Scaling ‘Heights’ Higher Than ‘Hamilton’

The best line of dialogue in “In the Heights,” which is playing through next weekend in a new production at New York City Center occurs early in Act II. Throughout the whole show, the lead character is Usnavi de la Vega, the youngish owner of a local bodega in Washington Heights, originally portrayed by the show’s creator and songwriter, Lin-Manuel Miranda. “Usnavi” seems an unusual name in Spanish, English, Spanglish, or, indeed, any language. Then, more than an hour into the show, we are informed where the name comes from. On the day his parents arrived from the Dominican Republic, as they passed through the harbor, they saw a beautiful ship bearing that name. His grandmother Abuela Claudia (Natalie Venetia Belcon) tells Usnavi (Matte Martinez), “Your father said, ‘Usnavi, that’s what we’ll name the baby.’” At which point he replies, “It really said ‘U. S. Navy,’ but hey!”That moment stands out as a comic highlight of a work whose charms are mostly musical, terpsichorean, and visual rather than verbal. In fact, the great strength of “In the Heights” is the way it does so many different and ambitious things at once.In 2008, “In the Heights” was Mr. Miranda’s first Broadway show, with the book written by Quiara Alegría Hudes. It instantly established him as a formidable force in the musical theater when it handily won the Tony Award that year for Best Musical. Then, it was a paean to the concept of diversity, first in the multi-ethnic cast of Hispanic (Dominican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South American) and African American actors, singers, and dancers. As one character says, “My mom is Dominican Cuban, my dad is from Chile and P. R. Which means: / I’m Chile-Domini-Curican, but I always say I’m from Queens!”The music itself is even more so: Mr. Miranda somehow combined salsa and rap along with more traditional elements of musical theater storytelling. So in the midst of all those loud and thrilling Latin dance numbers, Mr. Miranda throws in an old-fashioned waltz like “Everything I Know.” He came up with a hybrid sound that, nearly 20 years later, still sounds fresh and unpredictable. In fact, every scene in “Heights” almost literally explodes with energy; most of the scenes have singing, dancing, and dialogue all at once. The music keeps going, and the dance numbers essentially never stop, carrying the characters and the audience seamlessly from one scene to the next. The show achieves a consistent tone despite all the different styles that Mr. Miranda works in.When I saw the original “Heights” in 2008, I agreed that it more than lived up to all the buzz around it. I thoroughly enjoyed it, yet when years later I thought about the show or listened again to the Grammy-winning original cast album, I would try to remember the plot but was somehow unable to do that. Then, when the movie adaptation came out in 2021, I loved that as well, but even after seeing it, I was unable to describe the plot. Basically, it’s a strong ensemble story. A bunch of characters interact up in Washington Heights, and though there are two couples (in the best musical theater tradition), Usnavi and Vanessa (Ashley De La Rosa) and then Nina (Jaci Calderon) and Benny (Aaron James McKenzie), who get a lot of the stage time, the central character is really the entire Latino community of Upper Manhattan — a kind of Soviet mass hero. Yes, there’s some business about “Will Usnavi decide to leave the neighborhood? Will Nina go back to college?” but overall, this is not a show overburdened with an excess of plot.The music in this production, directed by David Mendizábal, still is amazing, from the big production numbers to such relatively simple airs as “Piragua,” sung by the Piragüero, a street vendor who sells what some of us call snow cones, flavored cups of shaved ice. Although it’s a relatively simple and very catchy song, one of the few in “Heights” that’s sung by a lone character on stage, the lyric tells us to “keep scraping by!” suggesting multiple meanings worthy of Sheldon Harnick: scraping as in the sense of just barely getting by economically, of scraping in the sense of the Latin percussion instrument the scraper or güiro, which is heard throughout the whole show, and, not least, the quintessential scraping of the ice itself necessary to create the piragua. It’s a purely charming, low-key number amid lot of theatrical spectacle.In retrospect, “In the Heights” is sometimes regarded as a warm-up for the composer/creator’s next major project, the blockbuster known as “Hamilton.” The use of rap and hip-hop beats here clearly points to that 2015 triumph. But for me, “Heights” is the superior show. The music here is a lot more hummable, and the dancing is overwhelmingly spectacular. Not to mention that the ending of “In the Heights” is a lot happier than that of “Hamilton.”

Scaling ‘Heights’ Higher Than ‘Hamilton’

Scaling ‘Heights’ Higher Than ‘Hamilton’

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