], you write: “These songs you like so much. They’re all about heartbreak, about longing … But they’re not beautiful because we wrote them that way … They’re beautiful … because we lived them.” As a Cuban American from Miami myself, as you are, there is a distance, both geographic and chronological, between the life that you lived, born and raised in Miami, and the life that they lived, born in and dying in Cuba. How did you close that distance?
I think the first step was acknowledging my privilege, but also that my lived experience was never going to be the experience of somebody who was born and raised and lived in Cuba. I identify as Cuban American, I identify as Cuban culturally, but I do not have the same lived experience as people who have lived both the joys and the sorrows of it.
Part of that is what made visiting [Cuba] so, so insightful. Just being there and interacting with a lot of people who had never left the island. But really just trying to inhabit the point of view of these artists who were born and raised and died there and what that must have felt like for them, for the outside world to keep looking at their music and saying, “Oh my God, it’s so lovely. It’s so beautiful. Everything is so filled with exotic flavor and it’s just so romantic.” But for them to not fully comprehend the level of suffering that went into the songwriting, the level of suffering that went into the performance, even just the agony of practice to be able to play like Leo [Reyna], our pianist, or Renesito [Avich], our tres player — the hours spent alone in a room with an instrument to be able to solo in a huge way and like be the Jimi Hendrix of the tres. That’s a lot of work and heartache and sacrifice. There were a lot of parties those guys didn’t go to so that today they could be the party.
On that note, heartbreak and hardship is now unfortunately so part and parcel to the Cuban condition, but the show is also really funny. So many laughs come out of some of the most heartbreaking moments of the show. Was that intentional?
I don’t think it was an active choice. I just don’t think I would have been capable of doing it without comedy. I think my experience of Cuban culture has largely been an experience of Cuban comedy. Whether or not that’s the storytelling tradition of my uncle telling a joke at the table or my aunt or my mother, or my grandmother telling a joke. And especially, I think, when the songs are so heavy and so about heartbreak. Not all of them, but many of them are so heavy and about heartbreak. It’s like they’re either about heartbreak or they’re about sex. It was about the counterbalance.
What drives you to write?
Oh, God. I’m not good at anything else, Nick. I’m not even sure I’m good at this … What was the question? “What drives you to write?” I don’t know … I do fundamentally believe in the power of storytelling and stories, whether or not that’s theater or movies or books. It is a way that we make sense of the world, and I believe in that as an art form. Like one believes in Santa Claus.
What’s it like to finally get to this point where you can’t touch it anymore? It’s out of your hands and this is the script that’s going to go in black and white forever?
A lot of therapy and a lot of meditation are going to help me get through the next week. … I genuinely hope that people like it. I’m proud of it. Most importantly, it’s been a lot of fun to make.
Thank you for your time. My dad’s coming to see it with me tonight for the second time. Thank you for bringing the old spirits back for him.
Thank you for the Margon chicken thighs. They were delicious.
The post ‘Buena Vista Social Club,’ writer Marco Ramirez ushers Broadway into the golden age of Cuban music appeared first on Los Angeles Times.
