Before a city chooses which places to preserve, people have already built a geography of their own. La Havana Madrid was a Chicago nightclub associated with Caribbean arrivals on the North Side in the 1960s. Sandra Delgado’s play with music returns to that room, drawing on stories of Cuban, Puerto Rican, and Colombian immigrants. Its setting is not a picturesque detour from the city’s history. It is a place where newcomers found one another, made music, and learned how to belong in a city that could still move them aside.
Teatro Vista first produced the work, and Goodman Theatre hosted a 2017 run directed by Cheryl Lynn Bruce. Goodman credited Carpacho y Su Súper Combo for live music. A recreated nightclub asks for more than dialogue describing the past; sound and gathering are part of its argument. The Goodman production materials identify a cast playing people with different routes into the room. The resulting history is plural. No one immigrant story can stand in for an entire neighborhood, and a club can connect people without erasing the differences among them.
The production was inspired by real stories, according to Goodman. That phrasing matters. Delgado’s work is a theatrical construction, not an oral-history transcript or a claim that every scene happened exactly as staged. It can bring the pressures of housing, work, movement, and friendship into a shared space without treating the people who lived them as museum specimens. Its live band makes an additional point: a place remembered through music requires living musicians, with names and years of practice, to carry it into another room.
Delgado is a Colombian-Chicagoan artist, according to Teatro Vista’s biography. The company records La Havana Madrid moving from its early productions to a 2024 presentation with Collaboraction at Millennium Park. That later setting changed the scale of the invitation. A story born from a neighborhood venue could occupy a central civic stage. Public space can be temporary and contested, but it can also allow an immigrant history to appear where the city tells official stories about itself.
The easy version of nostalgia says the old club was beautiful and now is gone. Delgado’s theatrical map asks a harder question: what happens to the communities that formed around such rooms when rents, planning, and cultural fashion change the city? La Havana Madrid does not restore the original address. It insists that the relationships made there remain part of Chicago’s account of itself. The work travels, while the city is asked to remember where it began.