Mineola High School students Bonnie Small and Kevin Merino gave a performance of their duet from next week’s production of “In the Heights” during the meeting of the Mineola Board of Education Thursday night at the Willis Avenue School.
The 2013 spring production covers the lives of an ensemble cast of characters in the largely Dominican-American neighborhood of Washington Heights in New York City over the course of three days.
The duet entitled “Hundreds of Stories” between Small, who plays “Abuela Claudia” and Merino, who plays “Usnavi,” the lead character, comes at the beginning of act two after Usnavi’s bodega has been robbed and she tries to convince him to move with her to the Dominican Republic using her lottery winnings.
“She serves as a surrogate grandmother to everybody in the neighborhood,’ director Joe Owens said. “The show has a decidedly Latin feel to it, taking place in Washington Heights, in the largely Dominican and Puerto Rican community where we see the themes of looking for something better, always trying to look for something better for you and your family, everybody dreams of getting out of the neighborhood to look for something better and we find that, as you often do, that what we were looking for was often right in front of us the whole time.”
The play was first performed in 1999 by Wesleyan University’s student theater company before premiering on Broadway in 2008 for a three-year run.
The curtain will go up on the Mineola High School production on March 15 at 7:30 p.m. and again on March 16 at 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.
