In The Heights

We Say...

Review by Will Friedwald

The first thing that you hear in the new hit Broadway musical In the Heights is the sound of someone channel surfing on an AM radio: a few beats of Latin pop, a little hard rock, a couple of lines of a commercial or news announcement. This seemingly random collage of sounds turns out to be the closest thing that the show has to a conventional overture, and it serves the same purpose: it acclimates our ears to the polyglot of sounds and musical genres that make up the score. The opening number, for instance, references both Duke Ellington and Cole Porter in quick succession. Lin-Manuel Miranda, who conceived the show, wrote the music and lyrics, and plays the lead, appropriated the Sondheim-ian conceit of setting the songs for different characters in different styles. So the ingénue, Nina (Mandy Gonzales), sings primarily romantic boleros, while most of Mr. Miranda’s own songs (as “Usnavi”) are cast in a highly literary form of rap. Even the basic musical make-up of the show is explosively exciting: Cuban-style salsa, played by a brassy 13-piece band.

The story can be likened to Fiddler on the Roof, in that it depicts a group of families of a particular ethnic background living within a larger community — in this case, Dominican and Puerto Rican immigrants in upper Manhattan’s Washington Heights. Most of the solo songs are intimate and slow, while the ensemble numbers are generally big, crowd-pleasing dance spectacles. The cast album is grandly entertaining in and of itself, and fully justifies its two-CD length; one of the more fetching tunes is given to a comparatively minor character, a street vendor who sells flavored ices, produced by scraping a large block of ice. He sings an incredibly catchy cha-cha-cha about how he’s just “scraping by” to the accompaniment of a guiro, an Afro-Cuban percussion instrument that is itself scraped, rather than struck, with a stick. Hearing the numbers without the visuals allows us to focus on Mr. Miranda’s lyrics, as the finale of Act I, in which he rhymes “La Chaim” with “you buy ‘em.” I’ve never heard that one before, even in Fiddler on the Roof.