“You Feel Like Your Ancestors Are Watching,”: The Stars of In the Heights on the Groundbreaking Musical

[Editor's Note: This piece was initially published in 2020, before the film was postponed. In the Heights opens this week.]

IT’S A FREEZING DECEMBER NIGHT in New York City, but uptown, at the 809 Bar & Grill in the Inwood neighborhood of Manhattan, it feels like a Caribbean Christmas party. Servers pass trays with tiny bowls of asopao de pollo; at the bar you can order a glass of coquito, the traditional Puerto Rican Christmas drink made with coconut and rum; and Bad Bunny plays through the speakers. A collection of journalists, industry professionals, and friends of the hundreds-strong cast have gathered to watch the premiere of the In the Heights trailer. The crowd is buzzing, even before the cast appears. When the trailer finally plays, people begin cheering—the kind of cheer that says, I was there, or maybe even, That’s my best friend onscreen!

“You’re going to hear the word magic a lot today,” the director, Jon M. Chu, tells the group. “There’s no other word to express what we felt shooting this movie every day.”

“It was the best summer of our lives,” adds Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music and lyrics to accompany a book by Quiara Alegría Hudes.

A bit of backstory: In the Heights was first drafted by Miranda when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan University in 1999 and then staged by a-student-run theater group. After hearing about the production (and obtaining a CD of the music), Thomas Kail, a Wesleyan alumnus, approached Miranda with the idea of preparing it to be shown off-Broadway. For the next few years, Kail and Miranda worked on multiple drafts—eventually bringing in Hudes, a respected playwright introduced to Miranda in 2004, to work on the book, and an updated version opened off-Broadway in 2007. A year later the musical moved to Broadway, where it won four Tony Awards (including Best Musical), the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2009. It ran at the Richard Rodgers Theatre until 2011. “If you can imagine Do the Right Thing mellowing out, learning Spanish, and bursting frequently into song, you’d get near In the Heights,” began an early review in New York magazine. “This story could have been a simple screed against gentrification, but it’s not,” added the critic Jeremy McCarter, calling it “an unusually subtle treatment of the force that’s remaking 21st-century New York.” In the Heights was bought by the Weinstein Company in 2016, but Miranda and Hudes managed to regain the rights before the production company went into bankruptcy proceedings in March 2018.

“You’re going to hear the word magic a lot,” says director Jon M. Chu. “There’s no other word to express what we felt shooting this movie”

The musical tells the story of Usnavi (Miranda in the initial Broadway production), a young man who runs a bodega in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan but whose heart is in the Dominican Republic—and who dreams of returning to his family’s Caribbean home. Surrounding him is a chorus of local personalities, each resisting or becoming an agent of change. There is Nina, who makes it “out”—to Stanford University, where, unbeknownst to her proud father, she is struggling. Benny, one of the few non-Latino characters, works for the car-service company owned by Nina’s father while pining for his daughter. Then there’s Vanessa, Usnavi’s love interest, an aspiring designer who longs for a downtown apartment, away from the gossipy, sometimes claustrophobic barrio in which she’s grown up.

The actors playing these parts in the film don’t share these back-stories, but they all found something recognizable in their characters and the musical. Anthony Ramos, 28, who plays Usnavi, grew up in a Brooklyn housing project and was propelled toward a career in the arts by a teacher who spotted his raw potential. When he first saw In the Heights on Broadway as a student at the American Musical and Dramatic Academy, he felt his life experiences were being reflected back to him. “I know every person on this stage,” he remembers thinking at the time.

A few years later, Ramos was cast in the original dual roles of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton in Hamilton at the Public Theater. (His fiancée, Jasmine Cephas Jones, with whom he shares a Park Slope apartment, is also a Hamilton alum.) “I watched him die every night for a year, so I knew he was an extraordinary talent,” Miranda recalls over the phone. Ramos also played Usnavi in a Kennedy Center production in 2018, and that performance cemented Miranda’s confidence. “I wrote this part and I played it,” says Miranda, “but the clothes, the words, the music all fit this guy like I tailored it for him.” Ramos feels the same: “Every day I was telling my own story, like someone else wrote it for me.”

Like Ramos, Melissa Barrera, 29, who plays Vanessa, saw the musical when she was a student; she had moved to New York from Monterrey, Mexico, to study at NYU and sat in the audience “between 10 and 15 times,” she tells me over Skype from her home in Los Angeles. Every time a friend or family member would visit, she’d drag them to the show, and “every time that there was an open call, I would go and sing and hope that one day I would get a callback,” she says. “It never happened.” She left NYU after two years to return to Mexico for her television debut on the musical–reality TV show La Academia—a Big Brother meets American Idol concoction in which contestants lived in an isolated house and participated in weekly singing competitions. She didn’t win, but she did meet her husband, the singer Paco Zazueta, and after she got kicked off, she started working on telenovelas, eventually landing the starring role in Siempre Tuya Acapulco, which turned her into a household name in Latin America.

When Barrera finally got the call to audition for the film in 2017, she was in the middle of moving from Mexico to Los Angeles to begin filming the Starz show Vida, about two estranged Mexican-American sisters who return home to Los Angeles after the sudden death of their mother. On top of that, she was trying to get her visa sorted. “I was so unprepared,” she tells me. “I didn’t feel my best. My brain was all scattered.” In the midst of the Weinstein fallout, In the Heights was put on hold, and she took that time to prepare, taking voice lessons and honing her dancing skills. When, a few months later, Warner Bros. acquired the movie, she was called in to audition again—initially for the role of Nina, but she was asked to read for Vanessa at the last minute.“Everything works out as it’s supposed to,” she says.

