Thanks to the involvement of Lin-Manuel Miranda ’02 with the Posse Foundation, I was fortunate enough to get tickets to an advanced screening of “In The Heights” (2021). I’ve been a fan of Miranda since discovering the musical in the mid-2000s and have watched his career bloom almost like a proud parent. When I got the opportunity to watch an advanced screening, I was equally excited and apprehensive to find out whether the film version would feel like a let-down.

Adapting a musical to the screen is never easy. For one, there simply isn’t as much time in the average movie musical as there is in the average two-act stage play. Some songs and plotlines are bound to be cut, and attempting to cram everything in to avoid disappointing fans of the original work is a fool’s errand. Ultimately, “In The Heights” succeeds at its primary goal of maintaining the general spirit of the original show. Still, there are changes that, while perhaps unnoticeable to a casual viewer, feel disappointing and even politically problematic to those who know the original version.

For total newcomers, like my friend and fellow Posse Veteran Diego Olivieri ’24, the film hits as an entertaining spectacle and a touching homage to Latine culture in New York City. 

“I’ve never been that into musicals, and I’ve always been skeptical about stuff like ‘Hamilton’—incorporating rap into a musical,” Olivieri said. “I felt like it was kind of cringey. But I have a friend who performed in a Wesleyan production of ‘In The Heights’ and said it was great, so I thought I’d give it a shot. I really liked it. It warmed me up to musicals a little in general.”

Olivieri told me that, though his personal story does not perfectly align with the film, Usnavi and Sonny’s stories of making a home in the United States resonated with him. 

“I have definitely felt like Usnavi, like I wasn’t ‘Puerto Rican enough’ because I was living here in the United States, away from my culture,” Olivieri said. “I’ve had to learn over time that wherever I am, I can create a little Puerto Rico.”

As a college student at a University where he is in a cultural minority, Olivieri said that thankfully, he has not felt as out-of-place as Nina’s character does being a college student at Stanford. Still, Olivieri said he was familiar with this experience.

“I have cousins that I know have felt like that, the stress of always being representatives of their culture wherever they go,” Olivieri said. 

In terms of the production team behind the 2021 film, the crew assembled is an admirable one. Christopher Scott’s choreography is grand and spectacular. He and director Jon M. Chu make full use of the film medium to do things that would have been impossible on even the largest Broadway stage. One of the first lines of the film (also featured in the trailer) says that the streets in Usnavi’s neighborhood are made of music, and Chu makes good on this promise, using choreography and special effects to make the scenery literally come alive with song in a use of magical realism that also is a lovely homage to Latin American storytelling tradition. Screenwriter, original “In The Heights” book writer, and Pulitzer-Prize winning playwright Quiara Alegría Hudees also plays with flash-forwards and flashbacks in ways that were unexpected and moving.

The performances are all impressive, especially given the variety among the cast’s resumes. Some are seasoned Broadway professionals. Others are on-screen actors who can sing, but perhaps have little theatrical experience. Meanwhile, Leslie Grace is a singer by trade, and a complete acting newcomer who brings impressive nuance to the role of Nina. All have been brilliantly cast and bring incredible life to their roles, which have been tailored to bring out their strengths: nobody seems like they have been given more than they can handle, and neither the theatre nor film actors feel out-of-place, which is impressive for a movie musical. And the inclusion of Olga Merediz as Abuela Claudia, who also originated the role in the musical, is delightful for long-time fans of the musical—especially given her role as the matriarch of the story.

“That idea of the matriarch of a Latin American community, that hit close to home,” Olivieri said. “And when they’re all sitting together playing bingo, it reminded me of the times I spent with my abuelos playing dominoes.”

But for longtime fans of the musical, like myself, there are some omissions that change the tone of the musical in a way that feels like a letdown for a 2021 audience.

Spoiler warning: The review below this line contains plot spoilers for both the original musical and the film adaptation.

For the most part, the film makes choices that streamline the plot while still maintaining the spirit of the original story. Most of the characters’ major storylines are just slightly simpler versions of those in the stage musical. Meanwhile, a few have been updated in smart ways that bring the story into the 2020s—Sonny, for example, is revealed to be a “DREAMer,” an undocumented immigrant who was brought to the United States as a child. This is a law that did not exist when the musical first premiered on Broadway in 2008. But in 2021, when the Obama-era law is under attack, and it feels like a necessary addition that fits well into the overall narrative.

However, other missing parts of the story feel much more conspicuous. Some characters, like Nina’s mother, have been scrapped from the story altogether; this deprives the audience of one of the most entertaining songs in the musical, “Enough.” Some of the musical’s most emotionally resonant songs, like “Inútil” and “Everything I Know,” which flesh out the side characters’ stories, are also missing. Meanwhile, songs like “Tell Me Something I Don’t Know” and “The Club,” which felt like padding in the musical, are left in place despite how little they serve the narrator. This group includes “Benny’s Dispatch,” which is perhaps the most skippable song in the original musical. And there are multiple scenes featuring a pretty pointless ice cream versus piragua standoff between Miranda and original musical cast member Christopher Jackson. While this is some charming comic relief and a fun cameo, the film would have felt fuller if it had focused on developing these characters rather than spreading itself so thinly among the ensemble.

