Minor spoilers are discussed in this post.I have a very special connection to Lin-Manuel Miranda’s first Broadway musical production In The Heights, from growing up in The Heights to being boricua and Argentinian. Not only was I amazed by going to see my first Broadway show when I was little, sitting in the mezzanine to see In The Heights made me immediately connect myself to Broadway because I saw myself on stage. There are many other reasons why I love the hip-hop Latin musical, but the main fact is that this love has made me desperate to see it as an adult once more. This was made a bit trickier though because In The Heights is no longer being performed on Broadway. Thankfully, due to Miranda’s new big hit - a little show you may have heard of, Hamilton - many productions want to get their hands on his first show to put on because they cannot do Hamilton until it is off Broadway. This is how I found myself attending In The Heights in the middle of Long Island, NY being produced by a white majority with an entirely white audience in an experience that left my insides twisted.If you don’t know, In The Heights is about “a hundred stories” of the people who live in the small corner of New York City called Washington Heights, a Latin community in upper Manhattan. The story’s main character is Usnavi, the bodega owner, who is a proud Dominican man who dreams of returning to his island, which he considers home more than the USA. The entire cast in encompassed with Latin characters, such as Nina, a second generation Latin character, with only one character who was written racially ambiguous, Benny. The characters are not the only explicitly Latin aspects of the show; the music has a very distinct Latin-American flare, Spanish words are unabashedly used throughout, and the specific Latin culture that is found in our communities is consistently mentioned.With all this attention to Latin culture, and being Latinidad myself, I was hyper-aware of my surroundings when I sat in my seat and noticed that there was only one other person of color in the small theater. Originally, I felt myself puff up with pride - the entire house was packed, only 3 seats left empty in the entire audience - and they all came out to see a show about Latin people. While I do want to say my connection to the show still had me weeping to myself nearly every single song, I was not unaware of the problems that were arising from the production.First, I will have to say I cannot say this for certain because I purposely did not get a playbill so I would not have confirmation, I am certain that the cast did not consist of mostly Latin performers. This problem I spotted as soon as I saw the entire entourage in the opening song. This already gave me complex feelings on how well the show would be, many of the accents were dropped, some Spanish words were said wrong, and some of the impact is lost immediately. There are two major problems for me when it came to the production of the show that cannot be overlooked. Going off of all the stage photographs from the original Broadway production, I noticed that all of the women’s clothing - even Nina’s at a certain point - are hyper-sexualized in this production. Their costumes were all short and cropped for each leading lady. The biggest insult? The fact that the very important instrument, the bongos, were left entirely out of the musical compositions. These things are already chipping away at some of the aspects of In The Heights, but that was not all. The most disheartening was the reactions from the audience.If you’ve seen Jordan Peele’s racially impacted horror film Get Out with different audiences, you’ll understand that watching with different groups changed how you view it. It all shows in the little things; what do they laugh at, what do they gasp at, what do they comment on, what do they walk away with.Many of the jokes that are culturally specific, of course, did not land. While I always barked out laughing at Usnavi’s insistence that he “won’t make any profit if the coffee isn’t light and sweet,” no one else in the audience saw any significance to the line. These dead jokes are to be expected when I’m the only Latinidad in the audience, but I am haunted by when they did choose to laugh. Whenever someone would exasperate a Spanish word, which is constant with the heatwave, there were chuckles. It happened over and over again, with many of the jokes. By the end of the show it gave me the aching feeling that they were not laughing with us in the humor of the show, they were laughing at Latin culture.There was a true testament to the difference between myself and the rest of the audience in the understanding of the show when I was the only one sniffling at Kevin’s solo Inútil, a heart-wrenching expression of his farmer father calling him useless and feeling useless when being unable to help his daughter. The first half of the show ends with the blackout that occurred just when the massive fight in the club happens (the scenes within the songs The Club and Blackout). During intermission, I overheard two men discussing what they thought thus far… “I thought it would be about growing up in Washington Heights, so of course it ends in a fight.” Hearing this made my face turn red, I wasn’t sure if I should shrink back or flare up with anger. The second man followed with his own declaration, “It’s just like West Side Story.” I returned to my seat feeling somehow ashamed. As usual, our diverse stories are all lumped together, and somehow still stereotyped. The audience wasn’t connecting with the culture of those people in the play, they weren’t trying to connect themselves with the characters, either.In the second half of the show, where Kevin and Benny are arguing, Kevin declares that the younger man is not a part of their culture, it was enlightening on a brutal truth of an issue very present in Latin culture. But in this setting, it seemed foul. It no longer felt like self-criticism. I even heard an audience member behind me whispering that “we were right about them.” The lesson doesn’t land or translate, instead it became reassurance of previous perceptions. Latin people were still them, we were still othered. While sitting there and listening to Usnavi say they were “just a corner full of foreigners” I realize that Latinidad people are not the only ones who think this. Here was an entire theater of people seeing this amazingly beautiful display of absolute pride and using it as amusement for themselves. Latin culture was being used as cheap amusement for a replacement for what they really wanted. This production didn’t seem like it was being put on to show a silenced culture, it was not about diversity. They didn’t set out to do this, and empathy certainly didn’t happen, either.The problem with having a diverse show on Broadway is the audience is almost never a mirror to that, even with Hamilton. While these shows are absolutely crucial to the people who are represented in them and building upon our culture, shows like In The Heights have always been a way to show our pride in our culture. Yet I did not leave that production with a sense of pride. Walking out of the theater, I left with the bitter taste of anger and shame, while everyone else left with the sense that they did the right thing by paying to see a show about the “other” people.