{"id":16227,"date":"2017-10-04T12:43:34","date_gmt":"2017-10-04T17:43:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/?p=16227"},"modified":"2017-10-04T12:43:34","modified_gmt":"2017-10-04T17:43:34","slug":"in-the-heights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/tartan-news\/2017\/10\/04\/in-the-heights\/","title":{"rendered":"In the Heights"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Beginning this week, the Victoria Theatre Association will be holding a performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s \u201cIn The Heights\u201d at the Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">\u201cIn The Heights\u201d is a musical focusing on the vibrant community of Washington Heights, New York. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">From the Victoria Theatre\u2019s page description for the musical, Washington Heights is \u201ca 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. It\u2019s a community on the brink of change, full of hopes, dreams and pressures, where the biggest struggles can be deciding which traditions to take with you and which ones you leave behind.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The musical has a cast of less than 15 named characters, focusing on weaving a story about the struggles, hopes, and dreams of the few that are presented with a life story in \u201cIn the Heights\u201d. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The creator himself, Lin-Manuel Miranda, played one of the leading rules as Usnavi de la Vega, who is the owner of the aforementioned bodega. A bodega is a what a convenience store such as 7\/11 would be called in a hispanic setting.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\"> Working with him is his younger cousin Sonny, the jokester of the barrio with a thoughtful side that yearns for social justice. Usnavi and Sonny have a friend named Benny, the only person living in the community that doesn\u2019t speak Spanish who dreams of opening his own business someday. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Benny works for the father of his crush, Nina Rosario, known as the first person in her family (and in the barrio in general) as \u201cthe one who made it out\u201d. Vanessa is seen as the most beautiful woman in the barrio and has all eyes on her for it with her one dream being to move downtown and away from her alcoholic mother as soon as possible. Taking care of Usnavi is \u201cAbuela\u201d Claudia, the matriarch of the barrio that everyone loves and thinks of as their own grandmother despite no actual blood relation with her. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The earliest draft of \u201cIn The Heights\u201d was written in 1999 during Miranda\u2019s sophomore year of college. The show was accepted by Wesleyan University&#8217;s student theater company Second Stage and once that was done, Miranda added more elements such as freestyle rap to the production to come closer to what the audience knows today. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The play ran for three days which resulted in Miranda being approached by several people (including Thomas Kail, who also directed Miranda\u2019s future musical <\/span><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">Hamilton<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">) in regards to expanding \u201cIn The Heights\u201d into a musical to be performed on Broadway.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">During its run, the musical was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four in 2008: Best Musical, Best Original Score, Best Choreography, and Best Orchestrations. \u201cIn The Heights\u201d was also awarded the Grammy for Best Musical Show Album the same year. <\/span><\/p>\n<p><span style=\"font-weight: 400;\">The show itself runs for two hours with a 20 minute intermission between acts. The showtimes are Tuesday &#8211; Friday at 8 PM, Saturday at 2 PM and 8 PM, and Sunday at 2 PM and 7:30 PM during the week of Oct. 3 to Oct. 8.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Erika Brandenburg<\/strong><br \/>\n<em>Reporter<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Beginning this week, the Victoria Theatre Association will be holding a performance of Lin-Manuel Miranda\u2019s \u201cIn The Heights\u201d at the Schuster Performing Arts Center in Dayton. \u201cIn The Heights\u201d is a musical focusing on the vibrant community of Washington Heights, New York. From the Victoria Theatre\u2019s page description for the musical, Washington Heights is \u201ca [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":10416,"featured_media":16230,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[2104,3,2160],"tags":[2162,2100,2161,2163],"class_list":["post-16227","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","category-tartan-news","category-theatre","tag-broadway","tag-erika-brandenburg","tag-in-the-heights","tag-lin-manuel-miranda"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"cc_featured_image_caption":{"caption_text":false,"source_text":false,"source_url":false},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/10\/Screen-Shot-2017-10-04-at-1.39.19-PM.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5s3vR-4dJ","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/10416"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16227"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16229,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16227\/revisions\/16229"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16230"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16227"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16227"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sinclairclarion.com\/home\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16227"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}