This Week on Broadway for March 30, 2025: Buena Vista Social Club

BROADWAYRADIO

03/30/25

James Marino,Michael Portantiere,Peter Filichia

This Week on Broadway for March 30, 2025: Buena Vista Social Club

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Peter Filichia, James Marino, and Michael Portantiere talk about Buena Vista Social Club, Othello, Purpose, Love Life @ Encores!, Vanya @ Lucille Lortel, Scott Siegel’s Broadway By The Season: 1934/35 & 1946/47 @ Merkin Hall, and 11th Anniversary High School Theatre Festival for NYC Public Schools @ the Shubert Theatre

Buena Vista Social Club: Justin Cunningham, Marco Paguia (seated at piano), Renecito Avich, Natalie Venetia Belcon, Román Diaz Photo by Matthew Murphy

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Panel:

Peter Filichia | [email protected] | Facebook
PETER FILICHIA is a playwright, journalist, and historian with a number of books. Peter’s new day-by-day desk calendar – A SHOW TUNE FOR TODAY – 366 Songs to Brighten Your Year – has been released! Peter also has columns at Masterworks Broadway, Broadway Select, and many other places.

Show Tune for Today is: At the Roxy Music Hall (Songs of New York)

Audrey Christie in I Married an Angel

Michael Portantiere | [email protected] | Facebook
MICHAEL PORTANTIERE is a theater reviewer and essayist. He is the founder and editor of CastAlbumReviews.com. He is also a theatrical photographer whose photos have appeared in The New York Times and other major publications. You can see his photography work at FollowSpotPhoto.com.

Kate, the Puppy!

James Marino | [email protected] | Facebook
BroadwayStars

Note: This week we had listeners join us while recording. These listeners are Patreon members who support BroadwayRadio. If you would like to join us in the future, become a supporter at Patreon.com/BroadwayRadio.

Pre:

Reviews:

Buena Vista Social Club: Isa Antonetti Photo by Matthew Murphy

MP + PF + JM: Buena Vista Social Club @ Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre
Step into the heart of Cuba, beyond the glitz of the Tropicana, to a place where blazing trumpets and sizzling guitars set the dance floor on fire. Here, the sound of Havana is born—and one woman’s remarkable journey begins.

Inspired by true events, the new Broadway musical BUENA VISTA SOCIAL CLUB™ brings the GRAMMY® Award-winning album to thrilling life—and tells the story of the legends who lived it. A world-class Afro-Cuban band is joined by a sensational cast in this unforgettable tale of survival, second chances, and the extraordinary power of music.

PF: Othello @ Ethel Barrymore Theatre, through June 8, 2025

Andrew Burnap as Cassio
Tony Award winner Andrew Burnap (Cassio) will next be seen in in Disney’s live-action adaptation of Snow White alongside Rachel Zegler and Gal Gadot, releasing theatrically on March 21, 2025. It was also recently announced that Burnap will be starring alongside Nate Mann and Shay Mitchell in The Up and Comer, a thriller directed by Golden Globe and Peabody Award winner Chris Long based on the novel from New York Times bestseller Howard Roughan, who adapted the screenplay. The multi-hyphenate was seen on Broadway last year as Arthur in Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot with a new book by Aaron Sorkin at Lincoln Center Theater, for which he earned a Drama Desk nomination, and Off-Broadway opposite Marin Ireland in Spain by Jen Silverman. In 2021, the actor won a Tony and Clive Barnes Award for his work Matthew Lopez’s The Inheritance.

(left to right) Jon Michael Hill (Naz), Kara Young (Aziza), and Harry Lennix (Solomon) in PURPOSE Production Photos by Marc J. Franklin

MP + PF: Purpose @ Hayes Theater, through July 6, 2025
For decades, the influential Jasper family has been a pillar of Black American Politics: civil rights leaders, pastors and congressmen. But like all families, there are cracks and secrets just under the surface. When the youngest son Nazareth returns home with an uninvited friend in tow, the family is forced into a reckoning with itself, its faith and the legacies of Black political power and familial duty. Spirited, hilarious and filled with intrigue, PURPOSE is an epic family drama from one of the country’s most celebrated voices.

