Before there was Hamilton, Lin-Manuel Mirandawon a Tony for In The Heights, the 2008 Broadway musical set in his home neighbourhood. While fans will recognise the rhythm of his hip-hop style, this is a looser, simpler affair than his later historical epic, but one brimming with the same energy and lust for life. These characters aren’t trying to change countries or win wars, but their struggles — to make a living, find love or establish a place in the world — are no less life-and-death for the individuals involved.
There’s simultaneously a lot of plot here and relatively little that seems out of the ordinary. Our hero, and narrator, is Anthony Ramos’ Usnavi, a corner-shop owner saving up to return to the Dominican Republic and reopen his father’s old beach bar, as his neighbourhood gentrifies and old businesses are driven out. He’s crushing on Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), who can’t wait to move downtown and start her own dress shop. Meanwhile the prodigious Nina (Leslie Grace) is back in town from Stanford. She left as a golden girl, straight-A student and hope of her family and friends. But Nina is finding college life tougher than she anticipated and returns with a secret, causing conflict with her dad (Jimmy Smits) but bringing her closer to her once and perhaps future love, Benny (Corey Hawkins).
Around this centre there’s a huge cast of salon girls, small cousins and caring grandmothers, and plot lines including disastrous date nights, a winning lottery ticket, the plight of DREAMers (undocumented immigrants) under US law and a New York blackout during a heatwave. Screenwriter Quiara Alegría Hudes has trimmed the musical’s book (which she also wrote) to remove a couple of characters and songs, but there’s still the rich sense of a fully realised neighbourhood full of real people, doing real jobs. These ones just happen to burst into song sometimes. That said, establishing so many moving parts means that in the middle section you may get impatient for the plot threads to coalesce already. British audiences may struggle with the frequent lapses into Spanish slang given the small Latinx population here — though the context usually makes it clear.
This is a big, soppy, traditional musical.
Yet the pace never seriously falters because director Jon M. Chu makes each number distinct and gives the film enormous momentum. His camera drifts through the quieter scenes and shifts every couple of bars during the musical numbers, never still for longer than a few seconds. But he never resorts to the sort of frenetic music video-style cutting that might tempt a lesser filmmaker; a veteran of the two best instalments of the Step Up franchise as well as Crazy Rich Asians, he knows how to shoot dancing and when to focus on the emotion, and he’s cast sufficiently talented triple-threats to avoid any need to cut around them. He also uses clever framing, so that one dance number is reflected in the window of Usnavi’s bodega rather than seen face-on. When Chu decides to add some CG razzle-dazzle, he does so to great effect: one diss track between a bunch of male friends is partially animated as their verbal scrapping takes semi-physical form. Huge bolts of cloth spill over buildings as would-be designer Vanessa struggles to make her start, and later a couple dance up the side of a building as the sun sets on the river behind them in an achingly romantic rendition of ‘When The Sun Goes Down’.
The cast are all strong, from the relatively established Ramos — a member of Hamilton’s breakout Broadway cast — and Straight Outta Compton’s Hawkins to newcomers Barrera (at least, new to English-language audiences) and Grace. You won’t mind that the more established names take bit-parts, with Miranda in a third-tier role as Piragua Guy, a drinks-peddler, Marc Anthony in a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it role as a deadbeat dad and Hamilton’s Christopher Jackson in a fun cameo.
It’s thanks to the uniform commitment of the young cast that the emotion hits as hard as it does. For all the rap and salsa influences and the specificity of its cultural setting — these characters take enormous pride in their heritage and the many national origins they represent — this is a big, soppy, traditional musical, a story about a tight-knit community helping one another through their issues with a shared sense of scrappy optimism and a killer sense of rhythm, to enormously uplifting effect.
