From Nairobi to New York: Director Saheem Ali Navigates Buena Vista Social Club to the Tony Awards

When director Saheem Ali first heard the songs of Buena Vista Social Club as a teen in his native Kenya, he couldn’t understand the Spanish lyrics—but he didn’t need to.

“I was so obsessed with it,” says Ali, whose father, an airline pilot, had brought the album home to Nairobi. “I was listening to it on repeat, memorizing the lyrics and singing along without knowing what I was singing about.” For him—and the millions who shared in his obsession around the globe—the Grammy-winning album featuring now-legendary Cuban musicians was more than a recording; it was an emotional education.

“It didn’t matter the genre or the language, I could feel how dynamic and how joyful it was,” Ali says. “It became this quintessential childhood album.” Three decades later, Ali has brought Buena Vista Social Club to Broadway, not just as an electrifying new musical—the show has received 10 Tony nominations, including for Ali’s direction—but as a passionate lesson in the power of music to transcend language, communication and culture.

LANGUAGE OF THE HEART
Selling more than eight million copies worldwide, the album and its blend of complex rhythms and lyrical melodies is a Cuban showstopper. Ali, though, didn’t simply want to resurrect an album. He wanted audiences to experience the thrill of its creation through the deeply complicated humans who brought it into the world. And in this case, the story centers on humans who express themselves through song—unraveling tales of longing, regret and romance—in Spanish. On stage, the album’s songs remain in their original language. Meanwhile, characters speak directly to one another in English.

“Inherently, that was the challenge of how to create this piece for a Broadway audience. We knew we wanted to keep the songs in their original Spanish and we didn’t want to use subtitles or translations,” Ali says. “In the end, we believed the emotional clarity of the story could carry the audience through.” The mission, then, was to construct a musical in which the audience could feel the full emotional weight of lyrics they might not understand. Which brought Ali right back to the musicians at the center of the recording studio.

Anchored in the personal histories of the band’s members, the show’s action flows freely in Havana between two pivotal years: 1956, when the songs were first popular amid the Cuban Revolution, and 1996, when the famed album was finally recorded. Many of the show’s most powerful moments come as the musical’s dueling timelines collapse into a single stage picture.

“That was very deliberate structurally,” Ali says. “In theater, it’s all about imagination. And it’s all about the audience going on a ride with you. When you can create two, three different intersecting moments on stage, that’s delicious and surprising and really forces the audience to lean into the emotional arc of the story.”

THE SOUND OF HOME AND HEARTBREAK
It’s not lost on Ali that his own personal journey—from Nairobi to New York—parallels the emotional arc of the musical.

The show’s narrative focuses on Omara Portuondo, one of the band’s vocalists and its only female member. Portuondo was separated from her sister during the Cuban Revolution—Omara choosing to remain in Cuba to make music, while her sister, Haydee, emigrated to the United States in search of a better life.

“I, too, left the country where I was born to try and make a different life,” says Ali, who crossed the Atlantic to eventually study directing at Columbia University. “I wanted to be a professional artist, and that simply wasn’t available to me in Kenya.”

A two-time Tony-nominee for Buena Vista Social Club and the Broadway production of Fat Ham, Ali also serves as associate artistic director of the Public Theater. While he has certainly found success in America, that doesn’t make his journey and separation from home any less bittersweet. “I live and I work here, but I still have this yearning in my heart for the place where I was born,” Ali says. “Home is complex. It’s not an easy subject.”

Audiences seem to agree—emotions within the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre have been running high. Night after night, the show brings down the house with its live Afro-Cuban band. Often, hearty applause breaks out at merely the opening chord of a song. But between the trumpet and trombone solos (and plenty of cowbell), you’ll find some quieter, and deeply personal, moments.

“We had a Cuban American woman in her 90s in a wheelchair, bawling listening to this music,” Ali says. “Then, on the other side of the theater, you have a couple from New Jersey also crying because they resonate with the story of the sisters being separated.”

"CHAN CHAN" IN THE STREETS
While Ali has spent decades infatuated with Buena Vista Social Club, it wasn’t his idea to bring the album to life on Broadway. Instead, he was invited to helm the production by the show’s book writer, Cuban American Marco Ramirez.

Had it not been for a transformative solo trip to Havana and Santiago de Cuba in the early 2000s, Ali says he may not have said “yes.” The trip gave the director the motivation to dive into a cultural experience outside his own. “I spent a couple months in Cuba taking in all the music and dance, which is experienced so viscerally there,” Ali says. “Practically every day I heard ‘Chan Chan’ in the streets. Even a decade later, the music of this album was still being played everywhere.”

NO MAPS, JUST MUSIC 
Listening to the music that he obsessed over as a teen hits differently for Ali as an adult. For one, he now knows some Spanish. “It’s not necessary, obviously, because these songs moved me as a teen regardless of their meaning,” Ali says. “But now, because I do know the language, I connect even deeper.”

He admits, tackling the album through the eyes of a professional theater artist didn’t come without its fair share of challenges. Chief among them: a conspicuously missing roadmap. “There was no mold to follow for a bilingual musical,” he stresses. “But we stepped into the challenge with an open heart.”

The result has earned Ali and his team a trove of accolades. But this show is more than a professional accomplishment for Ali. He's most proud to have helped build a theatrical experience that transcends translation. “This is an album that is quintessentially Cuban,” Ali says. “And yet there's something about it that can touch you no matter who you are or what language you speak.”