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.
Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
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Diese Geschichte stammt aus der December 25, 2023-Ausgabe von The New Yorker.
Starten Sie Ihre 7-tägige kostenlose Testversion von Magzter GOLD, um auf Tausende kuratierte Premium-Storys sowie über 8.000 Zeitschriften und Zeitungen zuzugreifen.
Bereits Abonnent? Anmelden
INSIDE JOB-"Hit Man"
Years before Hannah Arendt coined, in the pages of this magazine, the phrase \"the banality of evil,\" popular films and fiction were embodying that idea in the character of the hit man. In classic crime movies such as \"This Gun for Hire\" (1942) and \"Murder by Contract\" (1958), hit men figure much as Nazis do in political movies, as symbols of abstract evil.
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ARE WE DOOMED?
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RED LINE
With the election approaching, the U.S. and Mexico wrangle over border policy.