It’s a few weeks after the gathering uptown, and the world beyond 809 Bar & Grill has now seen the trailer. Set to the title song—which Charles Isherwood called “the most galvanizing opening number in recent Broadway memory” in his New York Times review of the original production—the trailer has immediately become a bright spot of optimism and exuberance as 2019 grinds to a close. People have been posting videos of their reactions to Twitter and Instagram, and there are often tears involved.

In a midtown editing suite, I huddle next to Chu as he shows me a few not-quite-finished scenes of the movie, and it becomes clear that the earnest emotion with which the trailer was received has been part of the making of the film all along. “We cried literally every day,” says Chu (also the director of Crazy Rich Asians). “You talk to the neighborhood extras, and they’re like, ‘Yeah, the only thing that has ever shot here was Law & Order, and it was a crime scene.’ ” During “Breathe,” a song in which Nina struggles to admit that she is about to drop out of school, I feel—to my embarrassment—that my eyes are prickling, too. When the scene ends and the lights are turned back on, I realize that all the people in the tiny editing suite are sniffling. A box of tissues is passed around.

The next day, a quiet Saturday morning, I meet Leslie Grace, who plays Nina, at El Museo del Barrio in East Harlem. She’s a vision in baby blue, wearing a boatneck sweater and high-waisted linen trousers in the same soft hue. She greets me with a kiss on the cheek, and we walk through a retrospective of Cuban artist Zilia Sánchez called Soy Isla (I Am an Island), casually chatting until a children’s art class takes over the space and we relocate to the museum’s café. She has yet to see any scenes from the movie and immediately grills me about what I’ve seen, envious. I confess that her scene made me cry.

“I really felt like I was living Nina,” Grace remembers. The 25-year-old is the only performer coming to the project with no professional acting experience, although she’s an established musician who released her first record, of Christian music, at the age of 14 before pivoting to Latin pop. (She’s been nominated for Latin Grammys and Billboard Latin Music Awards.) “Nina’s the one that nobody ever worried about because she had straight A’s, was never in trouble,” she tells me. Born in the Bronx to Dominican parents, Grace was raised in Yonkers and then South Florida after her family moved there when she was 10, the youngest in a mixed family of seven kids (“Yeah, Brady Bunch family,” she says). Nina’s New York story is nonetheless familiar to Grace. Her mother once had a salon two blocks from where the film was shot. But she senses a larger resonance as well: “When some of your crazy dreams are becoming a reality, you see people in your family looking at you with a sense of hope. It’s amazing that you can be that. But it’s also a big responsibility.”

When I speak to Corey Hawkins—who plays Benny—on the phone from L.A., he sees it similarly: “We all have our different journeys. And all of those journeys have led us to this point together.” Hawkins, 31, grew up in Washington, D.C., the son of a police-officer single mother. He later studied at Juilliard after a brief stint at an L.A. arts school that proved too relaxed for his temperament. (“It really made me nervous when everybody’s so, ‘Oh, it’s all good. Everything’s great. Just take your time.’ No! I need to hustle.”) At Juilliard he overlapped with Adam Driver, Orange Is the New Black’s Samira Wiley (who lived down the street from him when he was a child), and Danielle Brooks (whom he describes as his sister). He also saw In the Heights while a student; it was the first Broadway musical he’d ever seen.

The film for him is about “empathy,” he says: “What is your tribe? What is home for you? And what does that mean? How does that reflect on the people that you come in contact with and love?” He’s excited about the film’s timing: “We made this film to come out right before one of the most important elections in modern history,” he says. “How great that this movie might actually impact an election, that it might actually get people out to go vote, even though it’s not saying, ‘Hey, go vote.’ It’s saying, ‘Hey, we are all human, and we’re all immigrants here. We’re all sort of trying to find out what home is.’ ” He adds, “And whose home is it?”

Despite any heavy implications weighing on the minds of the cast, In the Heights is an exuberant film, though the breezy buoyancy of the film’s musical numbers took work. “Panic attacks” are the first words that come out of Barrera’s mouth when she’s asked what it was like to learn the choreography. During their first rehearsal, the actors were thrown in with the professional dancers, and even Hawkins, who had legendary choreographer and dancer Debbie Allen for a mentor when he was growing up, struggled. “This was comedy,” Ramos remembers: “I go into rehearsal, and one of the dancers, she’s looking at me like, ‘My man, I’m going to need you to keep up because you’re making me look bad.’ ” He breaks out laughing.

In one particularly ebullient scene, a family celebration grew to include hundreds of people—not only the dancers and extras but neighborhood onlookers as well. “When we shot this, I would call, ‘Cut,’ and it would not cut,” Chu remembers. “It went on for 10 minutes. Lin was up on this fire escape, and the people were just chanting, ‘Lin, Lin, Lin, Lin, Lin, Lin.’ ”

“Nobody stopped that day. Everybody was so into it. It was such an emotional day,” Ramos remembers. “You feel like your ancestors are watching. This is for our ancestors’ ancestors.”

Originally Appeared on Vogue