On Your Feet! (Broadway) NYC Reviews and Tickets

"The recipe may be familiar, but the flavor is fresh in 'On Your Feet!,' the half-formulaic, half-original and undeniably crowd-pleasing musical...But with an often mechanical book, moving through its rags-to-riches paces as if to a rigid percussive beat, 'On Your Feet!' ultimately falls somewhere in the middle of the hefty pack of jukebox musicals that have plugged in to Broadway’s power strip."
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"There’s not much about it to inspire reaction of any kind. A serviceable jukebox musical...Neither Estefan nor her life nor her music are especially dramatically interesting...With the bland diligence of an authorized mass-market biography, Alexander Dinelaris’s script trudges through Estefan’s journey...The audience perks up each time one of Estefan’s Latin-flavored hits begins, then palpably wilts as the numbers go on. Rhythm can only get you so far."
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"'To say that 'On Your Feet!' is better than most of its ilk is therefore faint praise…The happy news is that in its music and staging it re-creates the excitement of the songs when they were new…Here, in a story about making it big in America by becoming more like everyone else, the form at last matches the content. Is that a new high or a new low? Maybe a bit of both. 'On Your Feet!' — even the title sounds pre-owned — is a little bit special but mostly the overmiked same."
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"The book here by Alexander Dinelaris is hardly a model of robust dramatic construction…But the story is packed with heart, above all in its tender depiction of the couple's sustaining love.…Musical-theater purists will sniff, but audiences looking for entertainment with emotional uplift will get what they came for. Even at its most shameless it's impossible to deny the production's generosity of spirit."
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"'On Your Feet' is a play in which good news always far outweighs the bad — both in its story and in the production. It’s a syrupy, feel-good bio-musical, sure, but a near-perfectly executed one, with great songs and amazing dancing…The band sounds great, Jerry Mitchell’s direction is unsurprisingly crisp and polished, and Sergio Trujillo’s exuberant, Latin-flavored choreography is ferociously fun to watch."
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"A surefire audience pleaser...Newcomer Ana Villafane is a knockout in the leading role, the dazzling centerpiece of this flashy, splashy spectacle helmed by Jerry Mitchell...Structurally, the show builds to the full flowering of this Cuban-fusion sound, song after familiar song from the Estefan canon, mounted in full production numbers for Villafane’s dynamic voice, backed up by a robust singing-and-dancing chorus. It’s exhausting— but you can’t say it isn’t fun."
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"Alexander Dinelaris’s book is heavy on the Hollywoodian clichés, but it has its charming moments, too, and every other aspect of the production, directed by Jerry Mitchell, is slick and satisfying, starting with the smoking-hot choreography of Sergio Trujillo and the tear-it-up onstage band...Yes, I know, it’s just a jukebox musical, but I liked 'On Your Feet!' In fact, I liked it a lot—and I think you might, too."
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"'On Your Feet!' is every bit as propulsive as the music and the personalities it celebrates. It has the flaws of an authorized biography; it’s worshipful of the central couple...A star is surely born with the Gloria of Ana Villafañe… As story-telling, 'On Your Feet!' can be as clunkily generic as the title. But there’s a deep well of life in the music that comes across powerfully in the staging — especially in that central supernova performance by a young actress I hope we’ll be seeing a lot more of."
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