Tony Watch: WaHi not Gritty Enough?
In The Heights has been nominated for a Tony award 13 times! Benjamin Ivry of the U.K’s Guardian questions whether the sterilized version of Washington Heights presented on Broadway is a true representation of the neighborhood.
Ivry writes,
“I lived in Washington Heights a couple of decades ago during summer power outages, and instead of dancing in the streets as they do here, people climbed to the roofs of apartment buildings to fire handguns. Admittedly, audiences for Broadway musicals have limited appetites for verisimilitude.”
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A couple of decades ago was a different world in WaHi. I lived there the first decade of my life and it was a fun and vibrant place. It did get more gritty and violent and was probably at its worst two decades ago but it has since turned around. Of course life there is no Broadway musical but it’s not the eighties either.