Philly inspires her Broadway show

NEW YORK - Quiara Alegría Hudes is, herself, in the heights. The Philadelphian who began writing plays at Central High School - we're not counting an eighth-grade effort at Friends Select that she insists was "horrible" - has hit Broadway.

Amid other projects, Hudes, 30, spent four years working and reworking her script for the exuberant new musical

In the Heights,

which she wrote with composer/lyricist Lin-Manuel Miranda, who also stars. The smart Broadway money says

In the Heights

, which opened Sunday at the Richard Rodgers Theatre with a knockout gamut of music - sizzling salsa, hip-hop and elegantly written rap - has moved in for a long run.

"The Heights" refers to Washington Heights, the Latino neighborhood at the northern edge of Manhattan that's been steadily gentrifying over this decade. There, immigrants from all over South and Central America, along with their American offspring, built what new Americans have built for two centuries: a community that thrives on its roots even as it assimilates into something new.

Hudes' book for the show is centered in Manhattan, but its story of people connected with three businesses could just as easily be about Philadelphia. Hudes' mother is from Puerto Rico and her father is Jewish; after her parents divorced, she acquired a Latino stepfather and a penchant for storytelling in West Philadelphia, where she grew up near 49th and Baltimore amid immigrants from many parts of the world, all with their own tales.

Many of her Puerto Rican relatives live in North Philadelphia, where her mother and stepfather, Virginia and Sedo Sanchez, own real estate and businesses (they used to run El Viejo San Juan restaurant on Girard Avenue); they also operate the bar and services for US Airways members at Philadelphia International Airport.

"Even though

In the Heights

is about Washington Heights," Hudes says, "a lot of it comes out of my experiences in North Philadelphia, where businesses are always opening and closing."

As a child, Hudes (pronounced HOO-des) learned to play piano by ear, and kept journals and wrote stories. In 1993, her one-act called

My Dreams About Girls

, which she wrote while at Central High, was a winner of the Philadelphia Young Playwrights Festival. The play, about the friendship between two girls who grow up in West Philly, was staged at Temple University.

That accolade came at a point of upheaval in her high school life; Hudes was thinking of leaving home and beginning college early. "Winning was an amazing experience for me, and because of it I stayed at Central to see the play produced." She's proud that this year, she is honorary chairman of Young Playwrights' fund-raising event.

Hudes went on to Yale to study musical composition, not playwriting.

"I was surrounded by stories all the time," she says. "To me, writing and storytelling was something everyone does. I didn't think of it as a career choice." With backing from the Mellon Foundation, she wrote two musicals at Yale, and after graduation in 1999 composed for dance ensembles, took on music projects for theaters and worked as a studio sound engineer.

One day, her mother - who has a long-held interest in the arts - talked with Hudes about the future.

"She wrote beautiful songs and wonderful music, but writing was always her passion," says Virginia Sanchez, a painter who works in Latina themes. She advised her daughter that "so much needed to be told, and she had a skill for it, and we needed more writers. I really wanted her to look into that area of her life more."

Hudes took those words to heart. The first in her family to go to college - like the character Nina in

In the Heights

- she was back in school again, this time at Brown University for a master's in playwriting. She began writing scripts, almost all set in Philadelphia; one play,

Elliot, A Soldier's Fugue,

about the Puerto Rican experience in the military, was staged Off-Broadway and became a finalist for last year's Pulitzer Prize in drama.

During a reading at the Manhattan Theatre Club of Hudes'

The Adventures of Barrio Grrrl!

, whose heroine is a chubby North Philly Latina, an impressed friend talked to a producer. The suggestion: Hudes could work as a playwright with Lin-Manuel Miranda, a young composer who began developing a musical about Washington Heights as a student at Wesleyan University. A year later, Hudes got her master's, and the two began collaborating.

"He had this sound that was so neat, and he had a lot of characters," says Hudes. "But the story about a love triangle - I thought it had to be about the community, and what happens to the three businesses in the play. That's what I brought to the story from North Philly."

In the Heights

opened Off-Broadway to raves last year, and the team toiled on it constantly before it came uptown. Much of the plot is advanced by the songs, which briskly develop characters, solidly move the plot forward and often are showstoppers.

In director Thomas Kail's production, everything seems charged with electricity, even though the power goes off in Washington Heights for much of the second act. Andy Blankenbuehler's killer choreography is stunning, Anna Louizos' set seems to sweep into the George Washington Bridge that hovers over it, and Howell Binkley's lighting turns into July Fourth fireworks. Miranda, who weaves his rap lyrics into fine webs, leads a superb cast.

Hudes won't be basking in Broadway's glow for long - she has many other projects. She's developing

Barrio Grrrl!

for the Kennedy Center in Washington. Atlanta's Alliance Theatre will produce her new play,

26 Miles

, about a Philadelphia mother and daughter who defy a custody decision and run away on a road trip. And Scholastic is publishing a book Hudes wrote about a girl from North Philadelphia who takes a Chinatown girl on a neighborhood tour.

Hudes and her husband, Raymond Beauchamp, a clerk for U.S. District Court Judge Ronald L. Buckwalter in Philadelphia, are busy with their biggest project, their 13-month-old daughter, Cecilia. They live both in Manhattan and "a nice loft apartment in Northern Liberties that's about 10 times our New York apartment size," she says.

Little by little, "I have to say goodbye to

In the Heights.

It's on the stage, and it's the actors' play now. A lot of people ask me, 'Was it always your dream to be on Broadway?' I came late to that. I'm not from New York - I never dreamed of it. My dream is, I want the words to live longer than I do. I want the stories to be out there, and just maybe, possibly, outlast me."

Playing at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, 226 W. 46th St., New York. Tickets: $21.50-$111.50. Information: 1-800-755-4000 or

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