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On Stage: In The Heights

Music Theatre Wichita, courtesy Moonlight Theatricals

Music Theatre Wichita is closing out its season with the much-anticipated production of In the Heights, the award-winning musical with lyrics and score by Lin-Manuel Miranda and book by Quiara Alegria Hudes.

The show began in 1999 as the brainchild of Miranda while he was still a student at Wesleyan University. The plot centers on the lives of characters living in the predominantly Hispanic-American neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City. Originally an 80-minute one-act that some referred to as a hip-hop version of Rent, the musical score gradually evolved to include salsa and free-style rap numbers. By 2002, Miranda had written five drafts of the show, working alongside director Thomas Kail. In 2004, book writer Quiara Alegria Hudes was added to the mix, and in 2008, In the Heights made its debut on Broadway at the Richard Rodgers Theatre.

The musical was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won four, including Best Musical, Best Original Score, and Best Choreography. That same year, it won a Grammy for Best Musical Show Album, and was also named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

In 2009, the show was the subject of a documentary aired by Great Performances from PBS. The doc follows the cast and crew over two years as they struggle to bring the show to Broadway, and all the way to their triumphant showing at the Tonys.

Music Theatre Wichita is putting In the Heights onstage at Century II from August 7 to August 11.

Sanda Moore Coleman received an MFA in creative writing from Wichita State University in 1991. Since then, she has been the arts and community editor for The Martha's Vineyard Times, a teaching fellow at Harvard University, and an assistant editor at Image. In 2011, she received the Maureen Egan Writers Exchange prize for fiction from Poets & Writers magazine. She has spent more than 30 years performing, reviewing, and writing for theatre.