This song was reportedly cut because the scene it was designed to be in would have cost too much money, but when it was reinserted for the ill-fated film version, it became clear that they made the right choice for more reasons than one. Firstly, they made a much better decision to focus this moment in the show on Max sitting forlorn in jail rather than showing Leo in Rio…Max’s showstopper “Betrayed” wound up being one of the show’s finest moments. Second, this just isn’t a very good song, and certainly not up to the material in the finished score. The Latin tune is incredibly synthetic and cheesy, sounding rather like a slower, less earworm-y version of “The Macarena”. And the shock humor in the lyrics (‘The tropic breezes always blow there/And so, I hear, do the girls’) just comes off as heavy-handed and lame rather than raucously funny like the numbers in the finished show. If this had wound up being the show’s eleven-o’clock number (remember, it was slated to go where “Betrayed” is now), it might have actually hurt the show’s chances for success, but thankfully, Brooks was smart enough to get rid of it. Now, if only he had shown that kind of sense about pretty much every number in the Young Frankenstein musical…
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