“I used to think we lived at the top of the world / When the world was just a subway map,” sings Nina Rosario (Sophia Macías) on “When You’re Home,” one of the standout tracks of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights. “And the one-slash-nine/ Climbed a dotted line to my place.”
“There’s no 9 train now,” her love interest Benny (Alex Nicholson) reminds her.
“Right,” Nina replies.
This snippet of lyrics does a lot of work to establish the setting—and core tension—of the Tony Award-winning In the Heights, which was Miranda’s first Broadway musical, before Hamilton. Set in Washington Heights, a Manhattan neighborhood that’s also known as Little Dominican Republic, the musical centers on a group of Latino immigrant small business owners and neighbors. It tracks these characters through 48 fateful hours in the early ’00s, as they grapple with rising rents, developing romances, family betrayals, a heat wave power outage, and one winning lottery ticket totaling $96,000.
