In 1997, the album Buena Vista Social Club became an unexpected hit. Named for a popular Cuban music venue that opened in the 1930s, it was recorded in Havana in just seven days by a thrown-together group of Cuban musicians and catapulted Latin music into the spotlight. Now, those beloved songs are getting a fresh audience. A new musical, also called Buena Vista Social Club, is opening at Broadway’s Schoenfeld Theatre on March 19 following a successful off-Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company in late 2023.
Married couple Justin Peck and Patricia Delgado, who is Cuban American, have been a part of the creative team since the beginning. Although the two of them have worked together on a range of projects, including Steven Spielberg’s 2021 West Side Story, this musical marks their first credit as co-choreographers.
What were your relationships to the Buena Vista Social Club album before this production?
Patricia Delgado: I always associated the album with family gatherings. Listening to it on the radio in the car growing up, I didn’t think, Oh, it’s Buena Vista Social Club. It was more like this is just my family’s music. Cuban people’s music.
Justin Peck: It’s an album we both grew up listening to. For us, it’s very personal. At our wedding, it was the music for our first dance.
Patricia, on West Side Story, you were Justin’s associate choreographer. Now, you’re co-choreographers. How have these new roles changed your process?
PD: Working on so many projects in the supporting role to Justin has given me such an understanding of his style and his pace. I was so grateful to get the chance to do a co-choreographic process, but it doesn’t feel that different. If anything, it’s just given me more creative agency in the room. To have an idea, and not sit back, but challenge myself to not rely on Justin to step on the gas.
JP: The choreography in the show is essentially social dancing. So, what’s different about this process is that there’s so much involving two people moving in relation to one another. It’s a lot of the two of us trying something, throwing out an idea, and then the other person responding.
Do you shut off from the project when you’re at home?
JP: You can never clock in and out with this kind of work. It’s so all-consuming. It is a constant dialogue, but it never feels like work.
PD: It feels like we’re living it, and it’s a gift to get to be on it together.
Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck (right) in rehearsal for Buena Vista Social Club. Photo courtesy Polk & Co.
For the show, you’re blending an array of dance styles, including ballet, social dance, and Afro-Cuban forms. What kind of research have you done to prepare?
PD: One of the points of flight for us was the idea of ballet in Cuba. It’s ingrained in their social dance. People in Cuba do ballet like it’s eating.
JP: We’ve done a few trips to Cuba, and dance is so much part of the daily life there. People are dancing everywhere. And music is everywhere. It’s almost like incense burning all the time.
PD: There’s also a time-period element to it, because a lot of the dance in the show is from the 1950s. There’s no video footage of the Buena Vista Social Club, which was very liberating for us, because we get to dream and imagine what dance was like in that club at that time. There’s mambo and salsa, but it wasn’t like styles were codified. They were just dancing at a club.
Patricia, you’re first-generation Cuban American. Working on Buena Vista, how does it feel to be able to meld your Cuban and dance identities?
PD: It’ll make me cry immediately. I never imagined being able to use this music in this way. It’s the Cuban story that I didn’t live because I grew up in the United States, and my parents didn’t really live because they were immigrants. How lucky am I to get to share my personal truth and my family’s truth?
Justin, how did working on Illinoise—your last Broadway show—change how you’re thinking about using dance to tell stories?
JP: Illinoise was unique in that it was kind of like one massive dream dance, almost like the dream ballets in Rodgers and Hammerstein shows. I don’t think every show can be like that. But I learned a lot from making it. Buena Vista has to honor the history and the dance forms, as well as, hopefully, having some artistic novelty to the choreography. It’s a different assignment. But I’m always inspired to work on musicals and theater projects. It just feels like home for me.
PD: I’ve been thinking about Balanchine and Robbins, and how they went back and forth from the ballet world to theater. Yes, we can go back and forth. But it’s not really back and forth, it’s just this coexisting fabric of using dance to tell a story, or using dance in a more abstract way. They feed each other.
What do you hope audiences get out of the show?
PD: My mom came when she was 5 to the United States, and she’s never been back to Cuba. After the opening night at the Atlantic, she said in tears, “Even if I wanted to go back to Cuba today, I wouldn’t go back to the Cuba that I left. And you brought Cuba to us.” I think it’s like a time capsule. People can get a little bit of understanding of the human experience as an artist in Cuba at that time.
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