It would be another 13 years before In the Heights made it from Broadway to Hollywood - and that transition, too, would involve multiple hurdles and setbacks. But it has ended with In the Heights’ imminent release in 2021, just as America begins to emerge from its long and painful quarantine. Suddenly all those setbacks have begun to look like serendipity. Only three words from the score of Miranda’s 1999 In the Heights remain in Chu’s electrifying 2021 film adaptation: the “en Washington Heights!” the cast sings in unison to close out the show’s opening number. The story, too, has been revamped: Though Benny and Nina still exist, albeit in heavily revised forms, Lincoln is gone. An arc involving a winning lottery ticket and a blackout provides the skeleton of the new plot, and there’s a heartbreaker of a death scene. The movie narrative is built around a character who barely featured in Miranda’s earliest college drafts: Usnavi the bodega owner, the role Miranda originated on Broadway, played in the film by Anthony Ramos in a star-making turn. Miranda himself is no longer the face of In the Heights (he has a sweet cameo in the film), but the ideas he began fiddling with at Wesleyan in 1999 will now be splashed onto larger-than-life movie screens across the country, poised to become the film of the summer. Here’s the 22-year story of how In the Heights got from there to here - and how it changed Broadway forever in the process. #MUSICAL INTERMISSION CROSSWORD SERIES#.
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