Lin-Manuel Miranda is fitting in on Broadway
THEATER
'In the Heights' is a bright love letter to his old stamping ground, the largely Latino community of Washington Heights in Manhattan.
NEW YORK — IN 1998, high school senior Lin-Manuel Miranda saw "The Capeman" three times during previews, just before the highly anticipated Paul Simon musical crashed and burned on Broadway. Starring Rubén Blades and Marc Anthony, the show, in Miranda's opinion, was as exhilarating as it was frustrating. All that extraordinary Latino talent! But in the service of what? A musical based on a real-life gang slaying by a Puerto Rican-born petty criminal?
"I was deeply conflicted," the 28-year-old actor-composer recalls a decade later. "You know that story about Stephen Sondheim, when he was a young intern on the musical 'Allegro'? It was one of Rodgers and Hammerstein's rare flops, and Sondheim's often said that when he started writing musicals, he was always trying to fix 'Allegro.' Well, when I started writing 'In the Heights,' the impulse was to try to fix 'Capeman.' "
Miranda has succeeded at that and much more, at least given the critical reception for "Heights" when it bowed last year off-Broadway. Whereas "Capeman" was unfocused, dark and brooding, Miranda's musical is a bright and hip valentine to Washington Heights, the vibrant and bustling Latino community on the north end of Manhattan.
"A singing mural of Latin American life that often has the inspiriting flavor of a morning pick-me-up," wrote Charles Isherwood in the New York Times, going on to praise "the infectious bouncy Latin-pop score" by Miranda and his performance as Usnavi, the charismatic bodega owner who acts as the rapping tour guide of the 'hood.
Now that "In the Heights" has transferred to Broadway, opening tonight at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, the stakes for the $10-million musical have been substantially raised, not the least of which is the fate of the first major musical about Latinos created by and featuring Latino talent. Miranda, who composed the songs, is joined by Quiara Alegrìa Hudes, a Latina playwright who has fashioned the musical's book. Among the cast are Priscilla Lopez (the original Morales in "A Chorus Line") and Mandy Gonzalez ("Brooklyn").
Through an array of musical styles, including bachata, merengue, salsa, hip-hop and Broadway, "In the Heights" offers up characters dealing with a series of melodramatic crises over a Fourth of July weekend: Nina, who has dropped out of Stanford; her disappointed parents, Kevin and Camila, who run a car service; Benny, their ambitious dispatcher; Abuela Claudia, Usnavi's lottery-playing "grandmother"; his cutup cousin Sonny; and Usnavi's romantic crush, Vanessa, whose downtown cool is gently mocked by the girls of the local beauty parlor. At the center are the perennial assimilationist pleas: "How do I reconcile my dreams with my parents' ambitions for me?"
