‘Heights’ shines with originality
by Eric Marchese
Each of us can only know the world from our personal perspective. The challenge in life then becomes how to integrate that viewpoint with the views of those around us.
“In the Heights,” a recent new hit musical, reminds us of this while showing that although members of a community may call the same area home and speak the same language, they still may struggle to find common ground.
Chance Theater’s new staging is the 2008 Broadway show’s Orange County premiere. It’s also one of the few times the show has been done regionally at a venue as intimate as Chance.
Director Oanh Nguyen’s staging shows that getting a close-up look at the characters created in 2005 by Lin-Manuel Miranda (music and lyrics) and Quiara Alegria Hudes (book) is crucial to our understanding them, empathizing with them and feeling their joys and sorrows.
The “Heights” of the title is the Washington Heights district in Upper Manhattan, an area that, since the 1980s and ’90s, has been populated mostly by Dominican Americans or recent immigrants from the Dominican Republic.
Though we meet numerous characters, we primarily see things through the eyes of Usnavi de la Vega (Joshua Lopez), who runs a small bodega and is known to everyone in the neighborhood.
When Usnavi’s parents brought him to Washington Heights as an infant, the first thing they saw as they entered New York Harbor was a U.S. Navy ship – hence his unusual name. After their deaths, he was raised by Abuela Claudia (Candida Orosco), the barrio’s loving, protective matriarch.
Other characters abound, many of them youthful and therefore full of energy, enthusiasm, hopes and dreams. There is Nina (Julia Cassandra Smith), the first to have “made it out” of the barrio by being accepted to Stanford University. There is Benny (Charles McCoy), who runs dispatch for the car service owned by Nina’s dad – and who loves Nina. And there is Vanessa (Chelsea Baldree), who dreams of getting out of the Heights while working at a salon, and who is loved from afar by Usnavi.
The world “In the Heights” creates is both familiar and insular – a tightly personal, idiosyncratic community known best only to its inhabitants. What’s so striking about seeing “In the Heights” in Chance’s intimate staging, and what really hits home, is how the ethnic flavor generated by the show’s characters is so infectious despite being so distinctive and so personal.
That vibrancy is expressed in a flavorful score comprised of salsa, jazz, merengue and hip-hop. Both Miranda’s lyrics and Hudes’ dialogue are peppered liberally with Spanish words and phrases; in particular, Miranda’s spicy, inventive lyrics ring of realism.
All of Nguyen’s youthful actors have an easy physical grace that translates into characters who possess tremendous self-confidence, even bravado, and who express themselves with the kind of unvarnished candor that often disappears in maturity.
Lopez’s Usnavi brims with good cheer, his kind heart binding the barrio’s residents together. Baldree’s generally cheerful Vanessa is deeper than others may realize. Smith projects Nina’s mixture of bright inner spirit and humility plus her disappointment in herself for having left school. McCoy ably shows Benny’s ambition, his loyalty to Nina and his drunken bitterness when he realizes her dad Kevin’s bigotry is keeping them apart.
Tony Sanchez delivers Kevin’s dislike for Benny as Nina’s suitor as well as his self-laceration for possibly having failed her. Orosco’s Abuela is an ailing but tough survivor who has fended for herself since coming to New York City from Cuba in 1943.
Through Robyn Wallace’s expert music direction and Kelly Todd’s dance steps, numbers such as the Act I closer “The Club” are exciting and gritty and “Carnaval del Barrio” rocks with joyful abandon. Songs like “96,000” use nearly the entire cast while, at the other extreme, “Everything I Know” and “When the Sun Goes Down” are passionate and more intensely personal.
Bradley Kaye’s scenic design captures the realism of the barrio: the welcoming bodega, the neat order of the car service, the coldness of iron railings and metal trash cans, and the creative expression of random graffiti.
Yet it’s the show’s singular, wholly original vision, and Chance Theater’s vibrant, heartfelt realization of that viewpoint, that stick with us long after the final curtain.
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