Friends and Neighbors

Theatre is about telling stories, music is about capturing emotion, and art is about representing life. Artistry MN has accomplished all of that with their new production of In the Heights. Director Maija García’s production of Lin Manuel Miranda’s musical about a few days in the life of a Washington Heights community embodies the joy and struggle of everyday life. It’s about when it is time to move on and why it’s sometimes important to stick it out. More than anything, it’s a celebration of all who are able to keep living their lives in the face of setbacks, and learning from the ones you face along the way.

We see through the show’s runtime a collage of different stories representing the various people who live in the Hispanic neighborhood. Most everybody is facing hardship of some sort – financial, romantic, professional, personal – and everybody seems to be in each others’ business. Usnavi (Andrés-Román Wood) runs the local bodega and serves as our narrator. Everybody can tell he’s in love with Vanessa (Janely Rodriguez), but he’s terrified of making the first move. Benny (Chris Owuso) is ambitious but stuck in a job at the local taxi dispatch. He’s never quite been able to earn the respect of his boss Kevin (Pedro R. Bayón), a situation complicated by the fact that he has feelings for Kevin’s daughter Nina (Raquel Ponce), who just returned from California and is terrified to admit she had to drop out of Stanford. There’s also Claudia (Jen Santoro Rotty) who’s lived there forever and has served as the honorary Abuela to everyone in the neighborhood. What makes a show like In the Heights so distinct is that all of these characters and more feel like real people with real problems and real dreams. Much like Come From Away (soon ending its run at the Guthrie) everyone in this show feels like somebody you could encounter on the street, and they’ve been written, directed, and performed by people who fully understand their sort of life. It’s a show that feels universal in its specificity.

The word that comes to mind when I think of this production is vibrant. This is a colorful, energetic, exciting production where even the lowest points of the story feel full of life. This is thanks in large part to director García and choreographer Abby Magalee, both of whom do exceptionally good work. Magalee’s choreography especially is a highlight, with the cast breaking out some incredible dance moves that we know were meticulously planned out but nonetheless feel spontaneous. There’s always something going on in Eli Sherlock’s single-location set, reminding us that no matter what happens with our protagonists, life still goes on with everybody else. Then there are the moments when the entire neighborhood becomes engaged, like when Usnavi realizes he’s sold a winning lottery ticket and everybody starts to dream about what they would do with the $96,000 prize. The entire show, beginning to end, feels like we’ve been welcomed in to these people’s lives, to the point where when there’s a death, we grieve the deceased alongside everybody else.

The attention to detail, the sensitively managed performances, the emotional truth, all of these show that In the Heights has come from a team that truly loves that they have been given the opportunity to share this story with us, and for good reason. At a time when the Hispanic population is being targeted and demonized, works of art like In the Heights remind us that these people are just fighting to live their lives, and their willingness to do that is exactly what makes their lives worth fighting for. In what has been overall an incredibly strong year for musical theatre productions in the Twin Cities, In the Heights is one of the very best.

IN THE HEIGHTS plays at the Bloomington Center for the Arts through August 23rd