Cuba Is 90 Miles Away. This Week, It's in Morsani Hall.

Most 21-year-olds spend the fall of their senior year doing what senior year is for: refreshing job boards, pretending to have done the reading, and eating cereal for dinner with real conviction.

Aidan Olmo is spending it on tour, playing the young Compay Segundo in front of thousands of strangers a night.

“It’s insane to think that this is my life, and this is going to be my life for a year,” Olmo told me over video from Miami, three weeks into the first national tour of Buena Vista Social Club. “It’s a blessing. And it’s also work. We’re really putting in the work.”

The Tony- and Grammy-winning musical arrives at the Straz Center’s Morsani Hall on Tuesday, Oct. 6, for a six-day run. And if Miami was any indication, Tampa is not going to sit quietly in its seats.

Olmo’s theater career began in fourth grade, which is roughly when most of us peaked as performers, usually as a tree. Unlike most of us, Olmo kept going: regional productions across New Jersey, then the Manhattan School of Music.

Then the tour called. Rehearsals started Aug. 10. Senior year did not.

“This would have been my senior year,” Olmo said. “I’m leaving some friends and my girlfriend behind.” A pause. “But this is my first professional tour, and I’m so honored.”

For the record, that is a better use of a gap year than backpacking through Europe to “find yourself” in a hostel in Prague.

If the name Buena Vista Social Club rings a bell, it’s probably because of the 1997 album that took a group of veteran Cuban musicians, many of whom had spent decades out of the spotlight, and turned them into international stars. Somewhere, your parents still own the CD.

The musical tells the story of Omara Portuondo, the singer at the heart of it all, at two points in her life: a young woman finding her voice, and an older artist looking back. Along the way, she crosses paths with pianist Rubén González, singer Ibrahim Ferrer, and a young guitarist and songwriter named Compay Segundo. Think of it as an origin story, except the superpower is rhythm and nobody wears a cape.

Olmo plays Compay as the quiet one who’s secretly the smartest person in the room.

“You might not realize it, but he’s very wise, and he’s very knowing in a lot of things,” Olmo said, “especially for the age that I play him, which is not very old.”

A 21-year-old playing a man who’s wise beyond his years is the kind of casting that writes itself.

The tour opened its Florida run in Miami, which is a bit like testing your abuela’s recipe on your abuela. The audience knew the material. Some of them lived it.

“To see Cubans who fled the country in the ’50s and ’60s, and are now living in the United States, be able to witness Cuba again, it’s so beautiful,” Olmo said.

On opening night, the crowd erupted the moment the cast walked on stage. “It made me emotional,” Olmo said, “and it made a lot of the cast emotional as well.” Many of Olmo’s castmates were born in Cuba and came to the U.S. in their teens or twenties. For them, this isn’t a period piece. It’s a memory.

Tampa should feel familiar. This is, after all, a city where Cuban cigar workers helped build Ybor City, and where you can still get a better Cuban sandwich than anywhere else on Earth. (Miami disagrees. Miami is wrong.) Olmo has already been assigned homework for the Tampa stop: visit the Cuban Club. I assigned it. Mid-interview. That’s journalism.

The entire score is performed in Spanish, which Olmo calls a milestone, and the box office suggests audiences agree.

“That’s an incredible milestone that we are achieving, and it’s successful, which tells us something,” Olmo said. “It shows us that people want to see the show and want to relive this music.”

It’s also personal. The first show that made Olmo feel truly seen was In the Heights, discovered the way most of us discovered Broadway as kids: on a cast album, on repeat, much to the annoyance of everyone else in the house.

“To now see another Latin show succeed, and I’m in it, younger Aidan wouldn’t believe that,” Olmo said. “I love when I’m represented in a positive light, and this show does exactly that.”

Relax. You do not need to remember the one sentence you learned about the location of the library.

All of the dialogue is in English, and the show is built so that you understand what each song means and why it matters to the story. Olmo was emphatic on this point.

“It’s not a show that only a certain group could see. Anybody could see it,” Olmo said. “It’s a family show. Kids come up to us at the stage door and tell us, ‘Oh my god, this was the best show I’ve ever seen.’”

Which, if you’ve ever tried to get a child excited about anything that wasn’t a screen, is the strongest review a show can get.

Bring your abuela. Bring your kids. Bring the friend who has “Chan Chan” on a playlist and has never once wondered who Compay Segundo was. They’re about to find out.