Anna in the Tropics won a Pulitzer Prize based on its script, before it ever was staged, and it comes to Broadway with high expectations. The play provides good entertainment but has flaws that keep it from being fully satisfying. The faults include a cheap and contrived denouement and gaps in plot. For example, the eldest member of the cast, owner of a cigar factory, is shown to be a gambler and a drinker who has no money. But in Act Two, he is suddenly sober and sensible and pulls out a wad of bills saying that he got a loan. And no one says the obvious: What happened to you to cause this change? How did you turn yourself around?
The setting and plot are promising. We see a cigar factory in Florida in 1929, owned and operated by immigrants from Spain and its possessions. They face the clash of two cultures plus the threat of machines that will roll and cut the cigars, thus making their work obsolete. Then, too, Valentino and other celebrities are making cigarettes glamorous and clouding the future of cigar making, whether by hand or by machine.
A dozen talented Latin-American actors are portraying a variety of interesting characters from their own heritage, and that's a pleasure to see. Priscilla Lopez and Vanessa Aspillaga are particularly convincing. Jimmy Smits of TV fame is prominent as the stranger in town, a man hired as a lector to read literature to factory workers to educate them and to relieve the boredom of their jobs. He cuts a fine figure and acts adequately. Daphne Rubin-Vega plays a married lady who enters into an affair with the lector, a bit over the top and with an accent that's sometimes incomprehensible.
This brings up another problem: Some of these actors have no accent at all, others a slight lilt and some, like Ms Rubin Vega, a heavy accent -- with no relationship to how long the character has been in the USA nor how much contact he/she has had with Anglos. It's a glaring inconsistency.
Parallels between Tolstoy's novel, "Anna Karenina," which the lector chooses to read, and the lives of the workers are interesting. The poetic imagery is arresting, but the story dissolves into soap opera in the second half. Close, but no cigar.
