There's nothing in music-nothing, really, in the entire world of soundlike human voices working in tandem. In unison or in harmony, vocal collaboration is a metaphor befitting music's relation to society: if we can sing together, maybe we can work together, too.
"Buena Vista Social Club"-a new musical, directed by Saheem Ali, for Atlantic Theatre Company, with a book by Marco Ramirez and music by the eponymous award-winning musical collective, the subjects of the 1999 documentary by Wim Wenders on which this show is based-draws its fun, its exuberance, and its occasional moments of emotional depth from its focus on how voices come together to change societies, or to convey their sicknesses. After a vivid opening number, the story begins in a recording studio in Havana, Cuba, where a young musicology student and bandleader, Juan de Marcos (Luis Vega), has come to ask a life-changing favor of the legendary singer Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon). He thinks that Cuban music hasn't got its due, that it's more than fit fare for tourists, that a voice like Omara's and the history she symbolizes shouldn't go unrecorded. He's assembled a band and booked studio time; all she has to do is show up.
Belcon's queenly Omara-modelled on the actual Omara Portuondo, who is showcased in Wenders's film-is spiky, remote, set in her ways. She's lived through the history that de Marcos can evoke only nostalgically in reference to the songs he loves. Those songs remind Omara of real people and real events, political interludes whose senselessness and brutality have left unmusical lacunae in her life. Now she's curt and uncollaborative perhaps the best indication of her current state of mind is that she sings not with a live band but over a prerecorded track. She's not a musician to make friends. Not anymore.
この記事は The New Yorker の December 25, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です ? サインイン
この記事は The New Yorker の December 25, 2023 版に掲載されています。
7 日間の Magzter GOLD 無料トライアルを開始して、何千もの厳選されたプレミアム ストーリー、9,000 以上の雑誌や新聞にアクセスしてください。
すでに購読者です? サインイン
GET IT TOGETHER
In the beginning was the mob, and the mob was bad. In Gibbon’s 1776 “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,” the Roman mob makes regular appearances, usually at the instigation of a demagogue, loudly demanding to be placated with free food and entertainment (“bread and circuses”), and, though they don’t get to rule, they sometimes get to choose who will.
GAINING CONTROL
The frenemies who fought to bring contraception to this country.
REBELS WITH A CAUSE
In the new FX/Hulu series “Say Nothing,” life as an armed revolutionary during the Troubles has—at least at first—an air of glamour.
AGAINST THE CURRENT
\"Give Me Carmelita Tropicana!,\" at Soho Rep, and \"Gatz,\" at the Public.
METAMORPHOSIS
The director Marielle Heller explores the feral side of child rearing.
THE BIG SPIN
A district attorney's office investigates how its prosecutors picked death-penalty juries.
THIS ELECTION JUST PROVES WHAT I ALREADY BELIEVED
I hate to say I told you so, but here we are. Kamala Harris’s loss will go down in history as a catastrophe that could have easily been avoided if more people had thought whatever I happen to think.
HOLD YOUR TONGUE
Can the world's most populous country protect its languages?
A LONG WAY HOME
Ordinarily, I hate staying at someone's house, but when Hugh and I visited his friend Mary in Maine we had no other choice.
YULE RULES
“Christmas Eve in Miller’s Point.”
