When production designer Nelson Coates first saw Lin-Manuel Miranda’s “In the Heights” Broadway musical in 2008, he was so “blown away” that he immediately bought tickets to two more performances.
“One of the exciting ideas that Jon had for the whole movie, instead of having each number being variations on a theme, he wanted each one to have its own identity and its own look and feel,” Coates said.
The production design of “In the Heights” — a block party commemorating the individual and collective diversity of the neighborhood through its cultural pride and island memories — became a creative patchwork of actual locations and set builds at Brooklyn’s Marcy Armory.
“Ironically, it had a bodega and a car service on two different corners, but there were six different salons that I had to get rid of or hide the weakest corner with a series of town homes.
The bodega was a combination of an actual bodega exterior and interior set build, which required some imaginative reverse engineering for the more elaborate transformation into the El Sueñito bar at the end.
The older-looking salon set for “No Me Diga,” spotlighting the gossiping hairdressers, was one of the most difficult to navigate because of the long, narrow spaces, and lack of motivational light sources.
Also, because such a long space can be visually dull with everyone on the same level, Coates introduced a riser area in the back, which helped with the dance number, in which all of the chairs needed to roll and move to Christopher Scott’s choreography.
But the ingenious location for the “96,000” synchronized swimming number — the Highbridge Park Pool — actually came from Chu during an early scout.
Coates provided paint chips of exactly what he wanted the pool to look like, and they had all sorts of fencing and safety rails that needed to be removed for the singing and dancing in the water.
“And they’re all at different levels because they were built at different times,” said Coates, “so we had to create platforms for the dance surface and for the cameras, and there needed to be engineering on all of the fire escapes for them to stay up and have activity on them safely.
But Nina romantic dance on the side of a building for “When the Sun Goes Down” offered the greatest production design challenge.
“The majority of buildings have singular windows, and, with that sort of punctuation, it’s hard to ever have the magic of being on top of glass because you’re off of it almost as soon as you’re on it.
A complete building was designed, and the eventual set consisted of a two-story 26’ x 26’ section of the building, which included four double hung windows and two fire escape baskets and ladders, dense enough to support body weight and to create a danceable surface area.