IN THE HEIGHTS (Off-Broadway) Encores! at NYCC - previews & reviews — Page 3

starcatchers said: "
I’ve definitely heard better vocals out of her, but she’s such a beautiful actor that I kind of didn’t care. I also think she reads a bit young (she’s the perfect age for it, but she looks a fair bit younger than she is IMO)

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Claudia is supposed to be late 60s/early 70s. Natalie is like 57. Closer in age than Olga Merediz's original run, but I still wouldn't say age/appearance appropriate for the role. That was always a criticism back in the run despite her performance. I think its also a matter of styling.

CULTURE SAUCE - mixed / negative - Enjoys the score and voices - not the direction, choreography or production.

‘In the Heights’ speaks to a new generation in a gorgeously sung Encores! revival (Off Broadway review)

https://culturesauce.com/in-the-heights-encores-off-broadway-review/


★★★☆☆

That spirit of inclusion and ambition pervades David Mendizábal’s beautifully sung revival, which is running for three weeks at New York City Center as part of the Encores! program. As in the original Off Broadway and Broadway productions, which introduced us to future stars like Christopher Jackson, Karen Olivo, and Robin de Jesús (in addition to Miranda himself), this cast is bursting with talent who will be new to even avid theater fans.

Quiara Alegría Hudes’s book remains an overstuffed empanada of melodrama, with multiple subplots involving a dozen different characters. But it works, mostly, in part because the stories have a timeless quality that still speak to the modern moment. A common theme is the conflicting feelings immigrants have about the communities where they started, the desire to preserve that sense of bonding but also to move on, and hopefully up, to more secure financial and personal futures elsewhere.

Perhaps because of the large cast and the compressed rehearsal time for an Encores! show, Mendizábal’s staging can be awkward, with actors going up and down the stairs seemingly at random to the risers where the 13-member band performs. The blackout sequence at the end of Act 1 — with its resonant lyrical pun about the community’s “powerless” state — is a confusing dramatic dud that’s lifted only by the striking re-creation of July 4th fireworks by lighting designer Justin Townsend on Riw Rakkulchon’s minimal set.

Mayte Natalio’s choreography, full of unison salsa moves and kickline-like arrangements of the ensemble, doesn’t always provide the energy and visual flair that would lift the group numbers into the stratosphere. And while New York City Center is notorious for its acoustic challenges, Alex Neumann’s sound design could do more to rein in the instrumentals so that Miranda’s lyrics can actually be heard.

Still, it’s a pleasure to hear this Tony-winning score again, and to see a new generation of performers bringing their distinctive stamp to it. (And a new generation of theatergoers embracing it so enthusiastically as well.) It’s apt that Martinez waits until the curtain call to put on an ivy cap like the one Miranda famously wore as Usnavi. This is a revival that tips its hat to its roots but strives to forge its own path. In that respect, though, it only partially succeeds. ★★★☆☆

Updated On: 10/31/26 at 06:44 PM

VULTURE - MIXED

In the Heights Comes Back With Its Head in the Clouds

https://www.vulture.com/article/theater-review-in-the-heights-musical-encores-city-center-miranda-hudes.html

Offstage, however, In the Heights’s hopefulness can now look more head-in-the-clouds. Director David Mendizábal, of the heavily Miranda-influenced Mexodus keeps In the Heights locked in its original era — Graffiti Pete is in the middle of tagging Usnavi’s bodega with an “’08” when the show opens — and you’ll keep thinking about the nation’s authoritarian turn against Miranda’s immigrant heroes in the decades since, even if no one mentions ICE or, pointedly, Donald Trump. A lyric in “96,000,” in keeping with the film and other post-2016 productions. has Benny dream about being on the links with “Tiger Woods as my caddy.” The swap made my audience, a group clearly familiar with the original, cheer. This is a production that gets applause for what it doesn’t say.

