When 'In the Heights' Was Born At Wesleyan, Part 2

With the film version of “In the Heights” now in theaters and on HBO Max, I’m posting just a few of the stories I wrote about the show as it began at Wesleyan University', then to a basement reading at the old Drama Book Store, then to off-Broadway, then Broadway and then on tour.

This piece ran in 2010.

By FRANK RIZZO
Life is good for Lin-Manuel Miranda.

He's partying with J-Lo, working with Stephen Sondheim, Arthur Laurents and MTV and will star in a major motion picture, "In the Heights," based on the Tony Award-winning musical he began when he was a student at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

When we caught up with Miranda a few months after he left the show, the movie deal was in the works. He was also helping to launch of the national tour, which arrives Tuesday at Hartford's Bushnell Center for the Performing Arts.

It's been one incredible ride for Miranda.

"I still feel the same," he says over lunch at a parkside restaurant in a neighborhood north of Washington Heights, where he still lives (albeit in a larger, nicer place on top of a hill and not far from his parents). "I think I'm the same anyway, just 20 feet higher in the air."

In 1999, Miranda began "In the Heights" when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan, writing the script and music over a winter break when he was living in "the naked dorm."

"It was a Wesleyan hold-over from the '60s, an 'optional clothing' dorm. I think one person exercised that option, and it wasn't me, although I did pose nude for drawing classes. I'm sure there's an unfair rendering of me someplace. I'm just grateful it wasn't a photography class. Hey, it was $10.25 an hour."

Miranda presented his 80-minute, one-act work in 2000 at the student-run '92 Theater. In that audience were two seniors - John Buffalo Mailer (the youngest child of novelist Norman Mailer) and Neil Stewart - who were planning to form a theater group with two recent grads already living in New York City: Thomas Kail and Anthony Veneziale.

When Miranda graduated in 2002, he connected with the men, who had formed Back House Productions, which headquartered and presented shows in the 60-seat basement of the Drama Bookstore on ….CONTINUED