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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.

washingtonpost.com