I would be delighted if someone with the wherewithal picked up The Buena Vista Social Club (currently running at the Atlantic) and brought it intact to Broadway. The show features a series of terrific musical numbers played by a large onstage band, featuring an ensemble of first-rate singers and dancers in numbers exuberantly choreographed by Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck. As long as the performers are singing and dancing (which is most of the time), it’s wonderful entertainment and I would return to it happily uptown.

I think it’s worth mentioning, however, that the title is slightly misleading. The Buena Vista Social Club was the title of both the 1996 record album that brought a group of aging Cuban musicians to international fame and a 1999 documentary by Wim Wenders about assembling a concert featuring these artists in Havana. The show is inspired by the record and the film, but, though it appropriates some real names, it doesn’t exactly tell an accurate story of the group of musicians featured in them.

The book by Marco Ramirez has promising elements. In the Fifties, the central character, Omara Portuondo, entertains with her sister in the glitzy Havana nightclubs catering to American tourists. The door is open for her to sign a deal with Capitol Records that likely would bring her international stardom and wealth. Instead she chooses to shift her loyalty to the Buena Vista, a venue featuring Cuban musicians playing for Cuban audiences. When the revolution comes, she rejects her chance to go to America and become a celebrity and stays to sing in her own country. Forty years later, recording on her own terms in an antiquated Cuban studio, she has become a figure known to everyone on that small, impoverished island and virtually unknown to the outside world. With foreign backing, a producer named Juan de Marcos González has embarked on a project to bring Portuondo and many of her contemporaries back to public consciousness with a recording designed for the world market.

Much of the script is involved with Portuondo’s initial reluctance to participate in a project over which she will not have total control. This material seems to be concocted to create false suspense and, though Natalie Venetia Belcon as the older incarnation of Portuondo is a bracing presence, the wrangling strikes me as pro forma show biz soap opera.

The book also raises questions it doesn’t address. Portuondo apparently chooses to stay in Cuba to remain an undiluted Cuban artist. But the club that she chooses as her home is going to be closed down by the revolution. Why? What does the Cuban revolution have against Cuban music? That isn’t explored. Also, a Cuban entrepreneur, costumed in standard slick entrepreneur’s garb, offers her a contract with the label he’s starting. Surely the entrepreneur is an example of the kind of capitalist the revolution would have not had much patience for. Confusing.

Well, never mind, as I say, there isn’t all that much talking and there is plenty of music and dancing and, in this case, that more than suffices.

I am interested that the creators chose to write Ry Cooder out of the story. He had a defining hand in producing both the album and the film, and he played guitar for both. I suspect that he has been disappeared because he was an American outsider and the show didn’t want to deal with the issue of cultural appropriation. Paul Simon faced similar issues when he hired South African musicians to play on his classic album, Graceland. (You can rent a terrific documentary on this, Paul Simon: Under African Skies, from YouTube.) The musicians on Simon’s album and on Buena Vista Social Club became international stars from the exposure.

There is an irony here. The Cuban musicians celebrated by the album, film and now this show were aging and mostly languishing in the country whose culture they celebrated. It took capitalist outsiders to bring them to the attention of the world. Did this late-career fame dilute or distort their art? Maybe that’s the subject of another project.

Anyway, The Buena Vista Social Club: if you have an opportunity to get a ticket, grab it.