“Buena Vista Social Club” is electrifying as a concert of fifteen classic Cuban songs performed in Spanish by multitalented singers, dancers and musicians who are easily as vibrant as the veterans of the long-ago Cuban music scene who recorded the original album of the same name in 1996. That recording became a surprise phenomenon, winning a Grammy, reviving long-dormant careers, and spawning international tours and spinoffs, two acclaimed documentaries by Wim Wenders, and worldwide enthusiasm for traditional Cuban music.

But “Buena Vista Social Club” is billed as a new musical, not a concert. And so,  threaded through the often thrilling music is a plot that is little more than serviceable and less than trustworthy.

 “What follows is in no way a historical account,” says Juan De Marcos, a driving force behind the original album and our sometime narrator (portrayed by Luis Vega.)  “Some of what follows is true. Some of it only feels true.” 

These fudging lines are written by the musical’s librettist, Marco Ramirez, a Cuban-American playwright who’s best-known for “The Royale,”  a 2016 play that was “loosely based” on boxing champ Jack Johnson, and that (as I wrote in my review) showed a knack for punchy lines and for speculation “that smells like hooey.”

The story that Ramirez constructs for “Buena Vista Social Club” toggles back and forth between the 1990s and the 1950s, and centers in both eras on Omara Portuondo (portrayed In the 1990s, by Natalie Venetia Belcon and the 1950s by Kenya Browne) and a small circle of musicians she meets in and around the nightclub-like community center in the Buenavista section of Havana.

As with most of the characters in the show, Omara Portuondo is the name of an actual person, a storied Cuban singer and dancer who is still active at the age of 93, nominated this year for yet another Grammy. But she and the other characters on stage may or may not have a personality that corresponds with the real person. The Omara on stage in the 1990s is an intimidating and difficult diva, whom Juan De Marcos seeks out, in hopes she will join the recording session and convince her old friends to do so as well.

She eventually comes through, but with deep ambivalence, because, as she confesses, “old songs kicked up old feelings.”

Those feelings play out in the 1950s in her relationship largely with two of the other characters. The first is her sister Haydee (Danaya Esperanza), with whom she has an act that performs at the Tropicana, a swanky nightclub for tourists . They hire two substitute backup musicians (their regular backups are busy), Compay Segundo and Rubén González (portrayed in their youth by Jared Machado and Leonardo Reyna, respectively, and in their old age as Julio Monge and Jainardo Batista Sterling.) Compay overhears Omara singing “Veinte Anos” to herself, a sad song by Maria Teresa Vera that’s a classic trova, a rural folk  music that’s unlike anything that the sisters would be singing at the Tropicana. So he tells her about the Buena Vista Social Club, There, Omara meets Ibrahim Ferrer (Olly Sholotan in his youth, Mele Semé in his old age.) She falls in love with his singing – and there’s the mildest of suggestions that she might have fallen in love with the rest of him as well, but they are of a different class and color.  

Haydee is aghast that Omara has even visited the club, which is in what she considers a dangerous neighborhood.  Their differences come to a head when she and their parents, alarmed by the unrest that presages the Cuban Revolution, leave the country.

Omara is never able to reconcile with Haydee, but she does forty years later with the other musicians in her past, tunefully.

I personally would have loved a libretto (or at least a program note) that told us more about the music – tipping us off to which songs belonged to which specific Afro-Cuban musical genre, whether rumba, son, cancion Cubana, danzon,  punto guarjira. In any case, luckily, unlike many jukebox musicals, none of the songs in “Buena Vista Social Club” are jerry-rigged to advance the plot. They are simply the songs that the musicians, young and old, in the 1950s and the 1990s, are playing for an audience or for one another.

Some hardcore fans of what’s become the Buena Vista Social Club franchise might find it amiss that Ry Cooder, the beloved American guitarist and record producer who is usually credited as the prime mover behind the initial album, is not even mentioned in this musical; instead, Juan De Marcos talks vaguely of “some British guys” who took a chance on him.

On the other hand, these aficionado are the people most likely to appreciate how top-notch the talent the creative team has gathered to recreate the excitement of the original ensemble.  There is the mix of street, ballet, modern, Cuban choreography by the husband wife team of Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck; the seductive singing by the regal Belcon, the suave Monge, the swoon-worthy Sholotan; there are all the terrific solos – the virtuoso playing of the Tres guitar by Renesito Avich (who, like several of these first-rate musicians, also portrays a real-life character, Eliades Ochoa); the flooring flute solo by Hery Paz in “Candela,” which even wins over Omara, who had just protested: “No one ever recorded a scorching rendition of anything with a flute.” But everything is scorching in Buena Vista.

Buena Vista Social Club
Atlantic Theater Company through January 21 (reportedly all sold out)
Running time: two hours including an intermission
Book by Marco Ramirez 
Developed and directed by Saheem Ali 
Choreography by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck 
Sets by Arnulfo Maldonado, costumes by Dede Ayite, lighting by Tyler Micoleau, sound by Jonathan Deans, music supervisor Dean Sharenow, music director Marco Paguia, wigs, hair & make-up by J. Jared Janas, dialects by Rosie Berrido,
Cast: Skizzo Arnedillo, Renesito Avich as Eliades, Natalie Belcon as Omara, Angélica Beliard, Kenya Browne as Young Omara, Danaya Esperanza as Young Haydee, Carlos Sanchez Falú, Jared Machado as Young Compay, , Hector Juan Maisonet, Ilda Mason, Marielys Molina, Julio Monge as Compay, Leonardo Reyna as Young Ruben, Mel Semé as Ibrahim, Olly Sholotan as Young Ibrahim, Jainardo Batista Sterling as Ruben, Nancy Ticotin, and Luis Vega as Juan De Marcos. 

The original 1997 album: