Hollywood legend Rita Moreno is returning to her movie musical roots. The EGOT recipient is set to play matriarch Abuela Claudia in Warner Bros’ forthcoming adaptation of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Tony-winning musical In the Heights, Deadline has confirmed.
Moreno, who won an Academy Award for her role as Anita in the movie musical West Side Story, joins Anthony Ramos, who previously appeared in the original Broadway cast of Miranda’s Broadway juggernaut Hamilton. Ramos will play Usnavi, the bodega owner at the center of the action in the Washington Heights-set musical. He also played Usnavi in the Kennedy Center production.
Crazy Rich Asians director Jon M. Chu is set to direct the pic that will be adapted by Quiara Alegría Hudes, who wrote the book for the original musical. Anthony Bregman, Mara Jacobs and Scott Sanders are producers.
Deadline exclusively reported in May that Warner Bros wrapped a $50 million deal to acquire film rights to the musical. The property was the subject of a hot auction after it was extracted from The Weinstein Company ahead of its bankruptcy.
In the Heights won four Tonys in 2008 including for Best Musical, for Hudes’ book, and for Miranda’s lyrics. In the original storyline, Usnavi strikes it rich and plans to leave, until the pull of the neighborhood and the people in it give him pause. The musical residents of the largely Latino Upper Manhattan neighborhood Washington Heights – a bodega owner, a college student, a taxi driver, a beauty salon worker, and an old woman – aspire to better lives as gentrification begins to take hold, and a sweltering summer power blackout brings their personal life crises to a head.
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