Arrive Magazine - November/December, 2008

being hailed as the first real Latino musical. Unlike Passing Strange, In the Heights is structured like a traditional musical but the ground it covers —the New York City neighborhood of Washington Heights and its complex mixture of American and Latin music—is new. The show was created by Lin-Manuel Miranda, who understands the importance of productions that turn the spotlight on people who have seldom seen themselves represented on stage.

“In a lot of ways this is the show I would have died to see when I was a kid,” Miranda says. “I clung to any Latino representation anywhere. It’s natural for everyone to look for characters we can relate to and identify with.”

encourage them to look further afield for new material.

“I would make a very real effort to get out in the rest of the country and see what imaginative theaters are doing and what could be translated and transported,” she says. “I know there are shows out there, but you have to be diligent enough to find them.”

With the Broadway status quo undergoing such remarkable changes, what does the future hold? At press time, it’s hard to say. Broadway seasons run from one May 25 through the next, and many new plays are introduced in mid-to late spring, closer to the Tony Awards ceremony in June when a win can mean a great deal to a show’s attendance. In other words, a lot of the highly original works that will make their way to Broadway this season have yet to be announced.

The musical’s reinvention
has been fertile ground for
Broadway’s progress in
attracting new audiences.

NOV.01.08

A two-city exhibition:
Washington DC
4th St & Independence Ave SW
New York
One Bowling Green
www.AmericanIndian.si.edu

The Drama Queen

Though straight dramatic plays generally attract more traditional audiences, this year’s Tony winner for Best Play, August: Osage

County, was something of a rare bird for Broadway.

“It had three strikes against it,” says producer Freitag. “It had no star, it was 3 ¹/2 hours long and it was a drama— three things that you would say would never make it on Broadway.”

Yet, somehow, it has become a huge success. Written by Chicago playwright Tracy Letts, who also snagged a Pulitzer Prize for it, the play deals with a wildly dysfunctional Oklahoma family in the aftermath of the patriarch’s apparent suicide. In what was considered a bold move by producers, the director and most of the cast were imported from the legendary Steppenwolf Theatre Company in Chicago.

Deanna Dunagan, who won the Best Actress Tony for her role as August’s pill-popping matriarch, says the company’s initial fears about the acceptance of a “Midwestern play” on Broadway were quickly quelled by the excitement of the New York press.

“We had huge anticipation for this coming in [to New York] because the press had really followed it,” she says.

Audiences, according to Dunagan, are equally enthusiastic and surprisingly diverse. The success of August: Osage County undoubtedly will embolden producers to consider more serious plays, and Dunagan hopes it will

The first new production of the season, [title of show], is yet another reinvented musical, this one an ironic look at how the show itself went from a slim idea to Broadway. Revivals of All My Sons and Speed the Plow have brought famous faces such as Katie Holmes and Jeremy Piven to the Broadway stage, and Billy Elliot and Shrek, musicals based on popular films, will soon make splashy debuts. In the spring, a planned revival of West Side Story promises more Spanish dialogue and realistic portrayals of gang life.

Spring Awakening’s Steven Sater is working on musical adaptations of such varied works as Hans Christian Andersen’s The Nightingale, and Nero, the life story of the Roman Emperor.

Sater and his writing partner, pop star Duncan Sheik, have never been more optimistic about getting such unconventional works produced. “In the future,” Sater says, “Broadway may not only be an oasis for great entertainment, but might be a place for entertaining art that can move and sway and change you.”