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Top of the Heights
How In the Heights, the little Latin musical that could,
became The Great White Way’s most-talked-about and
celebrated show this season.
By Dave Gil de Rubio
It’s a long way from living in Manhattan’s Washington Heights working-class neighborhood to having the musical you’ve been working on since you were a teenager win four of a record-breaking 13 Tony nominations. But 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda and his semi-autobiographical musical In the Heights did just that during the American Theatre Wing’s 61st Tony Awards ceremony. In addition to Miranda winning the Best Original Score category, Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman won Best Orchestrations, Andy Blankenbuehler won for Best Choreography and Heights improbably beat out Cry-Baby, Passing Strange and Xanadu for Best Musical.
In the Heights is a musical love letter to Miranda’s beloved blue-collar neighborhood and its mix of small businesses, working-class people and cultural transition that has transformed it from a predominantly Jewish and Irish enclave to the current, dominant Dominican populous. Not only are the musical’s compositions steeped in the traditional theater vernacular, it seamlessly weaves strands of salsa, hip hop and reggaeton into a storyline that includes a Romeo and Juliet element, the struggle between assimilation and cultural pride plus a neighborhood fighting to maintain its soul in a time of escalating rents.
All of this from the pen and imagination of someone who got the theater bug in the sixth grade after seeing Phantom of the Opera on Broadway and totally relating to “this story about a really ugly guy in love with a girl. I mean I was 12, really short, couldn’t get any girls and as far as I was concerned, that show could have been about my life at that point.” Laughing as he recounts this story, Miranda is seated at a diner near his midtown apartment, dressed in a crimson hoodie and a baseball cap with a graffiti tag of In the Heights on its face.
Humble, funny and engaging, the New York City native lays out his background with elements that have unsurprisingly found their way into the musical’s storyline. Like his character Usnavi, Miranda had an abuela who always dreamed of the big score. In Heights, it’s Abuela Claudia who’s always playing the Lotto. In real life, it was a neighborhood caretaker and the local slot machine.
“I remember being about 3 and my Abuela Mundi would lead me by the hand to the local bodega where at the time, they used to have this illegal slot machine that she’d play every day,” he recalls. “We’d go in the back room where it was my job was to pull the lever. She’d be there feeding quarters into it and I just kept pulling the lever. Meanwhile, the guy who owned the store was giving me these free Now & Laters because this woman was coming in and spending money on this machine all the time. Sometimes she’d win some quarters. Sometimes she wouldn’t.”
And like Mandy Gonzalez’s character Nina, Miranda went from a Latino neighborhood to a school with a predominantly white student body. In the show it was Stanford University, but in real life Miranda went to Wesleyan University. It was while he was a sophomore that a play idea about his old neighborhood that Miranda had been incubating since his teen years caught the attention of some forward-thinking seniors, John Mailer (son of writer Norman) and Neil Stewart.
“They said they’d love to help me bring it to New York. I was a sophomore so I said okay, forgot about it and put it in the drawer,” Miranda says. “They were as good as their word and started Back House Productions with Tommy Kail, who’s the director and had already graduated. So I met Tommy the week after I graduated from college in June 2002 and we started talking about how to make Heights better, and that conversation continued ‘til today.”
With Back House building a black box theater, (a small unadorned performance space), in the basement of the Drama Bookshop on West 40th Street, Miranda and Kail started doing workshops and readings of the show. It soon attracted the attention of producer Jill Furman, who saw it at the end of 2002 and Rent co-producer Kevin McCollum, who saw a reading on Theater Row in June 2003. By the time an Off-Broadway production was being staged at 37 Arts in Manhattan, Book Writer Quiara Alegria Hudes and Musical Director/Co-Orchestrator Alex Lacamoire had come aboard in 2004. During this time, there had been readings at the Manhattan Theatre Club and a workshop at the O’Neill Theater Center in Connecticut in 2005.
All this work was part of Miranda’s two-pronged goal for In The Heights: to redeem the reputation of a neighborhood often portrayed by the media as a high-crime area, and to give Latinos something to embrace as their own on Broadway. While Miranda adores West Side Story, (“I think Leonard Bernstein’s music is perfect, plus it gave us a foot in the door”), the music of The Capeman worked better for him than the actual story.
“Were it not for that show, we might not be having this conversation. ... And while it was of course based on a true and tragic story, once again Puerto Ricans had to deal with the whole knife-wielding image hanging over how we’re portrayed,” he says. “Needless to say, we definitely had a ‘no knives rule’ when it came to creating characters and scenarios for In the Heights.”
As for his old neighborhood, Miranda is looking to set the story straight. “People need to know that it’s not this drug haven where the only images you have for reference are scenes like in American Gangster or in Shaft,” he says. “Also, the idea of a neighborhood filled with local businesses and people who look out for each other is fast disappearing, given how expensive it’s getting to live in Manhattan. I think it’s important to preserve that slice of neighborhood memories that’s fast disappearing all over New York City.”
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