Play Summary Of The Play 'Washington Heights'

Lin-Manuel Miranda won his first Tony Award in 2008 for Best Original Score for his work on In the Heights, a musical with it’s foundation of music being rap and salsa. Lin-Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights carefully infuses his latin and hip hop/rap roots into the lyrics and music to create one of the first hip-hop musicals that thoroughly tells a story. In the Heights jumps into three days in the life of the New York City latino neighborhood, Washington Heights and focuses on the dreams and aspirations for latino immigrants. It focuses specifically the story of the two main characters: Usnavi de la Vega and Nina Rosario. Nina is the “one who made it out” and went to college but is now back in Washington Heights after dropping out of Stanford University due to losing her scholarship. Nina also runs into one of her parent’s employees, Benny, and begins rekindling their love. Usnavi is the owner of the local bodega and dreams of flying back to the Dominican Republic, where his parents are from. Usnavi is in love with Vanessa, a worker at the salon next door, but is too awkward and intimidated to say anything.

The film has several ethnicities within a small area along a time line of one day. The film has many, informative methods in which it describe the various diversity issues of all the characters within the movie. For example, Sal’s pizzeria which is owned by an Italian American has pictures of famous Italian Americans on the wall and plays Italian music. One character named Buggin Out is always upset. Bugging out hates the fact that there are no black people pictures on the wall especially since the pizzeria is in a black neighborhood. His perspective represents the people in the African American community that always protest, but usually don’t work to improve the community. The

life in the mid to late twentieth century and the strains of society on African Americans. Set in a small neighborhood of a big city, this play holds much conflict between a father, Troy Maxson, and his two sons, Lyons and Cory. By analyzing the sources of this conflict, one can better appreciate and understand the way the conflict contributes to the meaning of the work.

The play uses stereotypes and biased cultural

Washington Heights is a unique and ever changing neighborhood at the mezzo-level, but affects the macro and micro. It located in upper Manhattan that is north of Harlem and south of Inwood. Begins on 115th street, it is typically thought to end around Hillside Avenue. This neighborhood has the Hudson River on the west and the Harlem River to the east. New York City’s Community Planning has designated Washington Heights and Inwood as Manhattan Community District 12. These two communities are similar in their ethnic populations, make up the tip of the borough of Manhattan, and are often assessed by the government as one district. The 2003 New York City Community Health Profile reported that 270,677 people living in District 12 and “one in two

Before getting into the case of Ocean Hill-Brownsville, Podair begins by discussing how the New York population became so divided in the first place. After WWII ended in 1945, the industry landscape shifted from on one that mainly relied on manufacturing to one contrived of service occupations. As a result, there was a plummet in the demand for low education labor, and a spike in the desire for workers with higher education. Resultantly, black communities were marginalized and jobless. Similarly, housing constraints and de facto segregation lead to mainly black neighborhoods, leading to neighborhoods that provided abysmal education for its local youth. A region in the Bronx that epitomized this lackluster educational system is the schooling system of Ocean Hill-Brownsville.

For example, many cities that are rich in culture, diversity, and vitality are beacons for white people interested in the “upcoming scene.” This brings more and more whites who displace and marginalize the original residents through increasing prices. Cities such as New York, Boston, and San Francisco all have neighborhoods that originally had mostly poor, uneducated African Americans, and now are swelling with young, educated whites that have greatly increased the price of living. In Boston, Charlestown, Jamaica Plains, and Beacon Hill have all experienced intense characteristics of gentrification from the 1970s up until the present, showcasing an increase in the population with at least a bachelor’s degree, as well as a large increase in new and renovated buildings. In New York, the most famous example of gentrification is in Harlem, has undergone a process of gentrification after becoming known as the national, and even international symbol for black culture with a vibrancy that is not seen in the suburbs. Finally, in San Francisco, in the bay area, there has been a massive influx of affluent companies that have completely devastated the middle class due to a high rise in wealthy, educated, employees. These employees have taken residence up in the bay area, causing the entirety of the already previously gentrified neighborhood to skyrocket to unobtainable prices, even for the

