Here’s the 22-year story of how In the Heights got from there to here - and how it changed Broadway forever in the process.
#MUSICAL INTERMISSION CROSSWORD MOVIE#
Miranda himself is no longer the face of In the Heights (he has a sweet cameo in the film), but the ideas he began fiddling with at Wesleyan in 1999 will now be splashed onto larger-than-life movie screens across the country, poised to become the film of the summer.
The movie narrative is built around a character who barely featured in Miranda’s earliest college drafts: Usnavi the bodega owner, the role Miranda originated on Broadway, played in the film by Anthony Ramos in a star-making turn. An arc involving a winning lottery ticket and a blackout provides the skeleton of the new plot, and there’s a heartbreaker of a death scene. The story, too, has been revamped: Though Benny and Nina still exist, albeit in heavily revised forms, Lincoln is gone. Only three words from the score of Miranda’s 1999 In the Heights remain in Chu’s electrifying 2021 film adaptation: the “en Washington Heights!” the cast sings in unison to close out the show’s opening number. Suddenly all those setbacks have begun to look like serendipity. But it has ended with In the Heights’ imminent release in 2021, just as America begins to emerge from its long and painful quarantine. It would be another 13 years before In the Heights made it from Broadway to Hollywood - and that transition, too, would involve multiple hurdles and setbacks.
#MUSICAL INTERMISSION CROSSWORD SERIES#
The show would, eventually, become a smash - but only after an endless, tortured series of workshops and revisions saw it heavily transformed from its origins at Wesleyan. When In the Heights made it to Broadway in 2008, its debut marked the start of a stratospheric trajectory. He would continue to refine it for nearly a decade after he left school before bringing it to Broadway. (Among its fans was the BMOC the young Miranda wanted to impress, who told Miranda that he made an audience feel “so cared for.”) Miranda wasn’t yet satisfied he loved the show but thought it needed more work - a lot more work. The student audience at Wesleyan went wild for that early campus production. Which, in Miranda’s case, meant not the rock of Jonathon Larson’s Rent score but the Latin salsa and hip-hop on which he grew up. Like Rent, Miranda planned, his show would blend classic Broadway ballads with the music of the moment. This new musical would tell the story of a raw, fraught love triangle: Washington Heights boy Benny is in love with Yale student Nina, his best friend Lincoln’s little sister - but Lincoln, a closeted aspiring songwriter, is in love with Benny himself.
Under their combined influences, Miranda developed material for a musical set in his old neighborhood, the Latino community in Upper Manhattan known as Washington Heights. He was just a kid, high on awe for Rent (which had opened three years earlier) and a longing to impress Wesleyan’s big man on campus. The story of In the Heights begins in 1999, when an unknown Lin-Manuel Miranda was a sophomore at Wesleyan University, decades before he received a MacArthur “genius grant” and won a Pulitzer. That’s a lot of hype for a show that started so small. Industry observers are nearly unanimous in saying it will be a smash. In the Heights isn’t only timely: It’s also based on a beloved existing property, and its early reviews have been mostly raves. As the horrors of a plague year begin to ebb away, what could be more suited to the moment than a gorgeous, joyous spectacle of a musical, one with talented and beautiful young people singing and dancing their hearts out on a giant movie screen? Chu and based on a Tony-winning Broadway musical by Hamilton’s Lin-Manuel Miranda, is widely expected to be one of the summer’s biggest movies. In the Heights, the new movie musical directed by Crazy Rich Asians’ Jon M.