Q.	How was that final bow on Broadway?
A.	It was unreal. I came out with a five-minute standing ovation, which was pretty amazing. Having done the show for a year, you learn to do the show so you can do it safely eight shows a week, but [I thought] “I don’t have another one coming, got to leave it all on stage tonight.” It was really a special night.
Q.	What did you do on your first week off the show?
A.	I took a page out of the play and took my abuelita to Las Vegas for a couple of days, which was fantastic. One of my first memories was going with her to the slot machines in the back of our local bodega. We went to the Bellagio a couple of days, and I wheeled her to every slot machine we could find and had a great time.
Q.	You’re back Uptown?
A.	I live three blocks from where I was living when I first wrote the show. It’s really quite a lifeline. I look at old black-and-white pictures of my grandfather, who passed away the week after the show opened on Broadway, and it’s like looking at black-and-white pictures of myself. And, frankly, the stories my father and my grandparents told me are the linchpin of In the Heights. You learn so much about yourself by linking ties with the people who share most of your genetic material. They remain an important part of my life.
Q.	As a child you wanted to do film. Why did you choose the musical as your art form?
A.	There’s music, there’s dance, there’s drama, there’s everything. I fell in love with [musicals] at a very young age. I’m not one of these people who likes every musical; I’m very picky. But when a musical is firing on all cylinders, I don’t think there’s a more moving art form.
Q.	Some reviewers criticized the show for seemingly ignoring many of the social ills that affect inner-city neighborhoods like Washington Heights.
A.	Here’s where you get the really interesting difference between the Latino media and the mainstream media. The mainstream media said it’s a wonderful show, the dancing is great, the singing is great, but it’s so unrealistic. Latino media said it’s such a great show, the music is great, the singing is great, and—at last—it’s realistic. It really shows the [difference between how] mainstream America sees Latinos versus the way we see ourselves. And when we paint our own portraits, we often paint them with love.
Q.	You wrote the Spanish lyrics for the new production of West Side Story now on Broadway.
A.	As a Latino actor, I’ve always described [West Side Story] as our greatest blessing and our greatest curse. For one, it’s a masterpiece. When I talked about musicals firing on all cylinders, I don’t think there’s a better synthesis of music, dance, drama, and subject matter. It has been the prevalent image of Latinos on stage for now 52 years. If you go backstage at In the Heights and start clapping the “America” beat, every single person back there can clap it with you, because we’ve all played Bernardo or Consuelo or Anita. That’s been our foot in the door as actors. When [librettist and director] Arthur Laurents approached me, he had a very audacious idea for this revival. He said, “I want the Sharks to talk to each other in Spanish when they’re with each other, and sing in Spanish when they feel like singing to each other in Spanish.” He said to me, “‘Do you think you can do that?” and I said, “I think I was born to do that.”
Q.	Did you work with the show’s lyricist, Stephen Sondheim?
A.	We met a couple of times. He was very generous about allowing me to find whatever language I needed to express the sentiments of the songs. What he was adamant about was the structure and rhyme. With a lot of the Spanish-language translations, the rhyme is the first thing that is sacrificed so that the lyrics can make sense in Spanish, so I really try to strike a balance between honoring the original lyric structure and continuing to have it make sense and be just as witty and effortless in Spanish as it is in its own amazing English lyrics.
Q.	I take it you’re satisfied with the result.