It’s Chayanne’s Autumn

It’s almost midnight on a warm, cloudless summer night when the crew of “Shut Up and Dance” finally breaks for lunch. As a small army of technicians, set designers and extras queues up before the catering truck, no one pays much attention to the effervescent, chain-talking young man who tags on to the back of the line.

It’s not the first time Chayanne has been overlooked. Despite a career that has produced 28 gold and 19 platinum Spanish-language records, the Puerto Rican singer is virtually unknown outside Latin America. Even co-producer Lauren C. Weissman couldn’t place the name when a Miami-based talent scout brought him by on the second of two daylong casting calls last fall.

“None of us,” she says, “knew who Chayanne was.”

But he won’t be anonymous much longer. After just two auditions, Weissman and her team were so impressed, they cast him opposite Vanessa L. Williams in their salsa-flavored dance romance, which is scheduled to open Valentine’s Day.

“We feel like we’ve discovered something,” Weissman says now. “Chayanne is going to knock the socks off the acting world. He’s going to be huge.”

And, superlatives aside, that’s hardly a minority view. While some originally may have considered it a gamble to cast an unrecognized actor in the lead of a Hollywood movie, Chayanne won many converts in four months of filming. In the trades, his dark good looks and charismatic screen presence have inspired comparisons to Antonio Banderas. Director Randa Haines likens him to Marlee Matlin, whom she directed to an Oscar in Matlin’s film debut, “Children of a Lesser God.” And Williams says he’s “very sexy and very appealing. . . . I think he’s got a promising future.”

Pretty good reviews for an overnight success--even if it was two decades in the making.

Born Elmer Figueroa Arce in San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico--a small town about 35 miles inland from San Juan, the capital--Chayanne, 29, got both his nickname and his musical talent from his mother, Irma. The nickname, which he earned as a toddler, was inspired by a TV show Irma and her husband, Quintino, watched during their first years of marriage in New York. The musical talent took only slightly longer to develop. Shortly after he learned to walk, Chayanne was dancing around the house with his mother and grandmother. And shortly after he learned to talk, he was singing with them.

By the age of 5, he was belting out hymns in church, accompanied by his sister on the guitar and his older brother on the accordion.

“So it was a family of music, folklore music,” says Chayanne, the third of five children born to a teacher and a mid-level supervisor at a U.S. food company’s San Juan plant. “Not professionals but just people that love music.”

But the Figueroas lost their amateur status in 1978 when Chayanne, then 10, joined Los Chicos, a group of prodigies who soon came to rival Menudo, Puerto Rico’s other pre-pubescent pop power.

“The group went from nothing to doing concerts for 30,000 people,” Chayanne says. “In that time we were very popular.”

So popular, in fact, they inspired a television show, a telenovela and eventually a movie, “Los Chicos en Conexion Caribe” (Los Chicos in Caribbean Connection), which played throughout Latin America. When the group broke up after four years, however, Chayanne was the only one to succeed in a solo career, acting in a TV series and another telenovela before recording, at age 17, the first of seven solo albums. His records have gone on to sell 4 million copies, produce 13 Top 10 Spanish-language hits and earn one Grammy nomination.

But after releasing the mega-hit “Provocame,” and following it with a 16-country tour in 1993, Chayanne began to chart a new direction for his career.

“I had a lot of things happening in my life,” he says. “That was the perfect time to change. Because the idea was changing.”

So he split with longtime manager Gustavo Sanchez, placing Patricia Vega in charge of his Miami-based CHAF Enterprises. He also returned to acting with renewed gusto, playing the lead in the Puerto Rican film “Linda Sara”--under the direction of Oscar-nominated director Jacobo Morales--and starring in the Mexican telenovela “Volver a Empezar” (which aired in the U.S. on the Univision network and is currently being rerun in Los Angeles on KMEX-TV Channel 34). But, perhaps most of important of all, he began to study English.

“I was preparing myself for the future, to expand my career,” he says. “I wanted to grow. And the United States . . . it’s the country that, everything that you do here goes to the world.

“I’m just starting. I’ve only been doing this 19 years.”

Southern California has been dry for weeks, yet the streets outside Eagle Rock’s Riviera nightclub have been made to look as if a tropical storm has blown through. In this scene, the script has Chayanne pushing through the club’s wide double doors just in time to see Williams, his jilted dance partner, driving off into the night.

But on consecutive takes a stagehand is late in giving Williams her cue, and Chayanne, left to improvise, actually heightens the scene, building what was written as a passing glance into an emotional search for his soon-to-be lover.

“OK, let’s break,” a satisfied Haines says when the scene finally ends. Moments later, after reviewing the tape, the soft-spoken director is generous in her praise.

“He has a lot of confidence that comes from having been a performer for a long time,” she says. “His gifts as an actor are so present. He has a scene presence that just leaps off the screen. He has that great thing that a lot of wonderful leading men and women have--that they are beautiful, sexy, desirable and also accessible.

“I think he’s just incredibly gifted.”

Nevertheless it’s how Chayanne acts when the camera is off that most impressed the crew of “Shut Up and Dance.” In an industry in which big egos are as common as big paychecks, virtually everyone from director Haines to the lowest part-time gofer has found his humility refreshing.

“We relish in it every day,” Williams says. “He’s always smiling, always laughing.”

“He’s the nicest gentleman I’ve met in a long time,” says Lora Kennedy, an independent casting director. “Chayanne doesn’t differentiate between the crafts service man and the producer. He treats everyone with the same respect.

“And he’s big.”

