Shannon Maracle’s Nina Simone Experience Transforms Puerto Vallarta

Every Saturday night at 7 p.m., The Social Club in Puerto Vallarta becomes something electric, intimate, and quietly revolutionary. Velvet curtains, candlelit tables, sepia-toned photographs, and the venue’s multi-room, speakeasy-style mystery blur the line between stage and audience. Into that atmosphere steps Shannon Maracle—one of Toronto’s most expressive and emotionally fearless vocalists—delivering a performance that isn’t simply a tribute, but a lived, felt conversation. This is The Nina Simone Experience.

For many years, Maracle has been known for her singular ability to not just sing a song, but to make you feel it. Producer Eddie Bullen once described her artistry as “a journey of vocal sightseeing that leaves you on the edge of your seat.” It’s that visceral impact—her power to animate a lyric from the inside out—that makes her the perfect center of this evening built around the life, music, and emotional legacy of Nina Simone.

A Show Built Around the Artist, Not the Other Way Around

The Nina Simone Experience was conceived, written, and directed by J.T. Horenstein and produced by his company, A Jonny Paradiso Joint. But in his mind, Shannon was never an interchangeable lead—she was the reason the show exists.

Horenstein first worked with Maracle last season on two wildly different productions: a burlesque parody at Coco Cabaret, where she fronted a live pre-show band, and the inaugural run of The Bourbon Affair at The Social Club. Watching her navigate jazz, blues, funk, and torch songs with equal authority, he realized she wasn’t merely a standout vocalist—she was a headliner waiting for the right vehicle.

Horenstein immersed himself in Nina Simone’s world—documentaries, biographies, archival interviews, political essays, performance footage, and Nina’s own reflections on art, love, and liberation. From that research emerged a script that doesn’t follow a linear timeline but instead unfolds as thematic chapters: belief, desire, music, activism, isolation, change.

Then he handed the script to Shannon as a gift—and the show truly began.

A Conversation Between Two Women, Not an Imitation

Rather than asking Maracle to impersonate Nina Simone, Horenstein asked her to stand beside her—as a peer in artistry and as a Black woman with her own stories, questions, and truths. He spent weeks interviewing Shannon about her life: her views on freedom, the weight and pride of being a Black artist, the challenges of longevity in music, and her own journey through stages in Canada and beyond.

Out of those conversations, Horenstein crafted monologues that allow Shannon to speak in her own voice. She does not play Nina Simone. She honors her. Challenges her. Intersects with her. Offers contrast and resonance. And most importantly, she brings Nina’s emotional universe into the present moment for the audience in Puerto Vallarta.

Shannon says the rotating audiences in this city keep the show alive in unexpected ways. “It’s going to be exciting to see what changes with an audience that varies every week,” she explains. “I like meeting people from all over the place, and here in Puerto Vallarta, there’s always someone walking in with a story—birthdays, anniversaries, divorces… everything. The stage is the same, but the energy is always new.”

That ever-shifting energy feeds directly into the show, giving each performance its own emotional temperature.

A Trio That Sounds Like a Universe

The music in The Nina Simone Experience is driven by celebrated pianist and musical director David Maiocco, whose playing is both atmospheric and fiercely expressive—an echo of Nina herself without ever becoming mimicry. Alongside him, the brilliant Mairead O’Grady and Dante Azuara weave a soundscape that can shift from spare and trembling to explosive in seconds.

Their interplay with Shannon is the heartbeat of the evening. Each musician has been given freedom inside the arrangements, allowing every Saturday night to breathe differently. Sometimes the band pulls back, giving Shannon space to whisper a tender lyric into the candlelight. Other times, they surge forward, letting the room vibrate with the righteous fire Nina Simone became famous for.

The Social Club: A Venue That Performs Alongside the Performers

To describe The Social Club as a venue is to undersell it. Designed by Bryan Stocks and his team, the space feels like a secret you’ve been allowed to enter—low lighting, mirrored hallways, balconies overlooking a three-story atrium, and hidden lounges that invite discovery. Every table glows with vintage lamps and bowls of illuminated fruit. The building’s raw historical character remains exposed, but softened and romanticized by decades of curated decor and found artifacts.

“We always intended the space to evolve with the performances,” Stocks explains. “One night it’s a jazz lounge, the next a burlesque salon. You don’t just visit The Social Club—you get invited into the unknown.”

For The Nina Simone Experience, Horenstein and the technical team transformed the venue into an immersive stage. There are seven or eight distinct playing areas, lighting cues that sculpt the room, and movement patterns that allow Shannon to weave through the audience, sometimes singing from inches away, sometimes towering above from a balcony.

The result is a show where the room itself becomes a character—a silent storyteller.

Shannon Maracle: An Artist Built for This Moment

Shannon’s path to this production began with her early breakout in Mama, I Want to Sing and continued through television appearances, major Canadian festivals, and her role as co-founder and lead vocalist of Blaxäm, sharing stages with icons like Al Green and Maceo Parker. Her career spans jazz, funk, blue groove, rock, and beyond—all genres that Nina Simone also stretched, bent, and redefined.

Her move to Puerto Vallarta opened a new chapter. After several years of not performing, it was hearing David Maiocco play that unlocked something: “I hadn’t heard anybody on the piano like that,” she says. “And when I heard him, I wanted to sing.”

Now she performs regularly across the city, including her Thursday residency at La Catrina Cantina and hosting one of Puerto Vallarta’s most beloved late-night open mics. But The Nina Simone Experience is something different—something bigger. It’s a culmination of everything she has lived, everything she has fought for, and everything she has become as an artist.

A Night That Feels Like Standing in a Pulse

The show unfolds like a kaleidoscope—songs braided with monologues, stories folded into musical explosions, quiet confessions followed by roaring crescendos. Moments of Nina’s activism are juxtaposed with Shannon’s reflections on identity, resilience, and freedom. It is not a biography. It is not a re-creation. It is an invocation.

Above all, it is a show built around feeling.

And Shannon makes you feel everything: longing, rage, tenderness, humor, and that deep Nina Simone ache that comes from being painfully, brutally awake in the world.

A Must-See in Puerto Vallarta’s Thriving Live-Music Scene

In a city overflowing with drag shows, pop tributes, beach-bar bands, and nightclub spectacles, The Nina Simone Experience stands in a category of its own—a soulful, intellectual, emotionally charged evening of jazz, activism, and storytelling grounded by Shannon Maracle’s rare ability to make an audience not just hear a song, but truly feel it.

And in Puerto Vallarta, on Saturday nights at The Social Club, that feeling becomes unforgettable.

Tickets and Reservations

Tickets for The Nina Simone Experience can be reserved by messaging +1 818-489-4937 on WhatsApp, where guests can pay via PayPal, Venmo, or Zelle. Tickets are also available in person with cash at Casandra Shaw Jewelry or Tunnel Bar, and both cash and credit are accepted at The Social Club on the night of the show. Because Saturday performances fill quickly, reservations are strongly recommended.