By CHRISTINE DOLEN
'In The Heights' playwright Lin-Manuel Miranda, at the 2009 Tony Awards. (Andrew H. Walker / Getty Images)
For Lin-Manuel Miranda, the years since he graduated from Connecticut’s Wesleyan University in 2002 have been a frenzy of hard work and achievement.
In the Heights, the musical he started writing as a Wesleyan sophomore, wound up on Broadway, won the 2008 Tony Award and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Miranda earned a best-actor Tony nomination for playing bodega owner Usnavi in his musical about colliding dreams and disappointments in Manhattan’s largely Dominican neighborhood of Washington Heights.
The multitasking composer-performer also worked with director Arthur Laurents and lyricist Stephen Sondheim on Spanish-language lyrics for the current Broadway revival of West Side Story. Last year, he became the youngest person to be awarded an honorary doctorate from Yeshiva University. And, in May, he debuted a number from his The Hamilton Mixtape – a hip-hop work in progress about Alexander Hamilton — for the Obamas at the White House.
Heady stuff for a guy who just turned 30, with much more in the works, including a movie musical of In the Heights starring Miranda and directed by Kenny Ortega of High School Musical fame. Miranda, whose career-making show arrives at the Broward Center for the Performing Arts on Tuesday, happily acknowledges the big changes in his life. But underneath, he says, he’s much the same guy he was growing up in Inwood, a neighborhood next to Washington Heights in northernmost Manhattan.
“I still take the A train. I still live in Inwood. I still go bowling on Thursday nights,” he says — though he’s running down this list from a Beverly Hills hotel suite, where the producers of a top-rated television show have put him up while he’s shooting a cameo appearance he can’t yet reveal.
FOUR-YEAR PROJECT
Miranda’s musical got transformed from a student project to a Tony-winning hit through more than four years of collaborative work with playwright Quiara Alegría Hudes, director Thomas Kail (a fellow Wesleyan grad) and others — although, Kail observes, “the heart, the musical landscape and the fundamentals were already there.” In the Heights features characters whose roots stretch back to Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. It paints a portrait of a neighborhood, one infused with drama and comedy: The older generation sacrifices to help the younger go farther, while the young ones search for love and purpose.
South Florida actor Oscar Cheda, a member of the touring company, describes it as “more like a Fiddler on the Roof, about coming to a different place but holding onto your heritage, sometimes too tightly. It’s heartfelt.”
Observes Hudes: “I don’t want to sell short its entertainment value, but with the choreography, the difficulty of the music, the way it’s sung, it’s virtuosic. To sit in joy for 2 ½ hours is a nice thing. But it’s not escapism. Everything is not necessarily perfect.”
In fact, In the Heights has touched many lives, including those of audience members who spend a couple of hours basking in its buoyant score, its resonant story of dreamers and generational conflicts and those moments of pure joy. Somehow, Miranda says, the show seems to win over even theatergoers who arrive sporting attitude.
“I’m a huge fan of hip-hop and Latino music,” Miranda says. “People who don’t like musicals and people who don’t like hip-hop come into the show with their arms crossed. But they leave with their heads bobbing.”
The notes and lyrics that get those heads moving were written by Miranda. But the sound of In the Heights owes much to its two Tony-winning orchestrators: Bill Sherman, who focused more on the hip-hop/Reggaeton numbers, and Alex Lacamoire, a Miami native who shaped the show’s Latino sounds and spent time as its conductor-keyboard player on Broadway.
Lacamoire, who went to high school at New World School of the Arts, coaxed the sounds of salsa, merengue, bachata and mambo from the score. Growing up in South Florida, he had danced to salsa hour after hour at parties, but he formally studied it when he went to the Berklee College of Music in Boston.
“What I wrote was based on what I remembered and felt, the clave pattern that is the pulse and undercurrent of salsa,” he says. “I didn’t know that. I read about it in a book when I was trying to write salsa for In the Heights. Thank God I got it right.”
Now working on a musical version of the cheerleading movie Bring It On with Tony-winning Heights choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler, Miranda and others, Lacamoire got a major thrill when Miranda asked him to play piano for the Hamilton Mixtape performance at the White House.
“It was the coolest gig of my life, and I got to chat with President Obama for about 30 seconds,” Lacamoire says.
It was Lacamoire who, in turn, helped Cheda have his own once-in-a-lifetime experience. The two met when Cheda was performing with a community theater group called the Lakewood Players in Kendall. Cheda got cast in The Pajama Game, and Lacamoire was hired to play piano. But because Lacamoire was just 13 then, Cheda would give him rides to and from rehearsals.
UNDERSTUDY ROLES
Years later, when the In the Heights team came to Miami to audition actors for the touring company, Lacamoire made sure Cheda had his shot. The actor is now part of the ensemble, understudying the key role of a car-service owner whose bright daughter isn’t coping well with life at Stanford University and the part of a vendor peddling icy piraguas (Puerto Rican snow cones) on a hot July day.
“This has been unlike any other experience in all my years in theater… . I’m a kid in a candy store,” Cheda says from a tour stop in Baltimore. “Working with the Broadway director [Thomas Kail], choreographer and musical director has been amazing… . Lin was at every rehearsal in New York; sometimes, he’d jump up and play Usnavi. He’s so creative, so full of energy and ideas. The things that come off the top of his head boggle the mind.”
On tour, diverse audiences in lots of cold-weather places — Minneapolis, Buffalo, Pittsburgh — have been embracing a Latino musical set over a sizzling Fourth of July weekend. Kail thinks that In the Heights, which has been on Broadway for more than two years, stirs “a sense of discovery, because it hasn’t been running for 10 years. You see people being won over.”
Given that In the Heights is finally stopping in a warming-up South Florida, several of its key creators are planning to head for Fort Lauderdale to do one of their periodic checks on the show. Lacamoire will help celebrate his mother’s birthday, with 70 friends and family members, at a performance. Kail will watch the show with his grandmother, who now lives in Palm Beach. And Miranda? He’s planning on some beach time.
Joking from that posh California hotel suite, he says, “I’m going to have to go out and do a Pretty Woman montage of me shopping on Rodeo Drive to buy a bathing suit.”
