Goodman Theatre’s flexible second stage, the Owen, gets a makeover for LA HAVANA MADRID, a salute to a Latino music club that thrived in Chicago in the 1960s. To accommodate Teatro Vista’s hit production, the Owen’s usual row seating has been replaced with nightclub-style tables, hanging paper stars, mirror ball lighting and a festive proscenium that frames Sandra Delgado – both the show’s author and its vocalist -- and Carpacho y Su Super Combo, a five-piece Columbian-American band.
Their music carries us through LA HAVANA MADRID the way that the club once carried immigrants through rough new lives in Chicago. These Spanish-speakers came from different countries but shared the common experience of otherness. At La Havana Madrid at Belmont and Sheffield Avenues, they found kinship whether they emigrated from Cuba, Puerto Rico or Columbia. And then there was the rejuvenating beat of the music – at least until gentrification pushed the Latino population out of Lincoln Park.
Oral histories onstage at the Goodman Theatre
LA HAVANA MADRID takes oral histories that Delgado personally gathered and puts them onstage, story theater style, under the direction of Cheryl Lynn Bruce for Teatro Vista. Once a rose-colored scrim lifts from the proscenium, the eight-person cast presents multi-hued recollections of getting a foothold in America. Accounts of racism, homesickness, immigration woes and police brutality coexist with those of young love, family reunions and summer ball games.
