Throughout the early 21st century, few shows promised a future for Broadway musicals quite like In the Heights. Created by the unstoppable Lin-Manuel Miranda, the story of Washington Heights has become one of the most celebrated works how it fuses different musical styles alongside a bilingual script and a celebration of simple everyday life. In the recent production by La Mirada Theater, the story once again comes to life just in time for the sweltering summer, where everyone is eating piragua and busting down hydrants for relief. As a return to the theater, it’s a joyous experience and one that 15 years later continues to inspire. It is everything that the stage should be, and luckily the magic still shines bright.
At the center is Usnavi (Ruben J. Carbajal), whose job at a corner store is the perfect intersection for a variety of perspectives that include cab companies, hairdressers, and even vandals. It’s a tight-knit community where everyone dreams of winning the lottery and celebrating Independence Day with neighborhood carnivals. As the opening music quickly proves, this isn’t a conventional story. It’s one where salsa will blend with hip-hop and earnest Broadway classics. Given that Miranda has an unabashed love for it all, he manages to make everything work, where by the end of the opening song, the harmonies overwhelm the audience, managing to encompass so many melodic ideas that shouldn’t work and yet they do.
With the privilege of stage room, the characters wander around while overlooking the Washington Heights Bridge, itself used as a place for the more fanciful moments to shine. During “$96,000,” where the money falls from the sky, or “Blackout” features fireworks sparking across the backdrop. Despite the simple setting of business fronts, there is an impressive amount of geographic dexterity on display, managing to use stage technique to make the flat surfaces feel more dimensional, where a crowd can feel massive, and even doing circular dancing can feel like a journey around neighborhood blocks. The show does an affecting job of making the place feel lived in, like a journey into someplace both universal and intimate, creating stories that need to be more shared on a stage.
It helps that the cast is full of talented performers who know how to keep up with the winding melodies whose wordplay is dizzying even to listen to. The world feels alive with small detail, where every t-shirt-cladded extra feels like they have their own story to tell. Even then, those who mostly know In the Heights from the recent film will discover how much more there is to this story. Performers croon from balconies, and talk of their economic struggles in ways that make characters like father Kevin (Benjamin Perez) feel more emotionally satisfying. Elsewhere, Abuela (Jacquelin Lorraine Schofield) manages to have an even more emotionally satisfying arc because of how the stage manages to allow scenes to play out slowly, unveiling subtext that makes the eventual reveals all the more satisfying.
Everything comes together for an amazing Act II that features life after a blackout, where a rundown, riot-induced Washington Heights captures the defeated nature of the characters. It’s a perfect visual sense of every character trying to follow their dreams and hitting a hurdle. Even in the closing 15 minutes, there’s uncertainty as to how everything will play out, finding everyone looking for the optimism that opened the story. With that said, the story is never free of humor for long, managing to capture the clever dynamics between the cast. It’s a world where everyone wants to find some sense of purpose, and that sometimes comes with self-effacing humor. For as sad as it is, there’s never a sense of total despair, and it’s the show’s lasting appeal.
In the Heights is a summer musical for the ages, managing to embody the optimism of a neighborhood that may not have everything going for them, but their dreams are still worth singing about. Going to work should be more fanciful, where mundane conversations turn into catchy salsa numbers full of campy humor. Everything comes together and presents a place where everyone’s story is unique and yet they all are distinguishable. It’s a story of a barrio struggling to survive, and it makes great reasoning for why these small-town places should be given that level of respect.
La Mirada Theater’s production predates a new season that will be coming in the fall, and one can hope they’re all as good as this. Everyone is in top form, managing to present jubilant energy and a culture that is presenting something new in the ordinary. The dream of having a story worthy of musical life in many hearts, including the immigrants who have made this neighborhood their own. What works is that everyone is welcome with In the Heights, where everyone can dance alongside each other and create brilliant, propulsive music that has impressive lyrical humor to it that rewards bilingual audience members. This is what community looks like, and it makes a great case for why it remains an important part of being alive.
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