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 Best of The Bay 2015.
