Lights up on Washington Heights!

Lin-Manuel Miranda was sick of seeing Latino performers relegated to playing West Side Story thugs, so he wrote his own show—a freestyling, salsa– and hip-hop–filled love story to his neighborhood, his heritage, and his musical theater idols. Now In The Heights is on Broadway, and its lyricist and star finds himself adjusting to life as the Next Big Thing.

By Una LaMarche



Lin-Manuel Miranda is still in shock. Just a week ago, he learned that his musical, In the Heights, will open on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre on March 9, 2008. “I fantasized about the show going to Broadway the way I used to fantasize about being a Jedi Knight in 1983,” Miranda says, his expressive eyebrows jumping above his infectious, cartoon grin. “It was a lovely dream. But I didn’t think it would ever happen.”

A lifelong musical-theater buff who once convinced Stephen Sondheim to attend his high school production of West Side Story, Miranda, now 27, wrote a first draft of In the Heights his sophomore year at Wesleyan University, composing the score on a portable keyboard. High-school follies notwithstanding, he was tired of seeing Latin actors forced to play stereotypical gang members or servants, or Latin parts being cast with whites (“Bernardo was Greek!” he exclaims, referring to Story’s Shark leader, played in the film by George Chakiris).

In the Heights emerged as a thoughtful, romantic, funny homage to Miranda’s neighborhood in upper Manhattan, incorporating salsa, merengue, rap, and hip-hop—“music that sounds like it could be coming out of a boom box or car stereo in Washington Heights”— into a score lovingly modeled on those of Sondheim, Cole Porter, and Richard Rodgers. Its Latin-American characters didn’t shoot each other or tag buildings with graffiti; they worked, they fought, they fell in love. The low-budget production, originally performed in a repurposed church on campus, caught the eye of some recent alumni—among them Thomas Kail, now the director—who had a theater company in Manhattan. They decided to produce a workshop and Miranda, who had no professional acting experience, found himself playing a central role in the cast when he realized that no one else could perform his narrator’s wordy, freestyle monologues fast enough. He kept the part, and earlier this year, during the show’s off-Broadway run, he won one of twelve Theatre World Awards for outstanding debut performance.

Now, the bilingual show—produced by Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller, the dynamic duo behind Rent and Avenue Q— is headed to the Great White Way on a wave of critical acclaim. The New York Times’ Charles Isherwood wrote that it should have been nominated for best musical at the Tonys (as an off-Broadway production, it wasn’t eligible). Miranda has received numerous accolades and fan mail, including a letter from Helen Mirren. And some are predicting that In the Heights will be next year’s Spring Awakening. It’s not surprising, then, that Miranda is feeling invincible. “Now, becoming a Jedi doesn’t feel out of the realm of possibility,” he says. “Which is absurd. Someone really ought to sit me down and set me straight.”

Photography by Disco Meisch.