'In the Heights': Beats With a Latino Pulse
Comments that include profanity or personal attacks or other inappropriate comments or material will be removed from the site. Additionally, entries that are unsigned or contain “signatures” by someone other than the actual author will be removed. Finally, we will take steps to block users who violate any of our posting standards, terms of use or privacy policies or any other policies governing this site. Please review the full rules governing commentaries and discussions. You are fully responsible for the content that you post.
Miranda wrote the music and the lyrics for this upbeat and up-tempo valentine to Upper Manhattan. Oh yeah: He’s also the evening’s star. Heck, for all I know, he had a hand in hanging the lights and designing the lobby posters.
Still, with some obvious help from librettist Quiara Alegr¿a Hudes, director Thomas Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and a 24-member cast primed to get your juices flowing at all costs, Miranda has bequeathed to New York an evening of old-style, innocent pleasure.
The pulse of the show may throb to the rhythms
of hip-hop and salsa, but the impulse that drives
it is pure Broadway. Miranda and Hudes’s achievement here is to have placed on the stage a story infused with the flavors of urban Latino culture and mixed them agreeably with the formulas of musical theater.
“In the Heights” is a concoction as accessible to the old as it is to the young; even in its intermingling of Spanish and English — and most of it is in English — the show seems an attempt to invite all comers with open arms.
The American musical has long been the most parasitic of art forms, adapting itself to all manner of popular stories and styles, from the operetta to the rock concert. On this occasion, it takes its inspiration from the street life and music of the Dominicans and Puerto Ricans and Cubans who settled in the tenements and aging apartment buildings of a gritty uptown neighborhood known as Washington Heights. Hudes and Miranda manage to make "In the Heights" both an immigrant saga and an act of nostalgia, recalling the enclave for the mixture of aspiration and belonging that it engenders.
Tags: innocent, lyrics
April 8th, 2008 at 10:47 pm
I’ve protested this war from the beginning, in the streets, but there’s this nagging part of me that keeps asking: If there was a genocidal civil war going on, wouldn’t we intervene to save lives? Take, for instance, Rwanda. Our inaction there has been the cause of plenty of retrospective guilt and hand-wringing. So…say we leave Iraq now and an all-out civil war breaks out. Sunnis murdering every Shiite they can get their hands on, and vice versa. Wouldn’t that put us in the awkward position of saying: We’re just going to let them tear each other to pieces and hope it all works out. Wouldn’t that be the same as not acting on Rwanda? or Darfur? or Somalia? or Bosnia?Then again, there are lots of civil wars that we don’t stick our noses into, Cambodia, Sri Lanka…
April 8th, 2008 at 11:37 pm
I think Bush has lost the heartland of this country. From Jan. 31, 2007, we learned Georgie doesn’t do it for Peoria anymore.”In Peoria this week, many patrons found their pancakes more interesting…A woman, eyeing Bush and his entourage, sighed heavily and went back to her paper. She was reading the obituaries. ‘Sorry to interrupt your breakfast,’ a White House aide told her. ‘No problem,’ she huffed, in a not-so-friendly way. ‘Life goes on, I guess.’”http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/16908975/site/newsweek/
April 9th, 2008 at 12:28 am
Who wouldn’t be for our withdrawl in 6 months… as long as we get the job done?
April 9th, 2008 at 1:18 am
It’s like having the cast of Beverly Hillbillies in Washington, but with too much authority.
April 9th, 2008 at 2:09 am
I hate to do this but I must. Find out first hand how US Soldiers feel about involuntary recalls…http://digg.com/politics/US_Soldiers_voice_opinions_concerning_involuntary_military_recalls
April 9th, 2008 at 2:59 am
The population polled is too small and too region specific for any scientific validity. The use of such poll numbers is amateurish propaganda at best. But then again an uneducated populace could be seduced by such invalid arguements. Show me the data.
April 9th, 2008 at 3:50 am
Makes you wonder how we would react if Bush turned around and pulled the troops from Iraq himself…
April 9th, 2008 at 4:41 am
how does it explode successfully without exploding on the first crash with the shelter?
April 9th, 2008 at 5:31 am
I’m Republican and I’m all for a strategy to get out, but I don’t believe giving a time table is in the best interest of both our troops or Iraq or the US. It’s basically giving terrorists and radicals a timetable and I don’t think thats wise. The military can have their own timetable and not release that info to the public, that’s fine with me. Thanks to our wonderful American media who does not have the best interest of our country in mind when they report news. All they care about is being first, giving no regards as to the content they are spewing out of their mouths.
April 9th, 2008 at 6:22 am
First, these 312 traitors will be expelled from the Republican Party. Second, they will be deported to Iraq. Third, they will detained as enemy combatants and interned at Camp X-ray. Finally, the intelligence their interrogations will provide will be the evidence we need to get the UN behind our upcoming invasion of Iran.