Beginning this week, the Victoria Theatre Association will be holding a performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In The Heights” at the Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton.
“In The Heights” is a musical focusing on the vibrant community of Washington Heights, New York.
From the Victoria Theatre’s page description for the musical, Washington Heights is “a place where the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music. It’s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions to take with you and which ones you leave behind.”
The musical has a cast of less than 15 named characters, focusing on weaving a story about the struggles, hopes, and dreams of the few that are presented with a life story in “In the Heights”.
The creator himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda, played one of the leading rules as Usnavi de la Vega, who is the owner of the aforementioned bodega. A bodega is a what a convenience store such as 7/11 would be called in a hispanic setting.
Working with him is his younger cousin Sonny, the jokester of the barrio with a thoughtful side that yearns for social justice. Usnavi and Sonny have a friend named Benny, the only person living in the community that doesn’t speak Spanish who dreams of opening his own business someday.
Benny works for the father of his crush, Nina Rosario, known as the first person in her family (and in the barrio in general) as “the one who made it out”. Vanessa is seen as the most beautiful woman in the barrio and has all eyes on her for it with her one dream being to move downtown and away from her alcoholic mother as soon as possible. Taking care of Usnavi is “Abuela” Claudia, the matriarch of the barrio that everyone loves and thinks of as their own grandmother despite no actual blood relation with her.
The earliest draft of “In The Heights” was written in 1999 during Miranda’s sophomore year of college. The show was accepted by Wesleyan University’s student theater company Second Stage and once that was done, Miranda added more elements such as freestyle rap to the production to come closer to what the audience knows today.
The play ran for three days which resulted in Miranda being approached by several people (including Thomas Kail, who also directed Miranda’s future musical Hamilton) in regards to expanding “In The Heights” into a musical to be performed on Broadway.
During its run, the musical was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four in 2008: Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations. “In The Heights” was also awarded the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album the same year.
The show itself runs for two hours with a 20 minute intermission between acts. The showtimes are Tuesday – Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 2 PM and 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM and 7:30 PM during the week of Oct. 3 to Oct. 8.
Erika Brandenburg
Reporter