Real Women Have Curves: The Musical
Broadway review by Adam Feldman
Just when you think you’ve figured out what Broadway is throwing at you, along comes a late-breaking curveball. Real Women Have Curves is the final show of the 2024–25 season, and it really is a ball: a joyful night of music and celebration. In many ways, this is a traditional Broadway musical—energetic, melodious, familiarly constructed—that honors traditional American values like loving your family, helping your community and working tirelessly to succeed as an entrepreneur. But since most of its characters are undocumented Latina immigrants to Los Angeles, Real Women is also, unexpectedly, the most relevant musical of the year.
Inspired by Josefina López's 1990 play and its 2002 film adaptation, Real Women Have Curves is set in 1987, well before the recent anti-immigrant scourge of ICE storms. Ana (Tatianna Córdoba) is a bright young woman who has been accepted to Columbia University, but is afraid to tell that to her mother, Carmen (Justina Machado); as a natural born American citizen, Ana plays an essential role in navigating the law on behalf of the dressmaking business that her older sister, Estela (Florencia Cuenca), has started with the family’s life savings. Although she is confident about her brains, Ana is less secure about her heavyset body, and Carmen isn’t encouraging on either account. (“You know what your problem is? You’re too smart,” she says. “This is why she don’t got no boyfriend. This and maybe ten…fifteen pounds.”)
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