LIGHTS UP
You hear the movie In The Heights before you see it. The film is set in a little corner of the most upper and most western block of Manhattan, home to an immigrant community of Dominicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans. A place where the Hudson River meets the sky: Washington Heights. This is the neighbourhood next to Inwood, where Lin-Manuel Miranda was born and raised; these are the blocks that inspired him, at the quite frankly astonishing age of 19, to spend his second year at university writing the first draft of a musical that celebrated all the chaos and all of the poetry of this district. A draft that would, in 2008, premiere on Broadway with the title In The Heights and win Miranda his first Tony Award – long before he turned his creative gaze to a founding father called Alexander Hamilton. This is a place where, as our hero Usnavi reflects in the breathless and ebullient 10-minute-long opening number of the film, which ends with him dancing in a crowd in the middle of a highway – the streets are made of music.
Listen. Can you hear it? There’s the beat, the insistent tap of a hand against an upturned crate. The jangle of keys twirled around a finger. Thena movie star,” enthuses Melissa Barrera, who appears alongside him as Usnavi’s will-they-won’t-they, just-get-it-together-you-guys love interest Vanessa, an aspiring fashion designer desperate to get out of the barrio.
