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    ‘I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan’ Review: What Are You Waiting For?

    Mona Pirnot’s comic ode to the downtown artist doubles as a meditation on the precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.Nothing has made me regret Atlantic Theater Company going dark for more than two months this year like “I’m Assuming You Know David Greenspan,” the absolute tonic of a show that reopens the company’s second stage.Written for and performed by the downtown wonder David Greenspan, who has collected a half-dozen Obie Awards over his singular career, it was originally scheduled to open the day after Inauguration Day. But when previews were about to start, the stagehands went on strike, Atlantic Theater indefinitely postponed the production and we, the public, temporarily lost out on a source of comfort and delight in a time of chaos.With a union contract ratified, we have it now, and frankly the abrupt suspension of this comedy by Mona Pirnot (tonally a complete departure from her play “I Love You So Much I Could Die”) has only enhanced its effect, adding a stratum to what was already a multilayered affair. Because this clever, funny play is both an attentive ode to Greenspan’s extraordinary artistry as a playwright-performer and an unsparing meditation on the psychic and financial precariousness of playwriting as a creative life.It is, then, very much insider theater — yet it generously serves, too, as an initiation for the unfamiliar: into Greenspan’s exquisitely expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a small gaggle of millennial women, and into the costs and payoffs of pursuing artistic ambition at full tilt.Theatergoers can witness Greenspan’s expressive whirlwind solo performance style as he plays a group of millennial women onstage.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesSet in Brooklyn in the summer of 2022, the action takes place in the apartment of Emmy, a playwright freshly cognizant of the danger of being too broke to afford health insurance. She has invited a few writer friends over to do a reading of her new work in progress — a litmus test that, no pressure, will tell her whether to give up theater forever. Mona, a fellow playwright obsessed with Greenspan ever since she saw him perform “The Patsy,” is the first to arrive, followed by Sierra, who writes for television and consequently has gobs of cash to throw around.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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    ‘Buena Vista Social Club’ Brings the Thrill of Music Making to Broadway

    A new musical inspired by the 1997 hit album gives a fictional back story to the veteran performers of the Havana music scene.The spirit of the musical “Buena Vista Social Club” is evident in its opening scene. Audience members have barely settled into their seats before a group of onstage musicians strikes up the number “El Carretero,” with the rest of the cast gathered around and watching. Some are leaning in from their chairs, others get up and dance on the side. The music is center stage, and we immediately understand its power as a communal experience that binds people.Therein lies the production’s greatest achievement. For a place where music so often plays a crucial role, Broadway hardly ever highlights the thrill of music making itself.Oh, there have been shows that have effectively pulled the curtain on the process — David Adjmi’s play “Stereophonic” takes place inside recording studios, and the most effective scenes in “Beautiful: The Carole King Musical” are set in one as well. But the interconnections between musicians, songs and a society have rarely been evoked as vividly, and as lovingly, as they are in “Buena Vista Social Club,” which opened on Wednesday at the Gerald Schoenfeld Theater. (This improved version follows the show’s Off Broadway run at Atlantic Theater Company, which premiered in December 2023.)As its title indicates, this production, directed by Saheem Ali, is inspired by the 1997 hit album “Buena Vista Social Club,” on which veterans of the Havana scene performed beloved sons, danzones and boleros from the traditional Cuban repertoire. Many of those songs and others are in the musical (a booklet in the Playbill introduces each one, with illustrations by the flutist Hery Paz), along with most of those musicians and singers. Or at least versions of them are. Tellingly, the book by Marco Ramirez (“The Royale”) identifies the characters by their first names only, as if to underline that this is more of an evocative flight of fancy than a biomusical — Ramirez makes the most of musical theater’s notoriously loose relationship with facts.The action travels back and forth between 1956, in the tense time leading up to the toppling of the autocratic Batista regime, and 1996, when the young producer Juan de Marcos (Justin Cunningham) assembles a backing band for the older singers he’s brought into the studio. (The British executive producer Nick Gold and the American guitarist and producer Ry Cooder played important parts in the “Buena Vista Social Club” album and the Wim Wenders documentary that followed, but the musical doesn’t mention them. Instead it focuses on de Marcos’s role in putting together the band and singers.)The show toggles between 1996 and 1956, where the young performers Compay (Da’von T. Moody), Omara (Isa Antonetti) and Ibrahim (Wesley Wray) bond over their love of traditional Cuban music.Sara Krulwich/The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More