"In the Heights" by Long Beach Playhouse
July 1, 2023
In the summer of 2009, I visited New York for the very first time.
I was there by the grace of God, having just spent months hoarding every single cent of my intern minimum-wage on my very first and by far shittiest car I would crash to the point of totaling (a thing I did so often in my twenties, you’d think I was striving for a new personality quirk when OBVIOUSLY that belonged to being a layman’s Zoey Deschanel). It was a 2003 Kia Rio in Playskool Blue and it didn’t change my life one bit. Finding an extra $200 to fuck off to the East Coast did.
This was my first foray into “vagabond vacationing”— the trips you take when you’re far too broke and really shouldn’t, but adventure— albeit smoggy and muggy and stabby — is an enticing call to the wild you must pick up or else you’ll spend your days forever itchy. I was there with my sister and her then-boyfriend, unaware I was their third wheel, thinking he was ours (and if that doesn’t tell you I’m the youngest, I truly don’t know what will). Though in the end, it didn’t matter. The tiny details always dissolve. What lasts are the titans, and New York had plenty.
Broadway was a priority. We didn’t come all this way to sleep on my sister’s boyfriend’s sister’s couch, subsist on sweaty bodega bananas, and get yelled at by dirt-lipped Bronx teens for nothing. We were classy people full of culture and culture we were gonna get. We both pooled our money as we repeated the same Marge Simpson line like a sonnet (“All my life, I’ve always dreamed of being in a Broadway audience”), half-joking, half-weepy because doing this damn thing felt like a field goal that would’ve been pushed all our lives. We stood dutifully in the Times Square TKTS line, whittling down our own “March Madness” of show contenders until there were two opponents left: a big-budgeted staged spectacle of Disney’s Mary Poppins or this other musical we heard vaguely good things about but had a troubling amount of rapping.
We chose the Disney play.
Now it’s too many years later and I’m older and wiser but still supremely dumb. I don’t time my Waze well enough, muscling through an extra 30 minutes of unexpected traffic because Long Beach isn’t so much a city as it is a state of mind and that state will always fuck you for never visiting enough. But the Long Beach Playhouse doesn’t deserve a second of my ire. They didn’t know. They couldn’t. Back when they opened in 1929, they were the only big, bright, shining star glimmering off the PCH, never anticipating their spotlight being shared with over-priced vegan fast food next to a “Sushi Studio” (everyone goes Hollywood). I imagine the Playhouse’s walls thriving back then with future famouses as the dream of Hollywood felt vibrant and attainable and real as opposed to the year I write this where it feels foolhardy and sadistic and fake, but I promise I won’t linger on that sad fact ‘cause I still have a show to cover.
I’m accidentally here on opening night again, but this time the buzzy energy is less a forced “happy to be here” tooth-clenched smile and more genuine enthusiasm for their family and friends. Maybe it’s because there’s no children in this show. Maybe it’s because the LBP doesn’t typically do “these kinds of shows”. Maybe it’s because the director Miguel Cardenas wrote one of the most beautiful letters I’ve ever seen in a self-published Playbill. Where my sister and I royally fucked up in 2009, Miguel was the victor, witnessing a baby Lin-Manuel Miranda long before he became the Internet’s Cringe King and all of us his gleeful jesters. It was that original Broadway performance of In the Heights that allowed Miguel to finally see a story that starred and celebrated and shook the world with people who looked like him kicking-fucking-ass. Miguel has kept a candle lit on the dream to direct his own version ever since.
