“Cheo Feliciano, Celia Cruz, Tito Puente, Fania All-Stars,” recalled Myrna Salazar, who began visiting the club as a teenager in the 1960s. “The big-name recording artists, they all went to La Havana Madrid.”
The building that housed the club still stands, butting up against the southbound tracks of the Belmont L station. But you won’t find any trace of La Havana Madrid there; the second floor, which housed the club, is now divided into a punky hair salon and a women’s fitness studio.
“It’s like everything — gentrification,” Salazar said. “History is lost. The leadership moves or dies, and we don’t have records of those things.”
Salazar spent nearly a quarter of a century as a talent agent before retiring in 2006. She’s now the executive director and primary force behind the Chicago Latino Theater Alliance, which organizes Destinos, an international Latino theater festival that will stage its third edition this fall.
She has also become a character in the play “La Havana Madrid,” inspired by the forgotten nightclub, which begins performances at the Den Theater here on May 11. The production is reopening two years after the Latino-focused company Teatro Vista first staged it in an 80-seat space at Steppenwolf Theater Company.
The play is the brainchild of Sandra Delgado, a Chicago native and longtime stage actor with extensive credits at Steppenwolf and other important local theaters. (New York audiences may have seen her at the Public Theater in 2017 as Jocasta in Luis Alfaro’s “Oedipus El Rey.”)
“La Havana Madrid” began its life as a piece about her parents, who came here from Colombia in the mid-1960s. Then she heard her father talk about the Lakeview club where they spent many nights out dancing.
“It was this immediate moment of like, ‘Oh my gosh, that’s not the play. This is the play,’” she said. “What was this place?”
Despite having grown up less than a mile west of where the club had been, Delgado said, she had never heard of it before then. And in the earliest stages of her research, she found herself frustrated, “going to libraries, going online and finding absolutely nothing.”
If you search the Chicago Tribune archive for coverage of La Havana Madrid, all you’ll find are classified ads for cocktail waitresses and one passing mention in a story on police cracking down on a numbers game. Nothing on its programming.
“It really just speaks to the larger issue,” Delgado said. “Where do Latinx people” — people of Latin American heritage — “fit in the history of this country? Especially in this city that’s so black and white.”
Further research did lead her to learn about the city’s first Puerto Rican Day Parade, in 1966: “I’m reading something online, and it says, ‘The queen of the first Puertorriqueños parade, Myrna Salazar.’ I’m like, Myrna? She was my first talent agent! Any Latinx actor who’s been around since the ’90s, that’s who represented us.”
Delgado called Salazar to ask if she had any information to share about La Havana Madrid. The details flooded out. The club was where Salazar had her bachelorette party. Its owner was the best man at her wedding to her now ex-husband.
“Yes,” Salazar recalled telling her, “I can give you some history.”
Salazar put Delgado in touch with the best man, Tony Quintana, who had been La Havana Madrid’s second owner, in the latter half of the 1960s. She found more former patrons through social media and other connections.
Many of their stories, including those of Delgado’s parents, are told in “La Havana Madrid,” a loose series of vignettes delivered to audience members who sit (and can drink) at cabaret tables. Under the direction of Cheryl Lynn Bruce, it was named one of Time Out Chicago’s Top 10 plays of 2017.
The leader of the onstage band, Carpacho y Su Súper Combo, is Roberto “Carpacho” Marin, who has been friends with Delgado’s father dating back to Medellín, Colombia; his story, of coming to America on a musician’s visa and deciding to stay, undocumented, when he was offered a steady gig, is included, too.
A preview feature in the Chicago Sun-Times led to Delgado receiving a Facebook message from the daughter of the club’s original owner, a Cuban baseball player named Luis “Witto” Aloma, who had retired in Chicago after playing for the White Sox in the early 1950s.
“She’s telling me how the dinner menu was half-Cuban, half-Spanish, about the beautiful china that had green edging with gold flecks,” Delgado said. “We’re already in rehearsal, and all of a sudden I have these really concrete details — what the steps looked like, what the room looked like.”
Carlos Flores, an amateur historian of Puerto Rican Chicago and a longtime street photographer, provided many of the images that illustrate the show in projections.
“La Havana Madrid” sold out its initial six-week run at Steppenwolf. The Goodman, finding itself with an empty studio space when actor Stacy Keach’s illness forced the postponement of his solo show, offered to bring the show downtown.
Reconfigured for a space with more than twice as many seats, it sold out another month, finding repeat customers and even former Chicagoans returning for a taste of their past.
“Someone my age would come once, and then they would come back with their parents, and then they would come back with their kids,” Delgado said.
She hopes “La Havana Madrid” can recapture that energy for another six weeks at the Den — then, perhaps, beyond.
“I think specifically about New York, because it’s super Puerto Rican, very Colombian,” Delgado said. “There’s a very strong Caribbean Latinx presence there. I think it would resonate.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.