This Broadway season has been unexpectedly rich in promising new musicals, and it concludes with a sensational surprise: Real Women Have Curves, based on Josefina López’s 1990 play and a 2002 movie adaptation that made America Ferrera a star, is a celebration of female empowerment, body positivity, and the indomitable work ethic of immigrants that is even more timely today. The story is set in and around a dress-making factory in East Los Angeles in 1987, where a group of undocumented Hispanic women toil in an un-airconditioned factory with capricious sewing machines, a daunting deadline to deliver 200 dresses in just weeks, and the threat of INS agents busting through the door just as they do the pillow factory in the same building.
The workshop is headed by Estela (Florencia Cuenca), who has gift for fashion design and management (despite her doubts), though the chief financial backer is her domineering mother, Carmen (Justina Machado), a 51-year-old migrant from Mexico with a doting house-painter husband (Mauricio Mendoza) who questions why his gringo clients “like to paint everything white.” (Unlike in the film, Raúl remains mostly on the periphery here.) The other workers are a diverse bunch, including a quiet teenager newly arrived from Guatemala (Aline Mayagoitia), a big-boned, seen-it-all older Mexican-born woman (Carla Jimenez), a pop culture and astrology-obsessed Guatemalan (Jennifer Sánchez), a flirty Latina with street vibes (Shelby Acosta), and a wry woman whose butch appearance in hairstyle and clothing is obvious but treated in a don’t-ask-don’t-tell way by her coworkers.
The central role is held by Carmen’s youngest child, Ana (Tatianna Córdoba), the lone U.S. citizen in the family who finds herself caught between her obligations to the people who raised her and her ambition to forge a better life for herself that may lead her far from her Boyle Heights neighborhood. In fact, the whip-smart, newly minted high school graduate has landed a full scholarship to Columbia University where she hopes to nurture her talents as a writer — though she’s managed to keep everything a secret until all the paperwork has come through. That’s understandable, because mami Carmen is as stubborn as she is belittling of her daughter’s appearance (“a little less rice and beans”). But as played by Machado, a talented performer who starred in the 2010s reboot of One Day at a Time, she’s less of a one-dimensional monster than her cinematic counterpart. Here, she’s a more sympathetic figure, one who’s so blinded by her hyper-protective impulses to preserve the life she’s struggled to obtain that she fails to respect how her children might make their own choices to carve their own path forward. It’s no wonder that when Ana suggests that she might have bigger dreams, Carmen’s curt retort is, “Sleep less.”
In many ways, Real Women Have Curves is a conventional coming-of-age story — though a more realistic one than you’d find in Alicia Keys’s Hell’s Kitchen. It even comes complete with a love story for our bookish and virginal heroine with a young Black geek (Mason Reeves) who’s also headed East for college and shares her passion for writing as a fellow (unpaid) intern at the local newspaper. And yet with its easy shifts from English to Spanish dialogue, Lisa Loomer’s book (with Nell Benjamin) feels grounded in a culture seldom seen on Broadway, and it feels richer for that degree of authenticity. (For non-Spanish speakers, rest assured that lines are often of the por favor – gracias – de nada variety, with other phrases translated almost as soon as they’re uttered.)
The score, by Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, is a flavorful pozole that blends mariachi and other South American elements with traditional musical theater styles. There are some real melodic gems here, like the soaring duet “If I Were a Bird” sung by Córdoba and Mayagoitia with power and vocal brightness. What’s particularly striking is how Huerta and Velez are able to convey serious thematic elements with laugh-out-loud humor — as when Ana and Itzel imagine a bird’s life that extends beyond the freedom and independence of flight and includes the possibility of pooping on things that threaten to hold them back: “touchy boyfriends, air pollution, too much ruffles, bossy mothers, smelly feet.”
The second act stands out with a series of show-stopping comic numbers that come in quick succession, from a hilarious celebration of women’s menstruation (“You turned off the nozzle, made me menopausal,” Carmen sings on the loss of her monthly visitor at age 51) to a wonderfully clumsy seduction tune in which Ana awkwardly tells Henry that she’ll “make you growl like an empty stomach.” Both numbers get a boost from director-choreographer Sergio Trujillo’s choreography, which is impressively showy while remaining true to its characters. (The physical production contributes to the overall effect, starting with Wilberth Gonzalez and Paloma Young’s costumes, Arnulfo Maldonado’s set design, Krystal Balleza and Will Vicari’s hair and makeup, and Natasha Katz’s lighting.)
The evening’s high-wattage highlight is the title tune, an ode to body positivity prompted when Ana sheds her blouse in the overheated, fan-less factory as the team rushes to finish the big order. Soon she encourages the others to strip down to their skivvies as well, and we see these women work up hte nerve to peel off their layers of shame and self-consciousness to embrace their lived-in bodies just as they are. It’s a genuinely catchy tune, artfully staged with a mirror-tiled dress form overhead like a disco ball, and it carries a powerful message that rightly generated a standing ovation at the performance I attended. Real Women Have Curves tells a simple story with musicality, with humor, with authenticity, and with an embrace of its female characters as fully rounded, three-dimensional individuals. You know, with curves. ★★★★★
REAL WOMEN HAVE CURVES
James Earl Jones Theatre, Broadway
Running time: 2 hours, 15 minutes (with 1 intermission)
Tickets on sale through October 5 for $48 to $299
Culture Sauce 