This is all a bit of a letdown, but there are also omissions and leave-ins that feel downright problematic. Especially glaring is the relative density of the lines of female characters, which has always irked me about the musical. At several points, the male characters spit bars written with “Hamilton”-level intricacy and density—complex internal rhymes and lyrical ingenuity that show off Miranda’s writing skill. Meanwhile, the women are left saying nothing of value, and sometimes literally just repeat the men’s lyrics. Miranda made significant, though still arguably inadequate, strides with the quality of writing for his female characters with “Hamilton,” so I hoped that this progress might carry over into this film adaptation that was so clearly trying to modernize. But unfortunately, no such luck.

Not only does the film miss out on some opportunities to update, it actively takes away the significance of some female characters. Nina’s delightful and strong-willed mother is killed off for no discernible reason, and Abuela Claudia’s character falls flat to the point where her death feels emotionally hollow compared to the musical. “Alabanza,” a song mourning Abuela Claudia, never fails to make me cry when it pops up on shuffle, but in the film I felt almost nothing for Abuela’s death.

Vanessa (played by Melissa Berrera) is by far the most watered-down character in the film version. She’s reduced to what I call “Amy Pond Syndrome” (a reference to the “Doctor Who” character played by Karen Gillan) in which a female character’s only two personality traits are “feisty” and “hot,” though Vanessa also has some vague “artist” flavor thrown in that feels mainly as a plot device to inspire the male characters. Vanessa essentially exists in the film only to to be the object of Usnavi’s affections and to look sexy—and the camerawork displays a definite male gaze—which is a disappointing choice given how much Miranda has benefited from his feminist image.

Overall, the most glaring plot difference is that money plays a much less central role in the film’s story than in the musical. In the original, much of the plot centers around the drama that ensues after word spreads that an unknown resident of the neighborhood has won $96,000 in the lottery. Everybody in the neighborhood is in a financial position where that amount of money would be life-changing.

However, in the film adaptation, the lottery ticket is just a footnote; the famous song “96,000” is one of the most elaborately produced numbers in the film, but after that, the lottery ticket is quickly forgotten until it is brought out as a surprise footnote at the end. Rather than a pipe dream that he can finally fund using his lottery winnings, as in the musical, the film implies that Usnavi’s plans to move back to the Dominican Republic were already fully-funded, and that the lottery winnings are just a kind surprise that Abuela Claudia leaves behind for him.

Nina’s storyline notably changes as well. In the musical, she is forced to drop out of Stanford because she has to work two jobs in order to pay tuition, her GPA suffers, and she loses her scholarship. While the film recognizes the steep cost of tuition, Nina instead chooses to drop out because of the microaggressions she is facing at school. She acknowledges the steep cost, but it is not her primary concern.

Finally, the film’s glossing over of the consequences of the city-wide blackout is uncomfortable. In the original, a character dies because of the stress and heat caused by the blackout, and while the film stops to mourn her, no mention is made of the institutional problems that allow 700 people to die every year from heat in the United States—a number that is only rising due to climate change. In fact, the writers left in a line that partially blames Abuela’s death on her own habit of skipping her medication. The blackout itself is also treated more like an excuse for a vacation than the emergency it actually would be in real life.

Concerns over possible looting and financial consequences from closing down businesses for several days that were present in the musical are brushed aside. So Daniela’s pep talk encouraging the neighborhood to shake off their worries (“Since when are Latin people scared of heat?”) falls quite flat, when characters have essentially been treating the blackout as trivial all along. 

And while the characters talk about the changes going through the neighborhood and being priced out of the neighborhood, we never actually see this happening. All of this is also taking place in large apartments that feel about as unrealistic as those featured in Manhattan-based sitcoms like “Friends” or “How I Met Your Mother.” The decentering of money gives the film a definite tone shift in that it instead places the characters’ interpersonal and emotional struggles at the heart of the film. 

This provides a more optimistic view and gives the characters much more autonomy; they spend more time solving their own problems and less time waiting around to win the lottery. But it also gives the film a bit of a naive, liberal feeling that will likely fall flat for many more radical activists. It feels like the film is being dishonest in its effort to brush off the very real problems of wealth inequality and gentrification that are plaguing New York City’s low-income neighborhoods.

The blandness with which politics is addressed is noteworthy in other places as well. Much emphasis is placed on “fighting the good fight”—Nina decides to stick it out in a place she feels unwelcome so she can change the system from within. Usnavi spends his entire lottery winnings on lawyers to help Sonny get his green card, which the film acknowledges is a risky gambit—but this feels more like an inspiring challenge than a very dangerous process that could very well end with Sonny getting deported. Police officers are present at a protest, and they stand politely in the background, which is a choice that in 2021 cannot be taken for granted. 

Overall, while the film casually acknowledges that the system is broken, it has a definite “Lean In” message that many to the left of Miranda—including many students at the very university where he wrote the musical—will probably take issue with. Unfortunately, Chu’s film missed an opportunity to transform a beautiful story into something more meaningful and relevant to a contemporary audience, and it still feels decidedly like a relic of the past.

 

Kay Perkins can be reached at kperkins@wesleyan.edu.