Electrifying Cuban music and dance on Broadway

“Buena Vista Social Club,” the new musical that opened Wednesday night at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, is practically a jumbo jet to Havana.

So transportive are the intoxicating Cuban music and spirited dance that it’s easy to forgive the show’s rather wispy and cliched book. The lush sights and sounds more than make up for all the burdensome exposition and Broadway-style one-liners. 

Named after and featuring songs from the popular 1997 album, “Buena Vista Social Club” hops back and forth through time — from the days leading up to the 1959 Cuban Revolution to the 1996 recording session at which the lost songs finally became immortalized.

We meet characters both in their optimistic youth, scraping by in nightclubs as they nurture dreams of becoming world-famous musicians, and almost 40 years later when some of them have succeeded and others are still busking for loose change on the sidewalk. No matter where they are in life, everybody longs for the long-gone Cuba they grew up in.

Director Saheem Ali, who elegantly weaves together both eras, and writer Marco Ramirez have centered their show around Omara Portuondo (Natalie Venetia Belcon, full of pathos and passion), the “¿Dónde Estabas Tú?” singer who’s being courted by the upcoming album’s producer. Now a star, she’s prickly and hard to convince. Confronting the past is painful for her. 

But skeptical Omara eventually dips her toes in and is emotionally reunited at the studio with her old pals from the shuttered Buena Vista Social Club: Compay Segundo (Julio Monge), Rubén González (Jainardo Batista Sterling) and other geniuses. 

After the Revolution, Fidel Castro closed down most of the clubs.

In flashbacks to a different world, Omara (Isa Antonetti) and her sister Haydee (Ashley De La Rosa) hustle to snare a recording contract, but their values in life and art begin to part ways. Young Compay (Da’von T. Moody) and Rubén (Leonardo Reyna) make a charming buddy act, and Reyna is a hell of a piano player.

There’s a barely-there love story, too, involving young Omara and Ibrahim Ferrer (Wesley Wray), a black performer who can’t escape background singing. Because details and development are scant, the audience never becomes especially invested in it. 

Really, though, the plot is just a means to more exceptional music. What gets our blood pumping is the fabulous onstage band that stirringly performs some 20 numbers, including “Chan Chan” and “Dos Gardenias.” 

The songs are accompanied by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck’s vibrant, fluid, full-bodied choreography that’s so athletic and rubbery it makes you question if the dancers actually have bones.

I really felt whisked away — a feat many shows set in international locales fail to achieve. The crowd audibly inhales when the windows slowly open on Arnulfo Maldonado’s set to reveal a spectacular ocean. Obviously it’s not real. But at “Buena Vista Social Club,” for a couple hours, you’re lulled into believing you’re drinking a mojito in 90-degree heat.