The title of the Estefans' new musical is blunt: "Basura," the Spanish word for trash. It is also, fittingly, a show about turning refuse into something beautiful — and a collaboration between one of pop music's most successful figures and her daughter.
From a landfill to the stage
"Basura" is inspired by the true story of a youth orchestra from Paraguay whose members, living beside a landfill, learned to play on instruments fashioned from discarded materials — a violin from an oil can, flutes from pipes — a story earlier told in the documentary "Landfill Harmonic." The musical is having its world premiere at the Alliance Theatre in Atlanta, running into July.
The subject matter — resilience, creativity and hope emerging from hardship — is one the Estefans have spoken about as central to why they took it on. It is a piece rooted in Latin American experience and music, brought to the stage by two artists with deep ties to that world.
A partnership across generations
The show pairs Gloria Estefan, the Cuban-American singer who became a global star in the 1980s, with her daughter Emily, a Berklee-trained musician who has built her own recording career. Writing a score together, the two have described the appeal of combining their different sensibilities — Gloria's gift for melody and rhythm honed over decades, and Emily's contemporary ear, as they told the New York Times.
For Gloria Estefan, whose life story was itself turned into the Broadway jukebox musical "On Your Feet!," writing an original stage score is a different kind of undertaking — and doing it alongside her daughter, she has said, was part of the point. It is a genuinely unusual arrangement: mother-and-daughter creative teams are rare in musical theater, and rarer still when one half is a figure of Gloria Estefan's stature.
Who Gloria Estefan is
For readers less familiar with her, Gloria Estefan is one of the best-selling Latin artists of all time. Fronting the Miami Sound Machine before going solo, she helped push Latin pop into the American mainstream in the 1980s with hits such as "Conga," selling tens of millions of records over a decades-long career and winning multiple Grammy Awards. Her influence on the crossover of Latin music into global pop is widely recognized.
Emily Estefan, born in the mid-1990s, has pursued a more independent musical path, releasing her own material and working outside her mother's pop lane. The pairing on "Basura" brings those two trajectories together.
Why it resonates
At its heart, "Basura" is a story with an appealing symmetry: a musical about young people who made instruments from garbage, written by a mother and daughter working across a generational divide. Both are, in their way, about collaboration producing something greater than its parts.
Whether the show travels beyond its Atlanta premiere remains to be seen, as does how audiences and critics respond. But as a piece of news, it is a warm one — a reminder that even a world-famous performer can find a fresh challenge in a small, true story, and that the best material sometimes comes, quite literally, from what has been thrown away.
