This is West Side Story* meets Working meets Rent. This is In The Heights. This is wonderful.
The musicals I've performed alone in my bedroom (straight through, with costumes) are generally dated pre-1980s, so it's always refreshing & encouraging to hear that, yes, people are still composing for Broadway. I can sing & gush through any Sondheim musical front-to-back, but even I don't believe ol' Stevie is making a comeback anytime soon (winning "Best Revival of a Musical" every other year does not count). Remarks of Broadway plummeting into extinction have lead to comparisons with opera's road of esotericism. I'll admit that all musicals share a distinctive quality; sui generis. Perhaps this is why critics can't see the art progressing any further than box office of Andrew Lloyd Webber rock operas.
So I'm reminded that musical theater's credo is revival (full of hope) & its modern-day composers are ceaselessly remaking Broadway's sound (while staying true to Gay, Gilbert & Sullivan). The best composers today are those who use what they know & what they've lived. Jason Robert Brown's heartbreaking The Last Five Years (2001) goes both ways in time & the audience witnesses the same marriage simultaneously beginning & falling apart. tick, tick...BOOM! (1990) is basically a musical portrayal of Jonathan Larson's aspiring-composer/SoHo-cafe-waitering days, while his notorious Rent sings about every bohemian topic possible (including Sondheim).
The blurring of contemporary pop sounds with the roots of blues music & the technique of classical voices is what makes listening to a cast album the greatest joy (I swear). Success is a song capable of being taken out of stage-context & placed solitary among another genre. In The Heights sounds to me sometimes like an R&B ballad, sometimes rap, salsa, merengue etc etc., but when I hear the rolling suspended cymbal closing the finale, I know I'm pretty much home.
In The Heights is this years Tony award winning musical written/composed by twenty-eight year old Lin-Manuel Miranda. He also stars in the show, but don't worry - he's tremendous. It was nominated thirteen times & took home four wins (including Best Musical).
*But actually, the opening number begins exactly as West Side Story's "America." Goody.
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