Now we’re here on Miguel’s dream day and I’m nervous. Performing a show that graced the Tonys stage within the last two decades is different than performing a show that took its final bow during the Eisenhower Era. The images of their more famous counterparts are still too vivid, not quite dulled with time. It reminds me of the touring company of Hamilton I saw in the Fall of 2017, where the audience that night was excited but weighed with worry. Would our “Flim-Manuel Miranda” attempt a beat-for-beat impersonation or break free like a Vegas Liza gone rogue? In the end, he read the room and leaned the former. He knew we didn’t come all this way to pay $40 for parking and elbow our fellow theatre man just to see a “new take”. Later at intermission, I overheard a group of women say it was, “actually nice they couldn’t see his face from their high seats ‘cause then they could just squint their eyes and pretend,” and I bit my jackass tongue from making an off-color joke to People I Don’t Know.
Our crowd tonight is reassuringly diverse and I quietly thank the higher power that’s kept me safe despite all the aforementioned car-totalings. In the Heights is not a show you wanna see performed by Whites or even Mostly-Whites, as “creative” of a choice that may be. Even when the POC-filled movie adaptation premiered, an Internet backlash zeroed in on the actors who were, “brown but not brown enough”. Here, I spend my pre-show time clocking 7 different diverse millennials in button-ups wearing vintage glasses (including me, maybe we’ll all kiss later), a Hispanic man wearing an impossibly-resplendent outfit of a silver-sparkle “moo-moo jumpsuit” (??) paired with elegant open-toed sandals (*Santa voice*: “They do exist!”), and a guy who for tonight’s performance will be playing the role of Friend of the Choreographer and I do not engage him once in conversation, yet still somehow know every detail about his life.
The lights dim as the audience erupts in customary cheers as the producers take the stage in their traditional theatre binary of Nice Musical Lady and Excitable Gay Man (a thing I can say, as a former and future Nice Musical Lady). Together, they tease the rest of the season (a COMEDIC version of Ben Hur!!) and thank the patrons for their continued support. The thanking “can’t be emphasized enough”, but they still try. I hear the term “starvation diet” for the second time in this series’ short run, but then they fortunately pivot to sunnier subjects: the amazing actors. The amazing crew. The amazing director, who everyone seems to know as they all crane their necks to reveal HE’S THE MAN IN THE SPARKLY MOO-MOO JUMPSUIT. I hurriedly scribble, “BEARD BOY IS DIRECTOR!!!” with so much fervor Friend of the Choreographer regards my presence like Ferris Bueller breaking the 4th wall: “You’re… still here?”
We don’t have a live orchestra, but the opening chords still give me chills (if it hasn’t already been clear— I will be crying during this) and then out comes a tagger miming spray paint and shortly after, our star. He chases the delinquent, then turns to us, perhaps sensing our nerves. He jostles his body back and forth, like a breakdancer contemplating a leap onto a cardboard square. When he finally launches into the first rap, the audience gasps (or perhaps mine was just so strong, it amplified) and for the next 2 hours and 40 minutes, Erick Joshua Guijarro grips us in his hands like a lotto scratcher he’s too terrified to cash.
Being the lead of a show stretches well beyond a simple spotlight. Erick knows he’s the production’s captain and takes on the responsibility with dutiful aplomb, grounding and saving and lifting up his more raw and un-callused castmates from falling out to sea, even when they get dangerously close (and they do). He’s the (and I mean this with the utmost respect) perfect “middle Animorph” between Lin-Manuel’s Broadway Usnavi and Anthony Ramos’s big screen boy. He leans into the LMM-pentameter but doesn’t let it swallow him. He swaggers through every scene, but doesn’t showboat. When he longs to dance with his love interest Vanessa at the first act’s finale, he does so with the perfect blend of awkward and amorous. The cast’s median age is 25, but Erick clearly holds the wisdom of a leader well beyond his years.
Performing a “mature, adult play” holds a spectrum of potential problems. Where shows like Chicago and Rent shout their sexiness to the back of the house, In the Heights whispers it through the seemingly mundane: a lingering hand on a forearm; a shared glance in between scenes; a smile that conjures a private world. Where this balance hits strongest is between Ja’lil Nelson and Angie Chavez, our respective Benny and Nina for the night. Their chemistry is off the charts, one part romantic, one part recognition of being the production’s obvious musical heavyweights. Ja’lil’s rapping is natural, playful, and at ease— perhaps a credit to his fronting local OC rock group Yes Yes Please (and a credit to his empathetic portrayal by being raised by 2 Moms. We love a king who comes from a female-dominated house!!).
