REVUE REVIEW : Cuban Dancers Warm Up the L.A. Night

Some anti-Castro Cuban exiles had threatened an angry welcome for the Los Angeles debut of Havana’s Tropicana nightclub revue. By show’s end Saturday night, however, the crowd in front of the Variety Arts Theater could have been mistaken for an after-church gathering instead of shouting pickets.

The elegantly tall, female dancers, who minutes earlier had churned, strutted and quivered their extravagantly costumed bodies, were being hugged and kissed like long-lost friends. “Kiss the earth for me when you get home,” one fan requested tearfully.

No one seemed to remember the 54-member troupe’s frustrating race against deportation only two days earlier when Immigration and Naturalization Service officials threatened to expel the performers because their visas had expired. The show’s promoters said they had no choice but to open three days early, and they expect to lose as much as $80,000 on the L.A. shows, which continue tonight and Tuesday.

“Politics has nothing to do with art,” Sonia Mendoza, a Cuban exile, said afterward.

“I miss this music so much,” seconded her mother, Irma Mendoza. “I wish our governments would come to an understanding and allow more groups to come. This music is therapy, a balm for the spirit. When I get out of church tomorrow, I’ll still be thinking about them.”

Speaking of the sacred and the Tropicana’s brazen carnality in one breath might seem sacrilegious. At least, that’s what the show’s opening seemed to suggest. Like immaculate egrets, the dancers marched on stage with the drill-like vulgarity, even awkwardness, of a scantily clad Las Vegas chorus line.

A cramped stage and a lack of rehearsal time were the obvious culprits. “We were almost bumping into each other,” said Andres Gutierrez, the show’s choreographer. Gutierrez, who is used to the expansive, garden-like setting of Havana’s Tropicana Club, hoped for a next time with a larger stage.

But it didn’t take long for the Tropicana’s true spirit to possess its audience. In numbers like “African Fantasy,” the mesmerizing, seething sensuality of gyrating hips, quivering shoulders, necks convulsively whipped back and Yoruba chants half-shouted by Luis Mora Ponce were really offerings to the santos. The audience understood this, shouting back the names of Chango, Oshun, Yemaya, the names of African gods who ride the shoulders of Spain’s Catholic saints.

The theater’s poor sound system posed problems that rattled a few singers.