OnStage: New 'Heights' for Latin culture

Composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda was a high school student when he first saw "Rent" on Broadway. Jonathan Larson's New York-set update of "La Bohème" was the first contemporary musical he had seen, and it inspired him to ask: Why not use the musical format to tell the story of the Latino neighborhood in Manhattan where he grew up?

Why not put a big spotlight on the salsa and merengue syncopation, the freestyle rapping and the cultural flavors that were so rife in his environment but so uncommon on American theater stages?

"Until I saw 'Rent,' I had never seen a show that took place today," said Miranda, 29, who has been traveling to promote the show. He spoke from Tampa, Fla., where the tour was launched. "It empowered me to think that anyone could write a musical."

He began to craft a show during his sophomore year as a theater major at Wesleyan University, where it was an 80-minute one-act. After many revisions over many years -- he worked on it while teaching seventh grade at his former school as he did the theater professional's juggling act -- it became "In the Heights," the explosive musical that won four Tony Awards in 2008, including best musical, and whose tour version opens Tuesday at the Orpheum in Minneapolis.

"Heights" is a big-budget extravaganza that evokes "Fiddler on the Roof" in its broad arc, "West Side Story" in its Latin focus, and "Rent" in its contemporary feel.

The hip-hop-inflected show tells the story of a neighborhood, from a grandmother who longs to return to the Dominican Republic to the Stanford University freshman who is struggling to come up with the money to return to college for her sophomore year. It is possible for the would-be sophomore to fulfill her higher-education dreams if her parents sell the gypsy cab that provides the family's livelihood.

There is also a mystery about who bought a winning lottery ticket.

"What I like about it is that it speaks of a community," said Al Justiniano, artistic director of St. Paul-based Teatro del Pueblo. "I grew up in New York and had always heard stories about the history of Washington Heights -- how it was Jewish and Irish, then Puerto Rican and Dominican. You can get a nice sweep of a story."

Broadening narrative

Justiniano, whose company stages three works a year plus a political theater festival, said he welcomes the success of "Heights." The high-profile Broadway and touring versions provide a contemporary goal post for Teatro del Pueblo and other small troupes that are developing nationwide. For Justiniano, the show's setting helps to "broaden the Latino narrative."

"Look, I worked in Northern Ireland some years ago, and I went there with preconceived notions of what it was like," he said. "The people there corrected me, letting me know that my ideas were outdated by about 10 years. That's often the case with Latinos onstage."

The Census Bureau estimates that as of 2008, 47 million Latinos live in the continental United States, a figure that would be augmented by counting the 4 million residents of Puerto Rico. It is a diverse population that includes Mexicans and Dominicans, Cubans and Chileans, Peruvians and Panamanians. Although classed together for official purposes, Latinos, now the country's largest minority group, come in a mosaic of cultures and colors.

(In Minnesota, Hispanics are predicted to become the largest minority group within 10 years, according to the state demographer's office.)

Many Latinos are served by Spanish-language newspapers, radio and TV, which broadcasts nightly news, talent shows and telenovelas. Others are fully part of the American mainstream. In addition to Teatro del Pueblo, there are a number of ethnic-specific theater companies nationally that cater to Latino subsets.

And some mainstream companies, such as Mixed Blood in Minneapolis, do shows that successfully bring in very specific audiences.

"We call it hand-to-hand marketing," said artistic director Jack Reuler, whose company has done a bilingual (English and Spanish) show annually since 1989. "Traditional theater marketing says to get someone in the door, and get them to come back," Reuler said. "We put that on the back burner and ask, 'Who's this play for, and how do we find them?'"

Reuler said that up to a quarter of his audience can be Latino.

If mainstream theaters have difficulty reaching Latinos, it's partly because of the limitations of the repertoire. When it comes to musicals, for example, there are only a few that feature Latinos at their heart. The short list includes "West Side Story" and Paul Simon's and Derek Walcott's "The Capeman."

In fact, "Rent" was not the only show to inspire Miranda. After he saw one of the few performances of "Capeman" -- it lasted only nine performances after opening on Broadway in 1998 -- he became obsessed with it.

"In my brain, I was editing that show for two or three years, trying to fix it," he said. "Then I finally gave up. That was the show that told me that only you can write your dream show."

Miranda said that the failure of that show was instructive. "The troubling thing about it was that it's 40 years after 'West Side Story' and it's still set in the same place with gang members," said Miranda. "I know it was based on a real case; the Capeman's victims were protesting outside the theater. But there are so many other stories about Latinos that you can tell."

A bridge in cultural divide

When he started writing "Heights," the first thing he said was "I don't want to have a knife fight," he said. "Then [after the Broadway opening], the reviews come out in the English and Spanish press. The English reviewers felt that I've airbrushed life in the barrio. The Spanish press praised it, pointing to the exact same things that the English reviews used as faults, to say that we had accurately reflected our lives on the Broadway stage."

Miranda added, "Some people have asked, 'What about showing some crime? What about showing some drugs to up the stakes?' My reality wasn't crime and saga. I know more about drug dealing from the rap music that I listened to than the reality of it."

"Heights" has been drawing new audiences to mainstream playhouses, said Miranda, and getting mainstream houses to be interested in telling Latino stories. The show's success in the insular theater world could be a template for how to embrace the greater changes that are afoot in the nation's culture, from its stages to its kitchens. "Heights" won the best-musical Tony in a year when Stew's "Passing Strange," about a young black man's journey to Amsterdam and Berlin in order to find himself, won the Tony for best book of a musical.

"Traditionally, theater has not been reflective of the demographic dynamism of the country," said Miranda. "But it is changing, because it has to. I wrote the kind of show I wanted to be in, and I hope that it gives other people license to go out there and tell their own stories."

Rohan Preston • 612-673-4390