In The Heights, West Side Story & Dear Evan Hansen herald the triumphant return of movie musicals
Spielberg’s take on West Side Story is the latest in a glut of all-singing, all-dancing extravaganzas getting the Hollywood treatment this year.
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.
Then comes the melody and then – because this is a Lin Manuel Miranda joint – comes a rap. “Lights up on Washington Heights, up at the break of day,” trills Usnavi, a bodega owner who dreams of returning to his home country of the Dominican Republic, played originally on stage by Miranda and here, on screen, in this heart-swelling, joy-bringing, life-affirming film adaptation by Anthony Ramos, an actor so charismatic his smile could power the entire city. “He is such a 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. In The Heights is two-and-a-half hours of magic; it is, director Jon M. Chu has said, “a vaccine for your soul”.
Filmed on the actual blocks of Washington Heights, at its bodegas and salsa clubs and parks and swimming pools, this movie musical adaptation feels like the walls of the theatre have come down and the production is spilling onto the streets. “Lin literally sat on this block when he wrote these songs, and yet it’s never been performed there,” Chu says. It’s why he felt so strongly that the movie had to be filmed on location, even though it meant shutting down one of the area’s busiest intersections to shoot that sprawling opening sequence. “Let’s bring the audience to the actual streets,” explains Chu. Though the plot hasn’t changed significantly in this adaptation, each character somehow feels larger on the big screen. Usnavi is determined to return to his parents’ country, though whenever he’s around Vanessa (Barrera) there’s this nagging sense that he’s exactly where he is meant to be. Nina (Leslie Grace) has made it to Stanford on the back of a crippling mortgage taken out by her father, but she feels isolated in the corridors of her college. Benny (Corey Hawkins), her adorable ex-boyfriend, has aspirations to start his own company and become a man worthy of his first love.
In The Heights is a movie about dreams, or sueñitos, as Usnavi says in the film. It’s this subject matter that connected Barrera to her character; she, too, left her home town in Mexico in pursuit of something more. Sometimes, Barrera explains, “we chase our dreams and our dreams take us far away”. And sometimes, we realise that “it’s okay to stay where you are, and find happiness there, and allow yourself to open your eyes to the love of your community,” she adds – a lesson that is learnt in the movie through a few all-singing, all-dancing numbers. There is no big, bad villain in In The Heights – if there is one, it’s gentrification. Or men who can’t get their act together to just ask the damn girl out. What In The Heights is, in essence, is a movie musical in the truest sense of the genre: a story about those emotions so feverish and fizzy and electric that they can only be told through song.
“Sometimes words aren’t enough,” explains Chu. “There’s a language break, and only melodies can help bridge some of that gap … When a movie can’t show how it feels to be lonely, a melody can, a move can.” In The Heights is a throwback to the genre’s heyday in Hollywood, when the movie musical ruled the box office, collected Oscars like Miranda collects Tonys, and made stars of young women from small towns with names like Judy Garland and Julie Andrews.
Supersized and loud, with dance sequences that could take your breath away, a movie musical was designed to make audiences feel brand new. They had razzle dazzle, glamour, antics and tap shoes. They were also long, which In The Heights unashamedly is, too. Add in a few more numbers and it would need an intermission, just like The Sound Of Music. What’s not to love? But there was a period when the movie musical went out of favour. Because of their heightened executions and penchant for jazz hands, they gained a reputation for being cheesy. It doesn’t help that the most recent blockbuster movie musicals were the calamitous adaptations of Cats and The Prom, either.
“Cinema has always had something against sentimentality. Musicals are viewed as saccharine or unartistic because the worlds they create aren’t realistic,” explains Alex Caress, one half of the movie musical podcast The Hills Are Alive. “But frankly, that’s the point.” He’s right: musicals are cheesy. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Caress’s co-host Kelsey Jayne believes that we’re living through a second golden age of the movie musical, as heralded by the recent critical and box-office success of films such as La La Land and A Star Is Born. This year alone, the genre is set to dominate cinemas.
Alongside In The Heights, there will be adaptations of Broadway and West End hits including Dear Evan Hansen, Everybody’s Talking About Jamie and Cyrano, as well as Cinderella, starring Billy Porter and Camila Cabello in July and the Steven Spielberg-directed West Side Story just in time for Christmas. On Netflix later this year comes Tick Tick … Boom!, Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut. And opening the Cannes Film Festival is Annette, the original French movie musical starring Marion Cotillard and, um, Adam Driver. An infinitely meme-able trailer has already broken the internet. The movie musical is back with a vengeance. High and low, arch and cheesy, casual and exquisite. Partly, this pop-culture trend stems, as with most things these days, from the pandemic, which dimmed the lights on Broadway and the West End for the better part of last year.
