‘In the Heights’ Is the Movie We All Need Right Now
When In the Heights premiered on Broadway in 2008, it became a guiding light for a generation of performers trying to find their way. “I must have watched it at least 15 times,” says Melissa Barrera of the four-time Tony-winning musical. “When I saw that show, I was like, ‘This is where I fit in on Broadway. These are people who look like me, who sound like me, who have names that sound like mine.’ ” The Mexican actress now costars in the show’s long-awaited feature film adaptation (in theaters and streaming on HBO Max on June 11) as Vanessa, an aspiring fashion designer yearning for a life outside of Washington Heights, the upper Manhattan neighborhood at the film’s center. Anthony Ramos, who stars as Usnavi, a bodega owner and neighborhood griot who, in between attempts to woo Vanessa, dreams of returning to the Dominican Republic, echoes the sentiment. “I didn’t know where I fit in on Broadway. I’m Latino, I’m from the hood in Brooklyn; people don’t even speak like me on Broadway. I ain’t gonna fit in on South Pacific. Who’s giving me a lead role on Broadway? [In the Heights] was like a beacon of hope for me.”
Although Latin Grammy–nominated singer-songwriter Leslie Grace hadn’t seen the stage show, she related deeply to her character, Nina, the pride of Washington Heights and the first in her family to go to college. After a disastrous first year at Stanford, riddled with overt racism and microaggressions, Nina comes home for the summer questioning her path and afraid of letting her family down. “I was just at that moment in my life, like Nina was,” says the New York City native of her acting debut. “That crossroads where you’re figuring out, ‘Is this who I am?’ I’ve always felt like I’m straddling the fence of being Latina, being American, and being Afro-Latina, too. And I looked at this film before I left home like, ‘This is going to be my Stanford.’ ”
Corey Hawkins, who plays Benny, the dispatcher for a local car service run by Nina’s father (played by Jimmy Smits), first saw In the Heights while studying drama at Juilliard and immediately felt at home. “I saw people who I knew growing up. I saw myself onstage in Benny, and I saw this beautiful tapestry of human experience that I gravitated toward,” he says. Nina’s journey was also a familiar one for Hawkins. “I know what it’s like being one of the very few people of color in a school. I went 3,000 miles away from home to school on the West Coast for a year and came up against that, too. ‘Am I enough? Can I bring all of me? Do I have to dim my light to feel like I’m accepted? Do I have to bow my head as I inhabit space?’ ” he asked himself. “This film gives people permission to be themselves and to chase after whatever they want and to achieve it. It’s also hella fun, too. It just feels good. Especially with everything we’ve gone through this year, this film feels right on time. It feels right in the pocket.”
Long before the sensation of Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Miranda created In the Heights (and originated the role of Usnavi) out of necessity. “I started writing [the] show because I desperately wanted a life in musical theater, and I didn’t see that many opportunities for me or for Latinx performers,” says Miranda, who is now a producer on the film. “We had West Side Story, which was back in the ’50s, and not that much new since then on the stage. The show came out of an impulse to create more opportunities for Latinx performers.” Crucially important in bringing the show to the screen was representing the breadth of the Latinx population. “The thing we tried really hard to do was cast with the understanding that the Latinx community is not a monolith. We come in all shades,” Miranda says. “We are Afro-Latinos, and lighter-skinned Latinos, and Latin Americans, and Central Americans. So the diversity within the film company really represents the many flavors that our community comes in. We’re very proud of that.”
“It’s great because sometimes within the Latinx community...we don’t even support each other on things if it’s not exactly who we are,” Barrera says. “We’re so nitpicky about it, but I can understand because we get [so few] opportunities to tell our stories that we burden these shows and movies with representing everyone.” Ramos concurs: “For most things, you don’t see a mixed Latin movie. There’s like one Mexican guy, or one Cuban guy, or one Puerto Rican. This cast is colorful, and almost everybody is Latino. Somebody’s from Peru, somebody’s from Panama, because that’s the diaspora of Latinos—we come from the Africans and the Taínos and the Spanish, and we’re mixed.”
