In the Heights: Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Storytelling Graces Shine

In April of 2015, Peggy Noonan wrote a glowing column about an off-Broadway musical. My mom read it and, as she had done with countless columns in my college years, emailed it to my brothers and me. Fond of musical theater but not someone who, say, watched the Tonys, I’d never heard of it. Friends of mine who do watch the Tonys (which is probably putting it lightly—singing in a men’s choir at an affluent college had me in close contact with some big ol’ musical theater fans) had, though, and had good things to say. By fall, the show was on Broadway and was becoming something of a sensation, and with my winter break newly open thanks to my departure from an a cappella group that toured after Christmas, I suggested to my mom that we go to New York and see the show together.

This wasn’t an entirely audacious suggestion. My mother had taken each of my brothers on a trip to New York on a break during their own college years. However, prices were rising. The musical was, again, becoming something of a sensation. Nevertheless, my dad bought the tickets, and if memory serves me correctly, he bought them at a good time, because 60 Minutes did a feature on the musical a few weeks later and the step into the mainstream was complete. The show was a big deal. A big, big deal.

I don’t think of myself as someone often ahead on the trends, and I don’t think of my mom as someone often ahead on the trends, and apologies to Peggy Noonan but I don’t think of Peggy Noonan as someone often ahead on the trends. But in this instance, we pulled it off, and so it was that in early January of 2016, my mother and I walked into the Richard Rodgers Theatre to see the original cast perform Hamilton, live and in person.

It was, of course, incredible, and getting to see the show with my mother—who took our family to Monticello when I was six and played the Wicked and Pippin soundtracks on two-hour rides home from travel baseball games when I was sixteen—was a divine kindness. Plenty of people more qualified than I have written their glowing praise of the thing, and I’d imagine many of the folk who read this website have a familiarity of their own with it, so I’ll spare you my thoughts on the now-six-year-old masterpiece except to say that among so many things, Hamilton is an impressive work of storytelling. Lin-Manuel Miranda, among so many things, is an impressive storyteller.

I thought about that on Thursday night walking out of In the Heights with my wife. The moon was big and yellow and hidden low behind the housetops of the neighborhood around the theater, and we drove around the block to get a clear view of it and we talked about Miranda and his talent for spinning a narrative.

I’m aware of the controversy that’s touched In the Heights, and I’m not in favor of dismissing it or ignoring it, and I don’t think myself qualified to talk on it in any sort of depth but here’s a column about it from Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. With the controversy recognized, though…it’s another deftly told story.

I’ve never seen or listened to In the Heights in its stage version, so what follows are impressions purely from the film. With that, too, recognized…It’s a different thing from Hamilton. It’s slower. It takes longer for the foundation to be laid. While Hamilton’s opening number famously “condensed the first twenty years of (Alexander) Hamilton’s life into four minutes,” In the Heights took what felt like half the movie to get done introducing everyone and was still unveiling core information about primary characters with just a few numbers left to perform. While Hamilton was a clear departure from the observation that musicals often stop the story to sing a song, moving forward rapidly and powerfully and covering dozens of years in just a few hours, In the Heights covers just a summer, and really just ten days or so of that summer, seven or eight first and then two or three later. Part of this pace is the focus on dance in In the Heights. Dance is core to the work. But part of it is the nature of the story. Hamilton was a biography. In the Heights is a character study of a neighborhood, horizontal in time rather than vertical, and develops its characters not by following them forward but by drilling deeper within them.

This is where the deftness is displayed. It’s not the breakneck lyricism of Miranda’s second major work. It’s the quiet touches, the snap realizations, the quiet hints dropped along the way. The lyricism is wonderful, and the music is wonderful, and the dancing is breathtaking, at least for someone with little knowledge of dance. But the storytelling is, for me at least, what makes the show, and this glimpse into Miranda’s artistic past—if the movie is indicative of the original show and again, I’ve yet to see the original show—highlights not just Miranda’s skill, but his versatility. The same man who can tell perhaps the most artistically impressive version of America’s founding story is also capable of bringing seven or eight protagonists into an audience’s heart in a still life that is, like the neighborhood it depicts, not at all still.