Ready to conga? 'On Your Feet' brings Gloria Estefan's life to a Tucson stage

Gloria and Emilio Estefan would have been the last ones to suggest creating a Broadway musical about their 41-year relationship.

But in the summer of 2015, the couple and a handful of friends and family sat in the audience of a Broadway theater watching their lives unfold to the soundtrack of their greatest Miami Sound Machine Cuban-pop hits.

When they came to the scene of “On Your Feet” where her mother sings “If I Never Got to Tell You” as her character lies in a hospital bed, Gloria Estefan remembers bursting into tears.

“It’s a very emotional song, and that is the emotional climax of the play,” she recalled of the scene that depicts the aftermath of the March 1990 bus crash in Pennsylvania that nearly ended her career. “That was a song that was written by my daughter (Emily) and me — my daughter who was not born (at the time of the crash), yet in the play is there in the biggest way possible.”

Estefan, 61, and her husband, 65, won’t be in the audience when Broadway In Tucson brings “On Your Feet” to Centennial Hall Tuesday, Nov. 13, through Nov. 18; she is finishing a recording project of Brazilian samba music and working on renovating the couple’s historic Cordoza Hotel South Beach in Miami. But she is confident Tucson audiences will relate to the play.

“A lot of lines will get the audience really loud,” she said during a phone interview from Miami last month. “We are very excited for Tucson. We have very fond memories of Tucson. We played there many times.”

During our conversation, Estefan laid out a few reasons why “On Your Feet” is so special for her and her family.

THEIR STORY

“On Your Feet” was written by Academy Award-winning screenwriter Alexander Dinelaris (“Birdman”), and it traces Gloria Estefan’s life from her childhood in Miami, to meeting her would-be husband Emilio Estefan Jr. when she was 17, through their multi-platinum, multiple Grammy-winning music career and to that 1990 bus crash on a snowy Pennsylvania highway that sidelined her for a year.

THEIR MUSIC

The play weaves in some of the couple’s biggest Cuban-fusion pop hits from Miami Sound Machine — “Get On Your Feet,” “Conga,” “Live For Loving You,” “Rhythm is Gonna Get You,” “Reach,” “1-2-3,” “Coming Out of The Dark,” “Turn the Beat Around,” “Cuando Salí de Cuba,” “Anything For You,” “Mi Tierra,” “Oye Mi Canto,” “Famous” — creating a soundtrack that The Associated Press called “infectiously fun.”

“If you aren’t humming a Gloria Estefan hit when you leave the theater, it might be time to check your pulse,” the AP opined.

Estefan said she added lyrics to several of the songs to make them flow more into the storyline.

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“We weren’t thinking of a story when we wrote the songs,” she said, adding that they wrote two new songs — one of them was the song she wrote with her daughter — for the play.

“It was creatively a very exciting project,” Estefan said.

A LONG TIME COMING

“Around 12 years ago, somebody had bought the Tropicana in Vegas and wanted to do a giant reboot of the whole theater and do it in a big way,” Estefan said. “They approached us about doing a bio musical and back then we were going, ‘Hmmm, I don’t know,’ but when we heard that Kenny Ortega was going to be involved … we were very excited because Kenny is not only an amazing director now, but he started with us doing the choreography for most of my tours, from the first one on. We thought if it’s in his hands, we could trust it.

“We went down that road, but long story short, things just kept getting in the way, and I like to listen a lot to the universe’s messages, so we pulled the plug on that because it wasn’t happening the way we wanted it to.”

Six or seven years ago, they were approached once again, but this time the stars seemed to align, Estefan said.

“Everything really clicked and from meeting Alex Dinelaris, the writer — we clicked, and I said, look no further — (to learning director) Jerry Mitchell was interested. … The team was a dream, and creatively we all worked great together. It was all just naturally unfolding.”

HANDS ON FROM A DISTANCE

Estefan and her husband were in Chicago while the show went into previews in spring 2015 before its move to Broadway later that summer. Estefan said she and her husband worked with the actors, giving them insight to the lives they were trying to recreate on stage.

“I really wanted them to understand who we were, who the characters were, my mom, my grandmother,” she explained. “For the little Gloria, I played her the actual tapes that she was recreating on stage. We really wanted them to have a handle because we were always like a family, from our employees and everybody in the offices for many, many years. We wanted them to have that feeling when they did the show.”

Even when Estefan would sneak in to watch the show on Broadway, she kept her distance.

“We would sit in the back row so as not to disrupt and to look around and see these big beefy guys with tears streaming down their cheeks,” she recalled. “A lot of guys who were fathers if they had daughters, they saw themselves reflected in the relationship and in the play. I got to admit, I like to make people cry. Most definitely if you move someone, it’s the most important thing for an artist.”