Home—where it is, the impact it has on who we become, and who we choose to become—is a theme that fills every crevice of the film. For its director, Jon M. Chu, those ideals felt familiar. “I hadn’t really seen a Broadway show like that, that spoke to my immigrant family or my community,” he says of first seeing In the Heights. “Like my mom and all her sisters, they took care of us, all us kids. I’m the youngest of five and my dad has a Chinese restaurant, so everybody who works there took care of us. That pressure, but also the love, and questions of, ‘What’s my path moving forward? What do I carry forward?’ All those [ideas] are very complicated,” Chu says. “I’d never seen it laid out like the show did.”
The film, which had been stymied for years by unsure studios, collapsing production companies, and concerns about star power and overseas performance, eventually found a comfortable home at Warner Bros., where all the pieces seemed to finally fall into place—just as Chu was looking to make a change. “I said, ‘I need to find something that speaks to me and that is scary for me to do.’ That’s when I found Crazy Rich Asians and In the Heights.” Although the prospect of digging deeper into questions of cultural identity for the first time in his career intimidated Chu, exploring those themes in Crazy Rich Asians proved worth the stress when the film wound up a critical and box office success, ultimately becoming a cultural touchstone. The added pressure of representing a culture outside of his own with In the Heights was a task the director did not take lightly. “I had to meet with Lin in New York, which I was very nervous about. When you’re talking about his baby and how people are going to change it for a movie,” he says, recalling their first meeting. “We met in a café, and I think I babbled most of the time because I was just so nervous.” For Miranda, Chu’s reimagining was literally more than he could have hoped for. “Jon just dreamed big,” he says of the director’s approach. “We’d been pitching this as a little independent movie: ‘Please just give us a couple million dollars so we can film this movie musical in our neighborhood!’ But Jon took the ball and said, ‘No. We can dream bigger than that. These characters live in a specific place, but they have big dreams! And this movie can go big.’ So he really pushed for us to have the resources to make a big movie musical.”
Musicals have (in recent history, anyway) had a difficult time defending their leap from stage to screen. Even the most energetic and storied productions can suddenly come off as stale and strange when the camera closes in. “That was the main challenge: how to justify this story for the screen; how to make it necessary for the screen. I loved asking that question,” says Quiara Alegría Hudes, the Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright who wrote the show’s original book and the film’s screenplay. “Usnavi has a line early in the film: ‘The streets were made of music.’ Jon and I returned to that line time and time again, as though it were a piece of the film’s DNA.”
For Chu, it was critical that the focus be on the places central to the characters’ formative experiences. “I didn’t want to take the audience away from these buildings when [characters] sang about their dreams. I wanted to make it feel how it feels when you’re a kid from an immigrant family dreaming and you only have the resources that you’ve seen. I wanted to invade their spaces, so you know that the walls of these buildings aren’t big enough for their dreams.” Chu’s years working with dancers informed his ability to infuse each musical sequence with purpose, avoiding the oftentimes-stiff transitions to characters breaking into song, and maintaining a musicality that simmers just beneath the surface, so musical numbers come to a natural boil. “In this, especially in Washington Heights, when [Usnavi] says, ‘The streets were made of music,’ they truly are. I understood that whenever they went into song or dance, or even just the score, that it wasn’t just a movie tool. This is how they saw and expressed their lives, and I really needed to plug into [that],” Chu says.
Moments of exuberance, stress, and sadness that can be so easily expressed onstage through song and dance are brilliantly translated in the film with touches of magical realism, echoing the literary genre often associated with Latin American authors like Isabel Allende, Gabriel García Márquez, and Laura Esquivel, who use a dreamlike reality to portray the everyday stories of people feeling hindered by their true circumstances. Through this lens, Vanessa takes to the streets of Washington Heights, her frustrations manifesting as colorful bolts of fabric slowly enveloping the neighborhood as she fails to escape. Nina and Benny find themselves performing an R&B-inflected pas de deux on the side of a building as the sun sets over an ever-present George Washington Bridge, and a heartbreaking solo from the film’s matriarch, Abuela Claudia (Olga Merediz), a grandmother to all who know her, sees her recounting her immigration story in a subway car and graffiti-splattered station as ivory-clad dancers stand in for her Cuban ancestors. “I really have to give the lion’s share of the credit to Quiara, who boldly reimagined what the story of In the Heights could encompass onscreen,” Miranda says. “She captured the essence of the stage production, but from the new framing devices to differences within story arcs, she really wasn’t afraid to embrace what we could do onscreen that we couldn’t necessarily do onstage. I think Quiara and Jon were a magical combination. They kept daring each other to go bigger and bolder.”
