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I
t’s a freezing December
night in New York City, but
uptown, at the 809 Bar & Grill
in the Inwood neighborhood
of Manhattan, it feels like a
Caribbean Christmas party.
Servers pass trays with tiny bowls of
asopao de pollo; at the bar you can
order a glass of coquito, the tradi-
tional Puerto Rican Christmas drink
made with coconut and rum; and Bad
Bunny plays through the speakers.
A collection of journalists, indus-
try professionals, and friends of the
hundreds-strong cast have gathered
to watch the premiere of the In the
Heights trailer. The crowd is buzzing,
even before the cast appears. When
the trailer finally plays, people begin
cheering—the kind of cheer that says,
I was there, or maybe even, That’s my
best friend onscreen!
“You’re going to hear the word
magic a lot today,” the director, Jon M.
Chu, tells the group. “There’s no other
word to express what we felt shooting
this movie every day.”
“It was the best summer of our
lives,” adds Lin-Manuel Miranda, who
wrote the music and lyrics to accom-
pany a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes.
A bit of backstory: In the Heights
was first drafted by Miranda when
he was a sophomore at Wesleyan
University in 1999 and then staged
by a student-run theater group.
After hearing about the production
(and obtaining a CD of the music),
Thomas Kail, a Wesleyan alumnus,
approached Miranda with the idea of
preparing it to be shown off-Broad-
way. For the next few years, Kail
and Miranda worked on multiple
drafts—eventually bringing in Hudes,
a respected playwright introduced
to Miranda in 2004, to work on the
book, and an updated version opened
off-Broadway in 2007. A year later the
musical moved to Broadway, where
it won four Tony Awards (includ-
ing Best Musical), the Grammy for
Best Musical Show Album, and was
a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for
Drama in 2009. It ran at the Rich-
ard Rodgers Theatre until 2011. “If
you can imagine Do the Right Thing
mellowing out, learning Spanish, and
bursting frequently into song, you’d
get near In the Heights,” began an
early review in New York magazine.
“This story could have been a simple
screed against gentrification, but it’s
not,” added the critic Jeremy McCar-
ter, calling it “an unusually subtle
treatment of the force that’s remak-
ing 21st-century New York.” In the
Heights was bought by the Weinstein
Company in 2016, but Miranda and
Hudes managed to regain the rights
before the production company
went into bankruptcy proceedings
in March 2018.
The musical tells the story of Usna-
vi (Miranda in the initial Broadway
production), a young man who runs
a bodega in the Washington Heights
neighborhood of upper Manhattan
but whose heart is in the Domini-
can Republic—and who dreams
of returning to his family’s Carib-
bean home. Surrounding him is a
chorus of local personalities, each
resisting or becoming an agent of
change. There is Nina, who makes
it “out”—to Stanford University,
where, unbeknownst to her proud
father, she is struggling. Benny, one
of the few non-Latino characters,
works for the car-service company
owned by Nina’s father while pining
for his daughter. Then there’s Vanes-
sa, Usnavi’s love interest, an aspiring
designer who longs for a downtown
apartment, away from the gossipy,
sometimes claustrophobic barrio in
which she’s grown up.
The actors playing these parts in
the film don’t share these backstories,
but they all found something recog-
nizable in their characters and the
musical. Anthony Ramos, 28, who
plays Usnavi, grew up in a Brooklyn
housing project and was propelled
toward a career in the arts by a teach-
er who spotted his raw potential.
When he first saw In the Heights on
Broadway as a student at the Ameri-
can Musical and Dramatic Academy,
he felt his life experiences were being
reflected back to him. “I know every
person on this stage,” he remembers
thinking at the time.
A few years later, Ramos was cast
in the original dual roles of John Lau-
rens and Philip Hamilton in Hamilton
at the Public Theater. (His fiancée,
Jasmine Cephas Jones, with whom he
shares a Park Slope apartment, is also
a Hamilton alum.) “I watched him die
every night for a year, so I knew he
was an extraordinary talent,” Miran-
da recalls over the phone. Ramos also
played Usnavi in a Kennedy Center
production in 2018, and that perfor-
mance cemented Miranda’s confi-
dence. “I wrote this part and I played
it,” says Miranda, “but the clothes,
the words, the music all fit this guy
like I tailored it for him.” Ramos feels
the same: “Every day I was telling my
own story, like someone else wrote
it for me.”
“You’re going to hear the word magic
a lot,” says director Jon M. Chu.
“There’s no other word to express what
we felt shooting this movie”
COSTUME DESIGNER, MITCHELL TRAVERS; MURAL BY ANGURRIA.