But Angie Chavez as Nina…
Angie Chavez is our sweet canary, except her song is less a harbinger and more a tether pulling her to the next big, bright stage. She flows through every heart-wrenching song with a polish grounded in pain. Where Usnavi is the brains of our story, the character Nina is our undeniable heart, already floundering in the liminal space of mixed-identity her fictional peers are just now contemplating. Angie’s cohorts are clear fixtures of the LBP, but she’s using this performance as a means to walk across the figurative graduation stage. I learn through the program that she’s New York-bound, gaining recent acceptance to the prestigious Circle in the Square Theatre School. I’m proud of her like she’s my friend, my sister, my anything but a stranger. I hope her vibrato never weakens in the harsh city air.
But then, there’s a flip side to our show’s undeniable youth. Our Sonny (Zachary Ballot) is clearly celebrating his 10-year puberty reunion, desperately hiding his stubble under stage make-up to seem more 13 than 23. Our Camila (Kaya Carr) works hard to bridge the mismatched gap of playing Mom to Nina, who seems only 6 or so years her junior. Our Abuela Claudia (Gisela Flores) is clearly entry-level, over-correcting the incongruence of her physical age to her character’s 80 years by moving at a faux-pained, unhurried clip. There’s never a moment in the show where she stands perfectly straight, like a one-woman game of limbo. Her age lines are less natural, more Maybelline. Her gray wig threatens to expose her natural brunette, but then she sings The Song.
“Paciencia y Fé” is a howl from the pit of the performer’s stomach. Where In the Heights’ youthful characters long to stretch a road riding out to an unknown future, Abuela Claudia is desperate to burrow into her past. It’s one-part performance review of the immigrant’s tale, one-part acknowledgement of life’s tragicomedy cycle: cities begin vibrant, then slowly fade. Blocks begin contained, then erode with evictions. Neighborhoods grow like family trees, until their tallest, oldest branches must get shorn in order to thrive. Claudia knows she’s dying, but she’s too afraid to say it. So Gisela Flores sings the ever-loving shit out of it. I know instantly why she was cast and as she hits the final note, I am fully weeping (told you I would cry).
The rest of the production thrives on a heart that hopes to pave over the obvious holes. They would like you to suspend your disbelief and imagine a world in which the mics work, not constantly glitching with feedback like a dimmer switch of white noise. They want to transport you to a far-flung world where the soundtrack doesn’t overpower the spoken lines. They want you to imagine a fantasy of “fireworks” that are far more than 3 multi-colored bulbs on a ceiling carousel that doesn’t move (and not all of them are on). They want you to forgive the shaky accuracy of the choreography for the fervor in which it’s done.
Because they know it’s not always about that.
Stages can lay bare and minimal, if only to be filled with the power of their performers. Spectacles can be big and flashy, though ultimately hollow with its heart. You could choose the “sure thing” of a big-budgeted Broadway showcase but ultimately waste the opportunity to witness something wild, unknown, but real. Like a comedic version of Ben Hur. Like a performance of Adults Trying Their Best. Like the right choice Miguel made that day in 2009 and the one I didn’t.1
In the Heights at the Long Beach Playhouse Mainstage is wrapping its last performances this weekend, with a final performance on Sunday, August 6th. For tickets click here. For the comedic Ben Hur coming to the stage next February, click here (and I’ll see you there).
Stay tuned for next week where I swap the A-train for a flying umbrella and come face-to-face with my poor choices in a Westminster show of The Disney Play that’s funded by not one, not two, but THREE mega-churches. Amen.
And I know I don’t need to tell you this, but that Broadway Mary Poppins super fucking sucked.