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

Joy Huerta was so sure about musical theater.

When the director and choreographer Sergio Trujillo approached Huerta in 2019 about adapting the work of Josefina López “Real Women Have Curves” in a musical, he had doubts.

Huerta, better known as half of the pop duo of brother and sister Jesse & Joy, was not familiar with the work of 1990, and never had the popular film adaptation of 2002 starring América Ferrera. But then he meets reading the script. And it was then, he said, he understood why the story could be so convincing in the song.

“I remember that he is very excited about that, because I thought: ‘Anyone can relate to this,'” said Huerta, 38, who composed the music and wrote the lyrics with Benjamin Velez, 37, for the show, which is now a Broadway to open.

Set in 1987 in the neighborhood of Boyle Heights in Los Angeles, “Real Women Have Curves” explores the experiences of immigrants through the history of a group of Latin women who work in a clothing factory. The attention focuses on an 18 -year -old girl who is divided between staying at home to help her undocumented relatives and move to New York to attend Columbia University in a scholarship. The production had a previous race in 2023 at the American Repertory Theater in Cambridge, Mass.

Shortly after the performances, Broadway this month, Huerta, Velez and Lisa Loomer, who wrote the book with Nell Benjamin, discussed their inspirations and approaches to adapt the story for the stage. In a separate conversation, Tatianna Córdoba, 25, who stars in the young heroine of the musical, Ana García, spoke about making her debut on Broadway in a role that identifies so closely. Here are five things to know about production.

It all starts with a newspaper.

More than a decade before “Real Women have curves” waves in 2002 as a film, his life began as López’s daily tickets, an undocumented Chicana teenager who recorded his experiences working in a sewing factory on Los Angeles nights.

When he was only 18, he expanded in those notes and turned them into a play. “Real Women Have Curves” had an initial production in San Francisco in 1990, and has been organized many times since then. López (and George Lavao) wrote the script of the film, starring a young Ferrera America in his film debut.

Loomer, who also lives near Boyle Heights in the 1980s, took out of the original works and added some new characters. “The film is quite different from the work, and the musical is quite different from the two,” he said. “But they have the same DNA.”

The show celebrates the positivity of the body.

Since the positivity of the body is a relatively new concept, Loomer had to find a way of writing about the celebrated appreciation of the history of the full figure bodies for a contemporary audience. One of the characters of the musical, the overwhelming mother of Ana’s family, Carmen, constantly criticizes her daughter by weight in the film.

“In terms of Carmen, I felt that it would be better understood if we left it in 1987,” Loomer said.

For the musical, he softened the borders of the character, which is played by Justina Machado on Broadway. (Lupe challenged her in the movie). In summary: Less shame of fat, more background history to help the audience understand the generational and cultural roots of Carmen’s hard approach. (I thought there are some blows, such as Count Ana, could endure a meal).

“You want to hate her for what she just said, but at the same time, she doesn’t say it in a way that she intends to leave Ana,” said Huerta. “He is thinking while talking, because that is where it comes from.”

The Spanish is sprayed.

It was an act of delicate balance, Loomer said: they wanted the members of the audience who do not speak Spanish could follow the story, but they also wanted to add as much authenticity as possible.

“They would not speak in English each other at home, and certainly not in the factory,” he said. “Then you have to give the feeling of Spanish, the rhythms, and yet the Anglo audience has to understand it.”

Sixteen from the 19 cast members are of Latin or Hispanic ancestry. Most are making their Broadway debuts. “I love seeing how, when the curtain appears every night, we see people who feel like” my God. That could be me. “And ultimately, that could be my aunt, or my cousin, or my aunt,” said Huerta on the cast.

Duration of the program Cambridge career, tested how much Spanish include in the songs. “We never wanted the amount of Spanish to get the people out of history,” Vélez said. “So a leg of a child is a leg while we discover the right balance.”

Illegal immigration is an issue.

The musical develops in the summer of 1987, when an amnesty program of the Reagan era for undocumented immigrants has long been for a long time. (The playwright became a legal citizen through this program). In a change of the film and the work, Ana is the only American citizen between her family and her co -workers. The other factory employees are undocumented as well as their older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), owner of the factory, and her mother, Carmen, who also works there.

“I made this change because the need for his family that Ana stays,” Lomer said. “It also increases the responsibility and guilt that Ana feels when she wants to leave and pursue her own dreams.”

Loomer also expanded the cast of undocumented characters, adding Guatemalan and Salvadoran women, including the sweet and vulnerable 19 -year -old Guatemalan indigenous refugees Itzel (Aline Mayagoitia), who sings about the challenges of life

“Beauty sometimes about doing a play that develops in the past, shows you what has not changed,” said Loomer, who has spent most of his career writing works of four decades that treat the experiences of Latinas and immigrant characters. “Sometimes, it allows you to see the present even more painful.”

The show is personal for the main actress.

When Tatianna Córdoba, who is making her debut on Broadway like Ana, read the script of the musical, the family dynamic resonated with her.

“Many of the Mother-Draamina exchange that Justina and I have in the program remind me so much to my grandmother,” said Córdoba, who grew up in the Bay area and whose parents are of Costa Rican and Filipina offspring. “There is that maternal judgment, but also love.”

The discussions about body image also felt faithful to life, said Córdoba, who studied ballet when he was younger before feeling pressure to quit smoking. “I realized very quickly, when puberty hit, that my body was changing in a way that many of my ballet friends do not,” he said.

One thing you want to have had when I was a teenager: security in her character.

“Ana is the one who wish he was 18 years old,” he said. “She only has this belief in herself, this confidence in her body that she would really want to have that age.

He loves to be part of a scene in act II when the factory women with figures more full of the boiling factory in his underwear, delight in their bodies. He has been receiving ovations standing in the middle of the show.

“There is something infectious to see other people be happy, to see people bee,” he said. “I think that is what makes people stand up and applaud: they feel really empowered and feel loved at that time.”