Dan Sullivan, a frequent contributor to the Denver Center’s Applause Magazine, has written a preview on just what makes In the Heights so special.  You can read the full article in our program, but here’s an excerpt:

Kyle Beltran in the National Tour of In the Heights. © Joan Marcus

[The phenomenal success of In the Heights] may be a little more than the show’s composer-lyricist, Lin-Manuel Miranda, had dared to hope for when he started writing the show in college. Neither, though, could he have imagined how labor-intensive the project would be. Being an actor, Miranda’s goal was to “write the kind of show I’d like to be in.” A natural setting would be the neighborhood where he grew up and still lived, Washington Heights. Eight years later In the Heights—starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Usnavi (Kyle Beltran heads the national touring company)—finally reached Broadway and won the Tony Award for Best Musical.

The real Washington Heights has traditionally been a “neighborhood in transition,” from Irish to Jewish to Hispanic to, in our day, gentrification. In the show, though, almost everyone’s Latino. Nina, home from Stanford for the summer, and maybe forever, is Puerto Rican. Usnavi was born in the Dominican Republic and longs to go back. Claudia, Usnavi’s surrogate abuela (grandma), remembers being a girl in Havana 50 years ago—not a happy memory, but it was nice to feel hope. Vanessa works at the beauty shop—for the moment. Next stop: downtown.

We get glimpses of everybody’s story, but Usnavi holds center stage, not out of arrogance (he’s too shy to date Vanessa), but because he’s the show’s caregiver as well as its caretaker, a big brother unconnected by blood to his pseudo-familia but responsible for everybody at considerable cost to his nerves.

It’s not just the show’s dance beat that he jumps to. He’s neurologically driven to help out his neighbors and to help the audience understand what’s going on. He does this in his native tongue: rap; the most elegant rap you’ve ever heard. Listen to his underthoughts as he makes change for the customers in his corner bodega:

You do rapid mathematics

Automatically

Selling maxipads and fuzzy

Dice for taxicabs and

Practically

Everybody’s stressed, yes, but

They press through the mess

Bounce checks and wonder

What’s next…

Print alone can’t register the exuberance of this. Wouldn’t it be funny if the American theatre’s long search for viable modern verse drama had finally discovered its proper metric base? And think of what it could do for opera! Visually and sonically then, In the Heights reflects the real Washington Heights or a slice of it. Miranda and his librettist, Quiara Alegria Hudes, show us the neighborhood as one might remember it ten or 15 years later, not as a TV camera would see it, but as it felt on a sizzling afternoon in July, with everyone out on the street and a radio blaring on every windowsill. It’s a moment in time and everybody knows it’s not going to last. Local businesses are going under, people are moving up and out. So, enjoy. It’s a carnaval under threat, but happily the show doesn’t overpaint the neighborhood’s dark side. The dialogue is salty enough, the dance moves tough enough to show that you have to be street smart to survive here. Having established that, the show foregoes the violence that we’ve unfortunately come to expect in barrio stories.

National Tour Company of In the Heights. © Joan Marcus

This was a deliberate choice. “People always ask, ‘Why aren’t there more drugs and crime in the show?’” Miranda told The Boston Globe as the musical went on the road last fall. “That’s because the only time they hear Washington Heights is on the radio. But that’s not specific to my neighborhood. And it wasn’t my experience. The only things I know about drug-dealing are from rap music. I’d be writing a fiction if I tried to make my show about that.

“I wanted to represent a side of life that’s largely unrepresented. Which is not the dude selling drugs or hanging out on the corner, but the guy who owns the small business on the corner. The dude on the street corner is still there. But we’re gonna tell this other guy’s story.” Miranda is paying tribute to the people he grew up with, not as they were at every moment, but at their best—loving, staunch, principled. That definitely includes the mothers and fathers. “What are my parents gonna say” is a serious question in this show; and the parents have plenty to say. If this contributes to our sense that we’re on a slight time-delay, it also reminds us of how little we know about immigrant families. Respectability is a major goal in this ’hood and it’s not linked with hypocrisy. Try dignity.

What it adds up to is the American musical at its best, a beautifully crafted show with a dozen influences (West Side Story, Rent, Hair, even, Fiddler on the Roof) that is never anything less than itself.

Watch IN THE HEIGHTS videos on the show’s YouTube Channel.

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