La Havana Madrid

Or: Sobre las Olas

She is born, like Venus, out of the waves. From beyond the aqua blue walls, Carpacho y Su Súper Combo pouring smooth, mid century latin musics into the air, Sandra Delgado, playwright and tonight’s embodiment of La Havana Madrid, a famed Chicago nightclub and the soul of Hispanic Caribbean music in the city. Mixing the memories of real life chicagoans, Delgado, by both in word and deed, summons the so-often-silenced voices of Latinx Chicago to the fore.

Some of the vibrant performances include Cruz Gonzalez-Cadel as Myrna Salazar, the crowned queen of Chicago’s Puerto Ricans who bore witness to the horrific riots that followed the shooting of a young man. Gonzalez-Cadel connects with her audience, both showing off her charms, sharing with us her rage and frustration, and seeding in our minds with the love of her birth and her adopted homes. Marvin Quijada plays Carpacho (the younger version the bass player and Band leader on stage behind him), hunted by immigration but enraptured by the blend of latin music learning to toddle in the city. And Tommy Rivera-Vega and Phoebe Gonzalez and Henry and Marjua, a young couple celebrating their first anniversary, who share both the spark and report of the infatuated and the married, building off their sentences and gazes to a warm and flattering picture.

Across these, and the many other stories of redemption and defiance, Delgado grooves away, undulating with voice and step. She illuminates how each of these stories crash upon and mingle with each other, just as the waves of cultures, of stories, has have built upon and texture each other. It’s a lively, and by the end, moving look at who we are and what we may become.