Most big-screen musicals naturally relish stretching far beyond the limits of a physical stage, but few have compelling reasons to draw the audience in close. “As Abuela Claudia says in the film, ‘It’s the little details that tell the world we’re not invisible,’ ” says Hudes, who, like much of the cast and crew, took a personal interest in making sure that specific elements of Latinx culture were represented throughout the film. “Jon let me go to town in the dinner scene, down to what piques (hot sauces) are in the kitchen,” Hudes says. “I’m like, ‘We need something store-bought, and we need a home-brew hot sauce they got off their tio’s work buddy.’ ” The input was a more than welcome resource for Chu, who knew firsthand from his experience making Crazy Rich Asians how impactful seeing those tiny details reflected onscreen for the first time could be. “Jon was always asking us questions,” Ramos says. “ ‘How would you say that? How would you do this?’ And we’d be like, ‘Jon, you got to get shots of the food, that’s huge! The guava and the queso on the cracker, and the aguacate.’ Everything’s got to be as authentic as possible. The little details matter just as much as the big ones.” Hudes took care to populate Abuela Claudia’s home with personal touches. “I approved every single pot in Abuela’s kitchen—I also approved the menu—details that add up to a portrait,” she says. Miranda, who cameos as Piragüero, a neighborhood mainstay selling shaved ice and cursing his rival, the Mister Softee truck, made his role extra sentimental. “I knew if I was playing [Piragüero], I was going to play him as a love letter to my grandfather,” he says. “I’m wearing his spectacles around my neck. I have his cowboy novels tucked into my pocket. I think every actor involved saw this as a way of honoring our ancestors and the people who came before us—our fathers and mothers, our grandfathers and grandmothers—who came here to provide a better life for us.”
Much of the cast had been keeping tabs on the film’s progress to becoming reality. “I had been looking for it for 10 years, since I was in college,” Barrera says. “I would go and audition on every open call I could get my hands on. It’s crazy because I’ve always believed in manifesting things, putting it out there in the universe, believing they can come true. After 10 years, I thought, ‘Maybe that’s just not going to happen—maybe I’m too old for [it now].’ Then it came around, and it’s the most full-circle thing that’s ever happened to me.” For Ramos, the connection is even deeper. “Whether people believe in faith or not, I feel like this was ordained, like God-divine. This group of people, there was a greater power at hand, handpicked to be in this movie.” At 19, Ramos performed in a regional production of In the Heights in Salt Lake City, an opportunity that earned him his theater union card, and the ability to audition for shows open only to union members. “And boom—that’s how I got Hamilton four auditions later from the In the Heights job,” he says. Even Smits, a New York City native and a veteran of stage, television, and film, says, “It had been on my radar since it was in its infancy,” having attended an early reading of the show, the off-Broadway production, and “the Broadway play, like, nine times” while working nearby. “When I got to see it and meet Lin and Quiara, I was like, ‘You kids are the real deal. You have the love of the tradition of Broadway, and a beautiful message that’s universal in terms of what home is all about.’ Then you have this kicker of hip-hop and the pulse of the city that resonated so beautifully.” Smits plays Kevin, whose small business is feeling the squeeze of gentrification as the bills for Stanford begin to pile up. The sticky conversations between Kevin and Nina surrounding education and sacrifice will be familiar ones for any child of immigrants. “Those lines that Jimmy does could be so harsh,” Chu says. “Yet he does it with such care that it makes those conversations with his daughter complicated. Conversations that I’ve had with my parents.”
For those involved in the production, the film’s decade-long delays to bring those conversations to the screen have ultimately been for the better. “I think in a year where we’ve all been locked down and reminded about what is important, to put out a film where we are able to celebrate community and togetherness is something that feels really relevant,” Miranda says. “Sometimes I shiver when I think about previous versions of this film that were possible, because I feel like every detour, every setback, and every challenge this film has faced over the 10-plus years it’s taken to make it to the screen—it’s only made the movie better. It clarified for us what we wanted out of a big-screen adaptation of In the Heights.” For Ramos, the time for In the Heights to keep shining its light is just right. “I hope kids around the world, in Colombia, Peru, Uruguay, Paraguay, all these places where they’ve never seen this before, can watch this movie and be like, ‘Damn, hold up. Maybe I can do that.’ Because I know that’s what [it] did for me.”
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