With two of the biggest live-theatre destinations going dark, the movies became the place where the genre could thrive. “I think everybody needs a little bit of an escape, and some relief, after the year that we’ve had,” muses Leslie Grace, who plays Nina in In The Heights. “I cannot wait! We’ve got so much coming, and I think it’s going to all happen at just the right time, when everybody needs it.” Though, if we’re being pedantic, several of these adaptations were in the works before the pandemic uprooted everything.
What Covid has done, however, is prove the hunger from audiences for movie musicals, after a year of no musicals at all. If you are one of the 11 million people who watched the trailer for In The Heights – or one of the 11 people who have watched it a million times – then you understand. Dear Evan Hansen, an adaptation of the Tony Award-winning production that sent Ben Platt’s star ascendant, was filmed entirely during Covid lockdowns and is slated for release in September. The themes of Dear Evan Hansen – identity, anxiety, connection – are made for song. These are soulful and intimate subjects, the kind of things that Chu believes can’t be constrained by mere words.
It’s the same with In The Heights, which deals in community, loss and finding your place, with the songs some of the most personal tunes that Miranda – whom Chu believes is “one of our greatest lyricists”, – has ever written. If you liked the mind-bending ferocity of Hamilton, you’ll love the playful spirit of In The Heights, which veers between sassy diva anthems such as No Me Diga to the galvanising 96,000, the production’s blow-out number in which Usnavi discovers that he has sold a winning lottery ticket, filmed by Chu at a local swimming pool in a no-holds-barred homage to the campy, over-the-top musical stylings of choreographer Busby Berkeley, the man who crafted the numbers in 42nd Street. Now that you need to see on the big screen.
“There’s a sense of community that you don’t have for a movie like this unless you can feel people crying in a row in front of you, laughing in the row behind you and dancing in the aisles,” Grace enthuses. “This is that type of movie.” Hamilton is Miranda’s magnum opus, but In The Heights is his heart, a tale of the children of immigrants wrestling with the legacy of their parents’ aspirations. Barrera saw the original stage musical 15 times on Broadway, saving up her pennies and weeping silently in her seat every time. “Being Latina and watching that show and seeing people speaking Spanish – people that looked like me and sounded like me – was a turning point in my life,” she says. “Seeing In The Heights was like a sign from the universe that there were jobs and opportunities for me.”
She auditioned to be part of the musical several times but never made the cut; in a twist of fate, she is now the lead actress in Chu’s adaptation. “I hope that’s what the movie does for people that watch it,” she continues. “That ray of hope … to be proud of where you come from, and where you’re going. And this idea that everyone has the ability to achieve their dreams. And every dream is valuable.”
In The Heights was made over a few hot, sweaty months in New York – “an amazing, unforgettable summer,” enthuses Barrera. Chu says that there wasn’t a day on set when he didn’t cry; in true testament to how much this movie means to him, he named his baby son, born in the middle of production, Jonathan Heights. “I was always worried … I never knew if the camera could capture what we were feeling,” Chu admits. There was one day, a 15-hour hard slog in the claustrophobic, spicy humidity of a New York summer, when 200 extras and the core cast of Ramos, Barrera, Grace and Hawkins were filming the Carnival scene.
It’s a pivotal moment in the musical, where the residents of the block resolve to celebrate their heritage in a rousing number that takes place in the backstreets of the barrio. “Before we started shooting, it was just an alleyway,” recalls Grace. “And then we filled it up with all of our pride.” Adds Chu: “We shot it on one day, and everybody’s dancing, and I called cut. Nobody stops. Everybody’s jumping up and down with their flags.” The scene concluded with everyone chanting ‘New York’ and ‘Lin’, over and over again, as the sun went down on another day in the Heights. “We were all bawling by the end,” recalls Grace.
This is the power of the movie musical: to give voice to our biggest emotions, to share our hopes and dreams as loudly – and as noisily – as possible, to thread connections between people and their communities across the aisles of a cinema. Musicals are hectic and thrilling and brilliant and are made for the big screen, preferably with an enormous bucket of popcorn and a soft drink the size of a small child. Sink into that plush velvet seat and wait for the beat to kick in, for that melody to leap into action, and for the orchestra to build and build and build until everything bursts open and you realise, oh, this is where the light is kept.
In The Heights is in cinemas June 24. Cinderella is in cinemas July 15. Dear Evan Hansen is in cinemas September 23. West Side Story is in cinemas December 9.
This story appears in the June issue of Vogue Australia, on sale now.
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