PF: Love Life @ (City Center) Encores!, through March 30, 2025

Andrew Scott in VANYA Photo by Julieta Cervantes

PF + JM: Vanya @ Lucille Lortel Theatre, through May 11, 2025
Direct from a sold-out run in London, Andrew Scott (Ripley, All of Us Strangers) brings to life multiple characters in Tony Award® winner Simon Stephens’ (The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) radical new version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.

Comedic and tragic, Chekhov’s examination of our shared humanity – our hopes, dreams, regrets – is thrust into sharp focus in this production co-created by acclaimed director Sam Yates.

VANYA explores the kaleidoscope of human emotions, harnessing the power of the intimate bond between actor and audience to delve deeper into the human psyche.

MP: Scott Siegel’s Broadway By The Season: 1934/35 & 1946/47 @ Merkin Hall, March 28, 2025
The 2025 edition of BROADWAY BY THE SEASON will be Scott Siegel’s 25th Anniversary of presenting major concerts celebrating the history of Broadway musicals. Hailed by The New York Times, Playbill, The Daily News, etc. for his work, Siegel will present this first of three concerts on March 28 with the rest of the season taking place on April 21 and June 28. It will – as always – feature a sensational cast of stars bringing their brilliance to the greatest songs written by the likes of Cole Porter (Anything Goes), Irving Berlin (Annie Get Your Gun), Lerner & Loewe (Brigadoon) and more as he revivies the great songs from two different seasons (1934-35 & 1946-47) in one single show.

PF: 11th Anniversary High School Theatre Festival for NYC Public Schools @ the Shubert Theatre, March 24, 2025
Academy Award and Tony Award nominee Jake Gyllenhaal (Othello) will host this year’s 11th annual event. Additional guest presenters, supporting public school theatre education, will include Maya Boyd (& Juliet), Will Eno (Thom Pain), Thayne Jasperson (Hamilton), Baayork Lee (A Chorus Line), Liam Pearce (& Juliet), members of Pigpen Theater Co. (Water for Elephants), Zachary Noah Piser (Redwood), John Scott-Richardson (Between Two Knees), Shaun Taylor-Corbett (In the Heights), Jessica Vosk (Hell’s Kitchen), Khailah Wilcoxon (Redwood), and more!

The Shubert Festival celebrates five outstanding high school student productions from the 2024-25 school year, selected from more than 30 productions across the city by professional theatre artists and theatre educators. Over the course of the festival’s 11-year history, school productions from all five boroughs have performed at the event.

News:

INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE, Raphael Sbarge and Greg Laemmle
INSIDE THE ARTHOUSE is a brand new video podcast in a talk show format, filmed at the Laemmle Royal in Los Angeles. Greg Laemmle and Raphael Sbarge host the show, dedicated to an “insider’s” perspective on filmmakers and other personalities responsible for films appearing on arthouse screens across America. The show will be seen on Laemmle’s YouTube channel and available as an audio podcast, anywhere you listen to podcasts.

Richard Chamberlain, TV Heartthrob Turned Serious Actor, Dies at 90
An overnight star as Dr. Kildare in the 1960s, he achieved new acclaim two decades later as the omnipresent leading man of mini-series.

Richard Chamberlain IBDB

Scott Rudin, Producer Exiled for Bad Behavior, Plans Return to Broadway by Michael Paulson
Rudin stepped away from show business four years ago amid reports that he had bullied assistants. He says he has “a lot more self-control” now.

Next Week:

The Picture of Dorian Gray @ Music Box Theatre, through June 15, 2025

Peter’s Brainteaser:

It’s a spoken two-word phrase that ends a song heard in this 1970s Tony-winning musical. The song, aside from one line, is entirely sung by a performer who would win a Tony for this musical.

These two words — identical words, by the way — also became the name of another 1970’s musical that followed a few years later. It was written by two brothers and although it never played Broadway, it did play a theater in New England.

What’s the phrase, the song, and the names of both musicals? You needn’t name the brothers, for they didn’t become rich and famous and therefore happy too – at least not in musical theater.

Michael’s Musical Moments

JONATHAN GROFF – birthday, March 26; JUST IN TIME begins previews March 31

Music Opener:

OPENER: “Beyond the Sea,”