There’s so much stage to work with in the Demens Landing site for American Stage’s In-The-Park series, most set designers over the years have unsurprisingly settled on environments with an open, uncrowded feel. But In the Heights (music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda, book by Quiara Alegría Hudes) wanted us to witness a jam-packed, messily urban New York City barrio, with one storefront pushing up uncomfortably against another. And this was the set that Steve Mitchell gave us: a kinetic, overfilled street in Washington Heights, with a bodega and a hairdresser and a taxi dispatcher and more, all competing for a little area of their own in which to provide sustenance for their owners. Of course the people on this street needed to assert themselves with loud salsa and hip-hop: How else to cry “Freedom!” in so congested a place? And of course, In the Heights transcended its own script to keep us satisfied. With that set (and those actors), who wouldn’t understand everything?
This article appears in Sep 24-30, 2015.