Kennedy found out how big one recent weekend when she hired a couple of day laborers to help her move. Since the men spoke little English and Kennedy speaks no Spanish, she tried to break the ice by asking if they’d heard of Chayanne. She might just as well have asked an Englishman if he’d heard of Shakespeare or a Dutchman if he could identify Rembrandt.

After a long, giddy recitation of Chayanne’s accomplishments, Kennedy related with a smile, one man eagerly volunteered: “And we hear he’s in L.A. making a movie.”

But will a loyal following and name recognition in Latin America translate into screen stardom in the U.S.? Kennedy certainly thinks so, especially if Chayanne avoids the temptation to change for English-speaking audiences.

“It would be silly for us not to think of him as a crossover. [Repackaging] would just ruin him,” she says. “I mean, he’s done well in other cultures. For him to change to accommodate us . . . would be stupid.”

Vega agrees, saying that Chayanne and his management team have never considered it. And why should they? Banderas--the actor Chayanne is most frequently compared to--made the move from the Spanish cinema to Hollywood without having to adopt an Anglo persona.

And Chayanne begins his career here with a number of advantages Banderas didn’t have. He’s eight years younger, for example, arguably more handsome and speaks better English. And while Banderas was little known outside Europe before making his Hollywood breakthrough in “Mambo Kings,” Chayanne lives in South Miami Beach and is already a household name to many of the nation’s 30 million Latinos.

“I have been in the United States performing [musically] for the people, for the Latino community,” Chayanne says. “I have been in Los Angeles. I have performed in the Radio City Music Hall. In Madison Square Garden, the first performance I did there I was 12 years old.”

But there’s a difference between performing in the United States and performing in English. So while offers to make English-language records and movies have been around for years, Chayanne has previously accepted just one, recording the single “Simon Says” for a Pepsi commercial, and later including the cut on his 1990 Sony album “Tiempo de Vals.”

“It was never the right time,” he says. “And my English--I’m not saying it’s great now, but it wasn’t that good. It’s better to do fewer projects but good projects. It’s something you need to feel in your stomach. And for some reason or another, I didn’t get it.”

The only feeling in his stomach now is hunger. It’s 3:30 in the afternoon, breakfast time for Chayanne, who is beginning to wilt under the daily grind of 12-hour days. The night before, he had been locked in a sound stage until dawn filming love scenes with Williams. Today’s schedule calls for another 12 hours of the same thing.

Hey, it’s a tough job, but somebody’s got to do it.

“I have been working a lot because in the movie I’m in almost every scene,” he says as he attacks a plate of eggs. “And the scenes have been very demanding emotionally.”

Physically too. Although Chayanne’s stage shows have always included energetic choreography, he had to learn complicated new styles of dance for the movie. Yet after just a few weeks of training, he had the ballroom, ballet and theater arts steps down cold, even mastering a difficult hold that required him to lift his partner over his head with one hand.

Chayanne plays Rafael Infante, a Cuban who moves to Houston in search of both his past and future. Once there, he meets Ruby Sinclair, played by Williams, a former dance champion in the midst of a number of personal crises.

Rafael is shy but engaging, smart but naive, sensual yet a perfect gentleman. In other words, he’s exactly like Chayanne.

“He embodies almost all the characteristics of Rafael,” Williams says.

But despite differing cultures, backgrounds, even dance styles, Rafael and Ruby are slowly drawn closer together, eventually pairing as an entry in the international ballroom dance championship. Backing the script is a dynamic soundtrack--possibly including a duet by Chayanne and Williams--and some sizzling dance scenes.

“As a first movie, this is great,” Chayanne enthuses. “There’s music involved. There’s dance involved. It’s fresh. It’s romantic. And it’s a good character.”

Reports in the U.S. and Puerto Rican press place the budget for “Shut Up and Dance” at $40 million, a figure a spokesman for the picture denied. But its lavish backgrounds, army of highly skilled extras, location shoots in Las Vegas, Houston and Puerto Rico and a cast that includes Kris Kristofferson and Joan Plowright in addition to Chayanne and Williams did not come cheaply.

And for a dance movie, it sure features a lot of singers. Kristofferson, for example, is a Grammy winner who continues to compose and perform, and Grammy nominee Williams just released a new album. The fact that others have been able to mix movie and music careers comes as considerable consolation for Chayanne, who opened a 16-nation Latin American concert tour on Thursday in Venezuela. (He’ll perform in Los Angeles in February, concert dates that have been scheduled to coincide with the opening of “Shut Up and Dance.”)

“If I had to sacrifice one, I don’t know which one I’d give up,” he says. “I started these careers parallel, the acting and the music, and I want to maintain this life. Because I love both.”

When the subject turns to music, Chayanne slips unconsciously from English into a rapid-fire Spanish, clipping his words and slurring his consonants in a manner more common to Miami’s Cuban community than to his native Puerto Rico. And it was a sound heard more frequently as “Shut Up and Dance” neared the end of its shooting schedule last month.

The tour to promote “Volver a Nacer,” Chayanne’s first album of original work in four years, was delayed seven months by the movie, so an assistant and a cellular phone followed him around the set, helping him reschedule shows and confirm promotional events throughout Latin America. Now, however, he faces time constraints of another kind: his Venezuela-born wife, Marilisa, gave birth to a son, Lorenzo, the couple’s first child, late last month.

“It’s going to be hard,” he says. “Especially as I’m preparing for this show. It’s painful not to see your family. [But] it’s not a matter of love or no love. It’s a matter of this is my career.”

A career that, after 19 years, may be just beginning. “The door,” he says with a smile, “has been opened.”