Atención, yo attention, it’s Dillon and I’d like to mention, I’m on the microphone this morning, honk your horn if you absolutely loved In the Heights— honk honk honk!
Okay, sorry I couldn’t resist. With the lyrical reference out of the way, I have to reiterate— I absolutely loved In the Heights. The glitzy big screen adaption, helmed by Jon M. Chu of Crazy Rich Asians fame, is the exact thing we need to lasso in summer 2021 after a hellish year (and change) of various states of lockdown.
To begin, for those of you who are unaware, In the Heights is a musical by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes, before Lin-Manuel Miranda was Hamilton’s/His Dark Materials’/Moana’s/everything else’s Lin-Manuel Miranda. It’s what made me first fall in love with the musical stylings of Miranda and I’m thrilled that this text that drips with heart is getting the big screen adaption and, by extension, larger audience that it deserves. The Broadway production ran almost three full years from February 2008 to January 2011, and spurred over a dozen professional international productions before becoming a community and educational theater favorite.
Save some of the song eliminations (I missed “Everything I Know” being in the movie), almost everything from the Broadway production is elevated by the cinematic medium, exactly how it should be when you take a stage show and adapt it for film. There are heightened visuals, actors that can carry a blockbuster on their backs without so much as pulling as muscle, lyric changes that have minor impact to the rhythmic pentameter but major impacts to both the story and to the social impacts at large, re-orchestrations that feel fresh, and changes in narrative that give it some semblance of a real plot. Let’s use these things as our guide.
As for its cinematic elements, the magical realism that we’ve come to expect from lavish Chu productions is as prevalent as ever. Characters dance up the side of a building, wigs dance along with their salon patrons as gossip is tossed through the air, massive plumes of fabric fall off of roofs, animations float between friends as they rap battle about lottery winnings, the list continues on and on. And each one serves to elevate the material in its new film format. I always say, if you’re going to adapt a stage show for the silver screen, give it something that a stage show couldn’t. On top of it’s fantastical elements, In the Heights give us a barrage of colorful locations and sets, stunning cinematography (shot here with excessive skill and vibrance by Alice Brooks), and doesn’t ever feel static, a major complaint I had about many of 2020’s stage-to-film adaptions.
The cast, led tremendously by Anthony Ramos, Melissa Barrera, Corey Hawkins and Leslie Grace, is truly exceptional and, not for nothing, they seem so much closer to the age of their characters than much of the original Broadway cast did. To see real bonafide triple threats leading a big budget Hollywood musical on their talent and not their names is a such a delightful change of pace (it’s not lost on me how important it is to sometimes get a “name” when producing movie musicals, but this casting proves that sometimes material and talent are enough to be successful with a commercial audience). The chemistry between Ramos and Barrera is so palpable you could wring it out into a cup to quench the thirst we all felt watching them. Ramos exudes effortless charm from beneath that freckled face and Barrera has the type of timeless, bright-eyed beauty Vogue has been writing about for years. Both of them are absolutely bound for stardom and will surely have massive careers after this film. And the real standouts from the supporting cast are Broadway legend Daphne Rubin-Vega as Daniela and Olga Merediz as Abuela (a role she originated on Broadway to much Tony-nominated acclaim), each representing the older generation of Washington Heights residents with comedy and heart respectively. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were a major awards campaign for Merediz in this years awards season— her big solo moment is truly one of the most beautiful musical sequences committed to film since the 2000s began and to make things even better, its scored by her gigantic, singular, emotive voice.
Shifting to the music, I wanted to quickly point a few of the lyric changes that I really appreciate in helping the show remain modern and culturally sensitive. In one of the show’s triumphant ensemble numbers (the ensemble in this movie is both next level energetic and inclusive) “96000,” they change the Broadway lyric “D*nald Tr*mp and I on the links and he’s my caddy” to “Tiger Woods and I on the links and he’s my caddy” which in itself is kind of hilarious given how imperfect Tiger Woods is but I appreciate anything done to erase the former from the cultural zeitgeist. In the same song they also change, “I got more hoes than a phonebook in Tokyo” to “yo, I got more flow than Obi Wan Kenobi-oh” which in a film so heavily focused on community and erasing stereotypes, feels much better. Updated orchestrations also make some of the songs so much more lively and contemporary, including “It Wont Be Long Now,” “Benny’s Dispatch,” and the aforementioned “96000.” And in “When You’re Home,” a sweeping, beautiful, string-driven musical interlude is added to the end to underscore Nina and Benny’s romantic apex in the style of old Hollywood movie-musicals.
And most importantly, this iteration of In the Heights has an actual plot! My biggest complaint about the stage musical version is that it’s kind of void of any tangible plot. In this one, there are so many wonderful changes to the narrative that update the circumstances and help to drive the story forward. The changes elevate the material from just a portrait of community, to a story of generational trials, tribulations, and triumphs. Without giving anything away, they change Nina’s story line in many ways, from her parental situation to her relationship with Benny (in the stage musical their main obstacle was that her parents didn’t approve of him not speaking Spanish), they anchor Sonny’s storyline firmly in contemporary politics by making him a DACA dreamer, they frame the entire movie as Usnavi telling his block’s story to a group of children, and they change how the $96,000 is spent, among other things. Sonny’s storyline in particular gives it real weight and urgency while the “this is my story” framing device highlights how big apart of the immigrant experience having community and passing down stories are, especially in a place like America where immigrants are constantly being exploited before being erased. Slight spoiler alert— the movie ends with Usnavi giving his daughter his cap and her looking directly into the camera as if to emphasize Abuela’s words: “little details to prove we are not invisible.” I don’t think it’s a mistake that it ended with a literal and metaphorical passing of the cap to the next generation in order to keep their community alive and thriving.
On a personal note, I lived on the exact block they filmed a majority of In the Heights on for many years. The summer they filmed, I watched dancers practice in the streets, I heard tracks booming from the Highbridge Park pool, I saw countless cast and crew members visit the craft services station that was literally at the foot of my building’s stoop. So to see the movie come to fruition in such a triumphant way was unbelievably exciting. Plus, though I no longer live north of 96th street, I’ve spent half of my years living in New York living in Washington Heights. My entire time there, though I have no connection to the Latinx diaspora, I was always treated like a member of the Heights community having been offered food by neighbors, assistance by strangers, and music when I didn’t know I needed it most. This is to say, I’ll always have a soft spot for those blocks and I’m so glad the rest of the world is being introduced to them on a scale of such grandiosity.
In conclusion, there was much talk last summer about how Christopher Nolan’s time bending blockbuster Tenet would be the film to “save the movie theater.” In actuality, it’s been made abundantly clear now that if there were any one film that was going to swoop in and mark the triumphant return of the theater going experience, it is Jon M. Chu’s rhapsodic In the Heights. It is joy served up on a silver platter and washed down with Usnavi’s café con leche.
You can catch In the Heights in theaters today and can stream it on HBO Max for no additional subscriber cost through July 11th.
