Imagine this: A full-fledged Broadway musical that is NOT adapted from a movie and does NOT involve cartoon characters, witches, animals or even legendary rock stars. Yes, a genuine Broadway musical (and a multiple Tony Award-winner at that), that bursts with heart, moves like a merengue-driven dream on a hot summer’s night, and lives and breathes through its affectionately drawn multigenerational story about ordinary people.
That those people just happen to be Latino immigrant strivers who live and work on an uptown Manhattan street — a place where the apartments are walkups with fire escapes, the storefronts are covered with grates and graffiti, the power is known to fail during heat waves, and the map of the world can look a whole lot like the subway map — makes it even richer.
The show, by the way is “In the Heights.” And though the first-rate national touring company production that opened Tuesday night at the Cadillac Palace Theatre will be in town only until Jan. 3, by all rights it should run here for a year. This is a sentimental “West Side Story” for the “ought” generation, and watching it I could only think: I wish Leonard Bernstein were still around to pat the musical’s still twentysomething creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, on the back and proclaim him his musical heir.
At its center is Usnavi (Kyle Beltran, a boyish, reed-thin, sweet spirited actor who makes the role created by the charismatic Miranda very much his own). Usnavi’s Dominican parents are dead, and he now runs their little corner bodega. But gentrification is on its way, the deli’s freezer is on the blink, and he can only pine for Vanessa (the very natural Yvette Gonzalez-Nacer), who is desperate to move downtown and be part of a more fashionable neighborhood.
I unabashedly confess: Despite decades spent in Chicago, “In the Heights” made me feel painfully homesick for my own roots in Nueva York.
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