‘Real Women Have Curves’ Is Now a Broadway Show. Here Are 5 Things to Know.

[ad_1] Pleasure Huerta wasn’t so positive about musical theater.

When the director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo approached Huerta in 2019 about adapting Josefina López’s play “Actual Ladies Have Curves” right into a musical, she had her doubts.

Huerta, finest often called half of the brother-and-sister pop duo Jesse & Pleasure, was unfamiliar with the 1990 play, and he or she had by no means seen the favored 2002 movie adaptation starring America Ferrera. However then she started studying the script. And it was then, she mentioned, that she understood why the story could possibly be so compelling set to tune.

“I keep in mind being so enthusiastic about it, as a result of I used to be like, ‘Anybody can relate to this,’” mentioned Huerta, 38, who composed the music and wrote the lyrics with Benjamin Velez, 37, for the present, which is now a Broadway musical scheduled to open on Sunday.

Set in 1987 within the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, “Actual Ladies Have Curves” explores immigrant experiences via the story of a bunch of Latina ladies working at a garment manufacturing facility. The main target is on an 18-year-old who's torn between staying residence to assist her undocumented members of the family and relocating to New York to attend Columbia College on a scholarship. The manufacturing had an earlier run in 2023 on the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

Shortly after performances started on Broadway this month, Huerta, Velez and Lisa Loomer, who wrote the e book with Nell Benjamin, mentioned their inspirations and method to adapting the story for the stage. In a separate dialog, Tatianna Córdoba, 25, who stars because the musical’s younger heroine, Ana García, spoke about making her Broadway debut in a task she identifies with so intently. Listed below are 5 issues to know in regards to the manufacturing.

It began with a diary. Greater than a decade earlier than “Actual Ladies Have Curves” made waves in 2002 as a movie, it started life because the diary entries of López, an undocumented Chicana teenager who recorded her experiences working in a stitching manufacturing facility in Los Angeles’s Boyle Heights neighborhood.

When she was simply 18, she expanded on these entries and turned them right into a play. “Actual Ladies Have Curves” had an preliminary manufacturing in San Francisco in 1990, and has been staged many occasions since. López (and George LaVoo) wrote the screenplay for the film, which starred a younger America Ferrera in her function movie debut.

Loomer, who additionally lived close to Boyle Heights within the Nineteen Eighties, pulled from the unique works and added some new characters. “The film is kind of completely different from the play, and the musical is kind of completely different from each of them,” she mentioned. “However they've the identical DNA.”

The present celebrates physique positivity. Since physique positivity is a comparatively new idea, Loomer needed to discover a solution to write in regards to the story’s celebrated appreciation of full-figured our bodies for a recent viewers. One of many musical’s characters, Ana’s blunt, family-first mom, Carmen, is consistently criticizing her daughter for her weight within the movie.

“When it comes to Carmen, I felt she could be higher understood if we left it in 1987,” Loomer mentioned.

For the musical, she softened the sides of the character, who's performed by Justina Machado on Broadway. (Lupe Ontiveros performed her within the movie.) In brief: Much less fat-shaming, extra again story to assist the viewers perceive the generational and cultural roots of Carmen’s harsh method. (Although some jabs stay, similar to telling Ana she may stand to skip a meal.)

“You wish to hate her for what she simply mentioned, however on the similar time, she’s not saying it in a approach that she’s which means to place Ana down,” Huerta mentioned. “She’s pondering as she speaks, as a result of that’s the place she comes from.”

Spanish is sprinkled all through. It was a fragile balancing act, Loomer mentioned: They wished viewers members who don't communicate Spanish to have the ability to observe the story, however in addition they wished so as to add as a lot authenticity as attainable.

“They wouldn’t communicate in English to one another at residence, and definitely not within the manufacturing facility,” she mentioned. “So it's important to give the texture of Spanish — the rhythms — and but the Anglo viewers has to grasp it.”

Sixteen of the present’s 19 solid members are of Latino or Hispanic descent. Most are making their Broadway debuts. “I simply like to see how, when that curtain comes up each night time, we see those that we really feel like, ‘Oh my God. That could possibly be me onstage.’ And in the end, that could possibly be my aunt, or my cousin, or my tía,” Huerta mentioned of the solid.

Throughout the present’s Cambridge run, they examined how a lot Spanish to incorporate within the songs. “We by no means wished the quantity of Spanish to take folks out of the story,” Velez mentioned. “So it’s been a type of a dance as we work out the proper steadiness.”

Unlawful immigration is a theme. The musical is ready in the summertime of 1987, when a Reagan-era amnesty program was in place for longtime undocumented immigrants. (The playwright grew to become a authorized citizen via this program.) In a change from the movie and the play, Ana is the one U.S. citizen amongst her household and associates. The opposite workers on the manufacturing facility are undocumented as are her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), who owns the manufacturing facility, and their mom, Carmen, who additionally works there.

“I made this alteration as a result of it will increase her household’s want for Ana to remain,” Loomer mentioned. “It additionally will increase the duty and guilt Ana feels when she desires to depart and pursue her personal goals.”

Loomer additionally expanded the solid of undocumented characters, including Guatemalan and Salvadoran ladies, together with the candy and weak 17-year-old Indigenous Guatemalan refugee Itzel (Aline Mayagoitia), who sings about rising above life’s challenges within the tune “If I Had been a Hen.”

“The wonder typically about doing a play that’s set previously, it reveals you what hasn’t modified,” mentioned Loomer, who has spent a majority of her four-decade profession writing performs that take care of the experiences of Latinas and immigrant characters. “At occasions, it lets you see the current much more painfully.”

The present is private for the lead actress. When Tatianna Córdoba, who's making her Broadway debut as Ana, learn the script for the musical, the household dynamics resonated together with her.

“Lots of the mother-daughter exchanges that Justina and I've within the present remind me of my abuelita a lot,” mentioned Córdoba, who grew up within the Bay Space and whose dad and mom are of Costa Rican and Filipino descent. “There’s that motherly judgment, but in addition love.”

The discussions round physique picture additionally felt true to life, mentioned Córdoba, who studied ballet when she was youthful earlier than feeling strain to stop. “I spotted in a short time, when puberty hit, that my physique was altering in ways in which a variety of my ballet buddies’ our bodies weren't,” she mentioned.

One factor she needs she’d had as a young person: Her character’s self-assurance.

“Ana is who I want was at 18,” she mentioned. “She simply has this perception in herself, this confidence in her physique that I actually want I had at that age. She’s way more involved about every little thing else happening together with her — her mind, her hopes and her wishes.”

She loves being a part of a scene in Act II when the fuller-figured ladies within the boiling-hot manufacturing facility strip all the way down to their undergarments, reveling of their our bodies. It’s been receiving mid-show standing ovations.

“There’s one thing infectious about simply watching different folks be joyful, about watching folks being courageous,” she mentioned. “I feel that’s what makes folks get up and clap — they really feel actually empowered, they usually really feel beloved in that second.”