Broadway Teacher’s Workshop

“ On Your Feet”

“ On Your Feet” is the classic rags to riches story of Gloria and Emilio Estefan and the Miami Sound Machine.  The story takes Gloria from a child in Miami singing with her guitar, entertaining her Abuela as she helps out the family, to her meteoric rise to musical fame with the help, management and of course, love, of her partner and manager Emilio Estefan.  One of the first scenes hits every emotional chord: her father is in Vietnam and is listening to a tape she has sent him in his barracks.  If you are a parent, you are aching for his longing for her, and his pride of her talent.  

The conflict is clear and realistic from the beginning.  How will the band make it on the American pop scene?  Is their music too Latin?  Is their music becoming too American for the Latin market?  At a key moment, Emilio says to their manager, “Look at this face.  This is the face of America now.”  The second conflict is also a part of her real story.  She had an accident that almost destroyed her career, and took her many months to recover.  There is great triumph in her final return, and the salsa dancing, flashy costumes and upbeat, popular Estefan songs bring us to emotional heights and depths that I did not expect from this show.  

Ana Villafane plays the role of Gloria Estefan, in her Broadway debut show.  It is uncanny how much she looks and sounds like Gloria Estefan.  In the post-production talkback she told us how she has worked on this.  Gloria Estefan spoke with her and shared a few of her performing secrets before shows, which Ana did.  She said Gloria’s  voice is naturally like Ana’s in her lower register, although she says she is a soprano, and Gloria is an alto.  It is clear she has learned Gloria’s way of moving, as this adds to the character she has created in the show.  She is clearly a first class actress, appropriating Gloria’s whole persona.  

Ektor Rivera, who plays Emilio, is charismatic on stage, has great chemistry with his Gloria, and moves beautifully.  His smoky voice is tender and shows great delicacy in the ballads.  He shows strength when it is needed in the moments he has to push Gloria to recover from her accident.  The scene in the hospital with Gloria’s mother is a turning point in the show.  Up to this point, there is mostly fast-moving staging, heart-stopping Latin dancing, a humorous tryst with the love declaration of the Estefans, and all of a sudden we are alone in a room with Gloria unconscious in the bed, and Emilio and Gloria’s mother facing unspoken resentment.  Timing of the lines, facial expressions, and then the final duet all contribute to an arresting portrayal of love, hope, and fear bringing two people together at a moment of crisis.

In the post-show discussion we learned that the show’s direction evolved drastically from the Chicago pre-Broadway version.  In the original version, it begins with the bus accident, and goes back in time from there.  The director believed, and rightly so, that this became too confusing for the audience, and this new version is streamlined, clear and very easy to follow.  There are scenes that are perhaps too cliche.  For example, when Gloria begins the scene not able to dance, and six minutes later, she dances like a professional?  A little pat.  At the beginning of the show, Gloria and Emilio are arguing before she goes on stage.  This appears trite and unrealistic.  It is obvious that it is a foreshadowing of the bus accident later on: Emilio is trying to get Gloria to take the bus to visit someone, and she is trying to convince him that she is too exhausted to travel.  The lines are trite, but moreover the acting is stilted in this scene.  The love scene between Gloria and Emilio in the bodega is also trite, obvious and not developed at all.  It is simply a vehicle for the next song.  

The director is clearly a dancer, as most of the direction is about preparation for the dancing, or dancing itself.  The dancing and the band carries the show.  It was a great decision to have the band on-stage for most of the show.  It is tight and joyous,  and a wonderful tribute to Miami Sound Machine, which was innovative and destroying ethnic barriers at the time.  It reminds us of what the show is about.  The director has every song show us the beauty and intensity of salsa, bachata, with the costumes to go with it.  He directs Gloria’s best songs with the band playing with her, and getting the audience clapping and wanting to get up and dance along with them.  He directs the conga song at the bar mitzvah to go into the audience and with a little boy flying around on-stage and then jumping into the audience as well.  You are not only mesmerized by the music and dancing, you become immersed in it and a part of it.  

The panels worked really well as scene designs.  The panels slide back and forth across the stage, but are not full sets.  They only take up a third of the stage, and are sometimes showing two places at once.  This design element gave the show flexibility with all the places it needed to go: Vietnam, Cuba, Miami, New York.  It also allowed for the quieter interior moments: in the hospital, with Gloria’s physical therapy, in the kitchen with her mother, in her father’s bedroom.  There are beautiful, colorful designs projected onto these panels, which correspond beautifully to the swirling skirts and flashy dancing by Sergio Trujillo.  They also show great contrast between the big performance numbers with Gloria and the band, and the intimate family portraits, like the scene where Gloria speaks of her love of Emilio and her father is in bed, unable to respond.  

Finally, I never bought an album of Gloria Estefan’s music, but I knew every single song that was sung in the show.  Why is that?  We learn from the show that the Estefans did everything they could to get their songs played on the radio.  I have always listened to a great deal of radio and now I understand so much better why I always loved their songs.   The contrast between the flashiness of the choreography and the intimate portrayal of a young woman declaring her independence from her overprotective mother is poignant, exciting and heart-wrenching.  The immigrant success story is slightly glossed over but the message is emphasized through the spectacular Latin dancing and the awesome rhythmic soundscapes of the band on stage.  For a jukebox musical, this one does everything you would want it to do:  Immerse you in the culture of the music, teach you about the singers and songwriters, and remind you of the importance of family and how they support you through it all.