Matte Martinez, the newest Usnavi, holds down the fort with competence and a bit of wryness. He’s almost too agile (the man once played Michael Jackson) to be convincingly awkward at the club, but he builds in a world-weariness to accommodate for it, and he’s got an upbeat charm alongside Aaron James McKenzie, who makes for an especially lovesick Benny. I discovered a soft spot for his slow-burn “When the Sun Goes Down” duet with Nina. He and Jaci Calderon render it with the warmth of hot concrete, still tender to the touch on a summer evening. Calderon reaches a bit to find a through-line in Nina — not her fault; In the Heights’s women are a little too perfect to make human — but she’s right to look for the sadness and anger beneath her Stanford near-dropout’s façade of achievement. And Ashley De La Rosa plays Vanessa, the salon employee who longs for West 4th Street, with a swagger that comes from her own precarity. In the Heights is flecked with a few heavy hitters in supporting roles: Linedy Genado, once a Bad Cinderella, lays down the law with her acrylics as the salon doyenne Daniela, and Natalie Venetia Belcon, a Tony winner for Buena Vista Social Club, will blow out your eardrums and heart as Abuela Claudia. But the great scene-stealer here is Ishmael Gonzalez, a young actor who had a breakout moment in Spread and is deploying killer comedic timing as Usnavi’s wisecracking, socially conscious compatriot, Sonny. Gonzalez is so delightfully alive in all their choices, landing jokes with precise head tilts and body rolls, that you’ll start to wonder why the musical isn’t just about Sonny trying to organize the underage cousins of bodega workers everywhere.

Instead, what is the plot of In the Heights anyway? For all Miranda’s score’s gusto, Hudes’s book has a real stop-and-start pacing — if only someone could get on the taxi-dispatch line to help it navigate. Though no one is carrying Encores! binders around, and Mayte Natalio’s free-flowing choreography does sand off some edges, In the Heights fits well into a near-concert format because it’s structured more like a showcase (a relic, perhaps, of its origins as a college project of Miranda’s) instead of a straightforward narrative. It launches with a fusillade of “I Want” songs, and then wanders into conflict after the fact. A song, “96,000,” that feels like it should be a great Act One finale comes too early. A grounding question — Will Usnavi leave Washington Heights or stay? — arrives incredibly late. I respect the archival impulse to put the show back onstage for our examination without much meddling, though you do feel like the film had the right choice of moving Abuela’s “Paciencia Y Fe” (thundering, in Belcon’s performance) back after the blackout to better order the emotional beats of the the lottery story line. Also, should a musical’s story depend so much on luck?

Because of that narrative disunity, the great challenge in staging In the Heights lies in its second act. As the characters sort through the aftermath of the blackout, the musical has to sort through a spreadsheet’s worth of questions, like who’s going to get those lottery winnings and in what proportion. (The show becomes oddly Ibsen-esque in its dependence on signatures and money transfers.) The act’s big number, Daniel’s rousing “Carnaval del Barrio,” much like its clear inspiration, “Too Darn Hot,” makes little logical sense — everyone’s already sweating, and the solution is todance? — but it drives home all the show’s thematic interests. The characters are fed up with New York and thinking about the lives they left to come here, but ultimately they’re deciding they want to stick it out together, like Daniela’s lieutenant, Carla, who calls herself “a Chile-Domini-curican, but I always say I’m from Queens.” The ensemble members bring out flags from their home Latin American countries and territories as they dance — here, Mendizábal and Natalio practically coat the stage in vexillology, an echo of Bad Bunny's Super Bowl halftime show. Those flags stick around on the set, hanging under the GWB, a reminder of what was left behind on the way to the Heights. Or rather, what was brought here to stay. Around that time, you might notice the anchor to all that upward-tilting lyricism: The word home, repeated 82 times in the script, sometimes as an arcing double syllable, sometimes as a punctuation mark. In the thrilling last stretch of the musical's finale. Miranda deploys both at once: ho-ome floating in the sky over “home!” down on the ground. A heaven-and-earth yearning gets registered in counterpoint. If only the place you dream about and the place that you are right now could be one and the same.

Updated On: 10/31/26 at 07:01 PM