Just as magical was a bossa nova arrangement of Billy Joel's "Rosalinda's Eyes" gently imparted by Mr. Pizzarelli, playing a Puerto Rican musician dreaming of his muse; it was attached to Mr. Sondheim's "In Buddy's Eyes," a wife's delusional certainty of how she appears to her husband, sung by Ms. Molaskey.
But in the early 1980's he decided on one last adventure, to New York, where many of his countrymen had ventured into the bodega business that had helped a previous generation of Puerto Rican migrants achieve their modest dream -- an education for their children and a house back home as their reward.
And Luis Fonsi, a Puerto Rican pop singer with crossover dreams, has made an English-language album that trades most Caribbean influence for pop-R&B.
For almost 50 years after the Spanish-American War, Puerto Rican sentiment was divided between dreams of statehood and of independence.
A Puerto Rican pop singer with crossover dreams, Luis Fonsi has made an English-language album that trades most Caribbean influence for pop-R&B crooning; he'd love to be Justin Timberlake.
"The dream of every Puerto Rican at that time was to own his own plot of land and a house of cement," recalls Mr. Figueroa, whose family had been tenant farmers for generations.
The play deals with Puerto Rican immigrants who reach for the American dream.
Straddling two cultures - the Puerto Rican lifestyle at home and the American dream beyond those four walls, Denise experienced firsthand the challenges, compromises and inequalities that many sons and daughters of Spanish-speaking immigrants go through every day.
JULIO MERCADO, the cynical half-Ecuadorean, half-Puerto Rican narrator of Ernesto Quinonez's shrewd first novel, "Bodega Dreams," is on the verge of becoming an exception to ghetto statistics.
She produced, with John Leguizamo, "Nuyorican Dream," which followed the struggles of a Puerto Rican family in New York.
