The cast of “In the Heights”. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Ice cold Pepsis, enticing lottery tickets and café con leche are just a few of the daily necessities dished out by narrator Usnavi to the urban denizens of In the Heights. “My parents came with nothing…and it’s all about the legacy they left for me,” he chimes to a pulsating red-light backdrop of the George Washington Bridge in the production’s high-octane opening number. That inspiriting canvas of Latin-American life boiled with the effervescence of the borough’s own sweltering sun in the 2008 production at Broadway’s Richard Rodgers Theatre. However, the current leg of composer Lin-Manuel Miranda’s joyous epistle to New York’s Washington Heights junction has yet to reach the same decimal point on the thermostat.

Bouncing its way through Miranda’s Latin-infused score, the fabric of In the Heights has maintained an indefatigable faculty- since its original stint at Off-Broadway’s 37 Arts- to inspire a doting sentimentality among viewers despite Quiara Alegrai Hudes’ precariously spined book. The conceit is pillared by three youthful inhabitants plagued with questions of legacy, identity, and future. Each is a second-generation Latin American, circumscribed in a nabe that once proffered hope but now faces the threatening looms of gentrification.

Usnavi, the spritely bodega owner, endeavors to return to the island of the Dominican Republic, the native home of his prematurely deceased parents. Vanessa, a vulpine salon worker, frets the uncertain credit standing that holds the propensity to fuel a one-way ticket out of the barrio. Nina, the youngest of the hankering bunch, places her sights somewhere in between her two peers’. Weighed with the stress of her family’s parlous finances, Nina has dropped out of Stanford University to the disheartenment of both kin and neighbors- two groups that, in the bosomed streets of Washington Heights, are often one and the same.

Woven into this mural is a cluster of the barrio’s residential shakers. Bemoaning bounced checks, late tax payments and communal gossip as they zip past the A-train entrance to 181st street, these individuals imbue the narrative with its infecting zest. Smirking at the woes that plague her daily trials, salon owner Daniela (a tart-tongued Isabel Santiago) is sure to include a dollop of gossip in her customer’s mani-pedi packages. Benny, a bootstrapped employee of Nina’s family-owned taxi service, harbors feelings- requited yet verboten- for the college freshman. The expenditures at stake in In the Heights are often frivolously low, while the ordained Act 2 resolutions too syrupy sweet. Even Anna Louizo’s panoramic view of the barrio, while seasoned in verisimilitude, suggests a rosy, riskless demeanor.  Yet neither Hudes nor Miranda waiver from the cynosure consideration of what it means to find a home, both in geographic and psychological renderings.

Elise Santora and Arielle Jacobs in “In the Heights”. Photo credit: Joan Marcus

Fortunately the wispy nature of the character arcs has clearly been tailored to evaporate from memory in the gyrating heat of the production’s song and dance idioms. Yet despite Andy Blankenbuehler and Luis Saldago’s pepped-up choreography (a tightly-knight marriage of hip-hop and Latin influence), the current cast does not seem quite up to the task.  Even Miranda’s throbbing score, a testament to the partnership between pop invasion and Broadway standard, tends to fizzle out in the production’s most warranting of numbers.

Kyle Betran is much too prudent in the role of Usnavi, a narrator/ensemble role drafted to meta-theatricalize the action while simultaneously propelling it. Miranda’s shredding lyrics and twisting bass lines do not percolate off of Beltran’s tongue with the ease necessitated by a character whose mom-and-pop shop acts as an emotional refuge for his community. The feisty Shaun Taylor-Corbett hits all the comic notes as Sonny, Usnavi’s would-be philanderer cousin, yet misses on the young man’s unveiled allegiance to his dishelmed streets. Arielle Jacobs projects a refreshing naïveté as the troubled Nina, yet her despondency too often recedes into the cerebral during numbers such as “Breathe” and “Everything I Know”, both anthems that would typically platform for more heightened revelations.

Ultimately this spry fraternity of performers could not consistently kindle the buoyancy licensed to them by the narrative’s libretto.  Which is a shame, because it is this passion that warms these neighborhood streets.

“In the Heights” runs through January 3, 2010 at the Cadillac Palace. For more information or to purchase tickets, please visit www.BroadwayInChicago.com.