The Tony award-winning best musical “In The Heights” made its way to Leon County Civic Center Monday night.
Tallahassee was the first stop on the production’s “Non-Equity” tour. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Latin-American opus “In the Heights” premiered on Broadway in 2008.
The show won four of its 13 Tony nominations, a Grammy and a nomination for the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
The musical reflects upon the importance of home, family, finding where you belong and ordinary days in the lives of characters of Puerto Rican, Cuban and Dominican descent.
Stacey Williams, a second-year theatre student from Jacksonville, said she was really impressed with the performance.
“I stayed excited from the beginning of the performance to the end,” said Williams. “I really felt like I was in another city.”
The set of the musical was outstanding and gave the impression that you were really in a community in Manhattan’s Washington Heights—which was the setting for the play.
Washington Heights is known to be a place where the coffee from the corner bodega is light and sweet, the windows are always open and the breeze carries the rhythm of three generations of music.
The community also reflects upon the bring of change, dreams and pressures, full of hopes, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions you choose to take with you and which ones you decide to leave behind.
Broadway has brought a new array of music to their audience in this play.
The music consists of hip-hop, salsa and merengue. The play also has a soundtrack.
“I’ve listened to the soundtrack who knows how many times, but this was my first time seeing it live,” Caitlin Barry, a Tallahassee resident, said. “The whole thing was amazing.”
In the Heights is a book as well.
The play was diverse and reached out to not only the younger generation, but old as well. It had young and old viewers on the edge of their seats wanting more, as the musical went from one scene to the next.
The cast’s costumes were everyday street wear, and choreography implementing hip-hop dance styles like popping and locking with traditional ballet and modern.
“I’m a huge fan of musical theatre in general, but this one really speaks to me as a musician— it’s got rhythm and heart and a really positive message about following your dreams and success being about more than money and fame,”
Heather Austin, a Tallahassee resident, said. “It’s great to see Broadway becoming more accessible to audiences outside New York City.”
For more information about the international tour of “In the Heights” visit www.intheheightsthemusical.com.