I thought cities had more diversity, more poverty, and low income household than suburb areas and this was supported by the above data. I learned that the increase of wealth and income in a small community hinders the rest of community where middle and low income families live. The ability to live in a “good” neighborhood is linked to income. Income can be one of the factors that determine how a region can be segregated. Even in the city, the income of the household separates the lower income families from the higher income families. High income families tend to live together and low income families tend to live in the same

The first play that we are looking at, Fences ,and Zoot Suit plays, I’ve chosen is multiculturalism. This is not the biggest part of the view in of these plays, the specific theme of the ethnic groups by El Pachuco in the Zoot Suit and the conflict of generations

Not only does it call out the issues of immigration and politics through its words, but it also brings out the issue of race through its casting. The characters are all white people, but none of them are played by white people. Not only does the show sharpen awareness of current controversial topics, but also of the knowledge of the founding of our country. During the American Revolution, the men fighting and planning were going through some really tough times, and it is hard to think of people in the 1700’s as being more than old men with white hair, but as Miranda says in Hamilton, “Congress writes, “George, attack the British forces,” I shoot back, “we have resorted to eating our horses.” With the awareness of history having been the present at one point, we also realize that these were real people with real feelings and flaws, as Miranda demonstrates with Alexander Hamilton’s murderer regretting his decision, confessing: “I should have known the world was wide enough for both Hamilton and me.” As Tom Teodorczuk sees it, a lot of Hamilton’s success comes from “contemporary relevance rather than celebrity currency,” which proves that the content is good enough that it does not need celebrities in order to get audiences. Through this show, topics that were relevant in the 1700s are shown to be theoretically the same as issues we face today, and that is pretty

Anyone who watches Lin Manuel Miranda’s hit Broadway show, Hamilton, can clearly see that he chose hip-hop as the genre throughout the play. But by doing so, it made people question why and what affect it has on the audience. Some people believe that Miranda chose hip-hop because that was simply what came to mind when he examined Hamilton’s characteristics. Rebecca Mead shares this belief by stating, “Miranda saw Hamilton’s relentlessness, brilliance, linguistic dexterity, and self-destructive stubbornness through his own idiosyncratic lens. It was, he thought, a hip-hop story, an immigrant’s story” (Mead). Her response is a simple answer for a simple question.

When looking at the origins of African-American Dramas specifically in Mulatto, Native Son, A Raisin in the Sun, Funnyhouse of a Negro, Great Goodness of Life, and Dutchman, the emotions of all these characters created the sense that everyone in this time were still searching for their identity. Each character in the plays had to overcome difficulties relating to their skin color, thus causing either confusion or confidence in their search for what defines them as their self. It created internal conflicts and they often blamed society for specific expectations and stereotypes. How the characters decided to express their feelings in emotions demonstrates a sense of realism and how they viewed themselves. In each play, we are able to see how the characters deal with the searching of their identity through various emotions and internal conflicts through their life choices.

When I saw In the Heights on Broadway, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m thrilled that Hauppauge’s SoLuna Studio has added it to their summer season. The wonderful creation runs through July 26th at the adorable Long Island venue.

In Jane Jacobs’s acclaimed The Life and Death of Great American Cities, she intricately articulates urban blight and the ills of metropolitan society by addressing several binaries throughout the course of the text. One of the more culturally significant binaries that Jacobs relies on in her narrative is the effectively paradoxical relationship between diversity and homogeneity in urban environments at the time. In particular, beginning in Chapter 12 throughout Chapter 13, Jacobs is concerned greatly with debunking widely held misconceptions about urban diversity.

When I read this play I react in an aggressive way because no matter what we try to do Americans will always see us as mediocre people who are always doing illegal things and that's part of my life because as Hispanic the stereotypes that have been created about my people will persecute me forever