News (Noticias) Tagged ‘Lin-Manuel Miranda’

At the start of another scorching July day, the guy who runs the corner bodega perfumes the air with the scent of café con leche. Hip-hop begins percolating, too, one ingredient in a musical stew flavored with salsa, merengue, bachata, mambo, Reggaeton. Dominicans, Cubans and Puerto Ricans breathe to these beats, some getting ahead, others just getting by.

The scene could be a snapshot from many a Miami neighborhood. But it’s actually the opening sequence of the Broadway show In the Heights, whose 13 nominations make it the leading contender going into Sunday’s 62nd annual Tony Awards.

The musical represents a nine-year odyssey and, no matter what happens on Sunday, a dreamer’s triumph for its wiry creator and star, 28-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda.”*

In the Heights,” the little musical that began on Wesleyan University’s Middletown campus eight years ago and matured at Waterford’s O’Neill Theater Center, captured the top prize at the annual Tony Awards Sunday night, honoring the best of the 2007-08 Broadway season.

Lin-Manuel Miranda, who as a student in Middletown created the musical based on the Hispanic neighborhood where he grew up in New York’s Washington Heights, also won for best original score.

A visibly thrilled Miranda, 28, accepted his composing award with a special rap that delighted the audience at Radio City Music Hall: “I used to dream about this moment; now I’m in it. Tell the conductor to hold the baton a minute. … Mr. Sondheim, look, I made a hat where there never was a hat, and a Latin hat at that.”"*

Collecting awards is becoming a habit for New Yorker Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Tonight the star and composer of “In the Heights,” the musical slice of Latino life in upper Manhattan, has an awards double-header.

The New York Immigration Coalition will celebrate Miranda’s accomplishments at its 20th anniversary gala at the Hilton.”*

The welcome news out of Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre is all about Lin-Manuel Miranda, the energetic multi-talent behind the endearing new musical “In the Heights.”

Miranda wrote the music and the lyrics for this upbeat and up-tempo valentine to Upper Manhattan. Oh yeah: He’s also the evening’s star. Heck, for all I know, he had a hand in hanging the lights and designing the lobby posters.

Still, with some obvious help from librettist Quiara Alegr¿a Hudes, director Thomas Kail, choreographer Andy Blankenbuehler and a 24-member cast primed to get your juices flowing at all costs, Miranda has bequeathed to New York an evening of old-style, innocent pleasure.”*

*From: http://www.washingtonpost.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Age: 23

Hometown: “I’m from Norwalk, Connecticut, and my parents are Puerto Rican.”

Currently: Playing Sonny, the wisecracking bodega clerk and younger cousin of In the Heights’ central character, Usnavi [Lin-Manuel Miranda].”*

*From: http://www.broadway.com/
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

Ghostlight Records has recorded the score to the new Broadway musical In the Heights for an upcoming release.

Andres Levin and Ghostlight founder Kurt Deutsch produce the forthcoming cast recording of the Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes musical.”*

*From: http://www.playbill.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

IN 1998, high school senior Lin-Manuel Miranda saw “The Capeman” three times during previews, just before the highly anticipated Paul Simon musical crashed and burned on Broadway. Starring Rubén Blades and Marc Anthony, the show, in Miranda’s opinion, was as exhilarating as it was frustrating. All that extraordinary Latino talent! But in the service of what? A musical based on a real-life gang slaying by a Puerto Rican-born petty criminal?

“I was deeply conflicted,” the 28-year-old actor-composer recalls a decade later. “You know that story about Stephen Sondheim, when he was a young intern on the musical ‘Allegro’? It was one of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s rare flops, and Sondheim’s often said that when he started writing musicals, he was always trying to fix ‘Allegro.’ Well, when I started writing ‘In the Heights,’ the impulse was to try to fix ‘Capeman.’ “”*

*From: http://www.calendarlive.com
Traducido: usando Google o Altavista/Babel Fish

“”In the Heights,” the lively off-Broadway musical about Latino residents of New Yorks Washington Heights, will be getting a Broadway address.

The critically praised show, which features music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda and a book by Quiara Alegria Hudes, plans to set up shop in a larger theater during the 2007-2008 season. The Broadway opening date and theater will be announced. It has been playi”

“The life of twenty-seven-year-old Lin-Manuel Miranda, the writer of and lead actor in the new musical “In the Heights”””about the ups and downs of the residents of a block in Washington Heights””seemed pretty serene the other day as he did some errands in the old neighborhood. Miranda, who is trim and dark-haired, with a goatee, and is as eager-beaverish as they come, lives on upper Broadway, a few blocks from his parents’ house, across the street from Inwood Hills Park, where he was born.

“I’m the luckiest guy in the whole world,” he said, taking a chair at his local barbershop, where he was getting a shape-up on his goatee. “My dad, Luis Miranda, is a Democratic political consultant and lobbyist, and founder of the Spanish-English weekly Manhattan Times. My sister Luz is an executive at the paper. My dad and my mother”””a child psychologist, also named Luz””“encouraged me my whole entire life to do what I wanted. So I found places””Wesleyan, for one””that had people who felt as passionately as I did about things like Hitchcock movies. “

“Last week, Towleroad correspondent Josh Helmin sat down with Lin-Manuel Miranda, the 27-year-old creator and star of the new hit Off-Broadway musical In the Heights. Set in the northern Manhattan neighborhood of Washington Heights over one fateful Fourth of July weekend, Heights follows the trajectory of two love stories and the results of one lucky lottery ticket. With some of the most thoughtful lyrics that New York has heard since Avenue Q according to New York magazine, energetic performances, inspired choreography and costuming, In the Heights is a sexy, fresh, funny, and moving addition to the musical theater canon. Amid the seats at 37 Arts Theater in midtown Manhattan, where In the Heights is currently playing, Miranda who is straight talked to Josh about the shows gay plotline that was written out, the future of the American musical, and the seven-year journey to Off-Broadway ”” that may just lead to the Tonys.”

“Lin-Manuel Miranda grew up in Manhattans vibrant and diverse Washington Heights neighborhood, and his background in a close-knit Puerto Rican family has inspired his work as a writer, composer and performer. A co-founding member of Freestyle Love Supreme, Miranda has toured comedy festivals with his groups fusion of hip-hop, storytelling, improv and musical theater. His first full-length musical, In the Heights, began life when he was a student at Wesleyan University in Connecticut, and after four years of development, it has found a home at off-Broadways 37 Arts Theatre. Miranda, who is part of the cast of his show, won the Georgia Holof Lyricist Award at the 2005 O’Neill Music Theater Conference for In the Heights. While waiting for his commercial break, he taught middle school English at his alma mater, Hunter College High School, and composed commercial music for political candidates Fernando Ferrer, Carl McCall and Eliot Spitzer. Broadway.com asked this fresh young talent to talk about his journey from the Heights to off-Broadway.”