Spadina sizzles to a Cuban beat
By Susan Walker
ENTERTAINMENT REPORTER

Oh, poor Toronto. When was the last time this city of bean-counters and profit-watchers uncrossed its arms for something like this:

"Hot! Hot! Havana: an original entertainment extravaganza showcasing . . . an explosion of colour and flair, rhythms of salsa and merengue, Vegas-style showgirls."

A purple and pink glossy brochure of the kind that lures Canadians to winter vacation spots announces the Tropicana Dinner Theatre, opening tonight in the heart of Chinatown. Airport entertainment comes to hard-hearted Hogtown.

And that means bare legs and butts, tassled tatas, lots of glitter and carnival headdresses - direct from Cuba to snowbound Spadina.

Elaborately costumed dancers  from Santiago, Cuba

"For the last few years, I've been going back and forth to Cuba for great entertainment," says Tropicana's entertainment booker, Bob Gaskin.

The former talent agent and casting director was blown away by the shows at Havana's Tropicana club and its sister venue in Santiago, where the Cuban government duplicated the original club. The Havana operation opened 50 years ago, says Gaskin, and has hosted guests as big as Nat King Cole and Frank Sinatra.

The Tropicana shows in Cuba play in 1,000-seat outdoor theatres. As many as 200 performers crowd the stage.

Compared with frozen-hipped Canada, the country appears to be immersed in a continuous festival of music and dance. Cubans, of all the peoples of the Americas, are well known in professional dance circles for a natural ability to move. Music, says Gaskin, is an essential ingredient of all Cubans' lives. "They wake up in the morning with music and they go to sleep with music."

Hot! Hot! Havana presents 10 elaborately costumed dancers from Santiago, performing to live salsa, merengue and bolero music - Cuba's equivalent of a tango. The eight-piece orchestra - two trumpets, a trombone, keyboard, guitar, bass and two percussionists - and a comedian named Cesar complete the Afro-Cuban act. Toronto singer Nicoletta opens for them.

"This is a Vegas-style show with the costumes to go with it," promises Gaskin. "The costumes are all homemade. The dancers don't have such things as sewing machines, but their costumes surpass a lot of the outfits you would see in a Las Vegas show."

In another life, Gaskin was responsible for resuscitating rock legends of the '50s and early '60s, including the Platters, The Coasters, Lesley Gore, and Freddie Cannon, on a Global Television show called The '50s Connection.

With the Tropicana Dinner Theatre, he hopes to import Cuba's untouched '50s culture to end-of-the-millennium Toronto.

"If you took a trip to Cuba, you'd find it's as if you just walked into the '50s or early '60s. That's the kind of atmosphere we're trying to create here," he says.

It worked for the folks who brought us Forever Plaid.

"I don't think you've seen these girls in downtown Toronto," says Gaskin mildly.

The Cubans are booked for six weeks, but the Tropicana will keep them for six months if they are popular. Not all the shows booked into the dinner theatre will cater to T.O.'s swelling Latin following. Gaskin has his eye on future acts that can play to a broad public, including performances now on stage in Las Vegas and London, that feature either comedy or Broadway-style performing.

If it works, the Tropicana, in a five-storey building one floor down from the former Club Shanghai, will revive the flashier club scene that once characterized Spadina. Just north of the new club, at Dundas and Spadina, showgirls of another kind used to alternate with standup comedians in the old Victory Burlesque Theatre. Up at the top of the strip at College St. was the Silver Dollar, re-opened and frequently revived in the last decade. In between were the El Mocambo and Grossman' s Tavern - both still very much with us. Today, in another sign of a revitalized west-end entertainment scene, The Comfort Zone next door to the Silver Dollar is a venue for hip-hop, r&b, techno, rave, jam bands and spoken word artists.

If anyone could dream up a dinner theatre that might fly in downtown Toronto, it's Tropicana manager David Nimmo, late of Stage West and the Legends in Concert theatres in Myrtle Beach and Daytona Beach, Fla.

"We wanted to do something extremely upscale," says Nimmo. His investors, Hing Loong Investments, own the building and have spent more than $1 million on renovations, sprucing up the space to hold 250 people and building a stage to house sizable acts. Interior designer Kalvin Kong has incorporated an art deco motif.

A buffet dinner featuring spicier dishes during the Cuban engagement precedes the entertainment. Tickets range from $54.95 (plus tax) early in the week to $62.95 on Saturdays.

Nimmo expects a tourist crowd as well as locals in search of entertainment that doesn't make big demands on the intellect.

Something of a showbiz veteran at age 35, Nimmo was born to have his own club. "I love dinner theatre. I've always wanted to build something from scratch."

Hot! Hot! Havana opens tonight at the Tropicana Dinner Theatre, 247 Spadina Ave., 2nd floor. For tickets, call 597-8988, or toll free, 1-888-597-8988.

CAPTIONS: LATIN HEAT WAVE: Elaborately costumed dancers from Santiago, Cuba, tonight bring the glitz, glamour and music of famed Havana nightclub to a new hot spot in the heart of Chinatown.

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