ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the mobilization of defiant joy in terms of geography and the use of stage space. It considers four major categories of space that are articulated in the representative musicals. They include spiritual space, community space, commodified space, and safe/dangerous space. The socio-spatial theatre of these musicals speaks to colonial and migrant-related trauma and engages with a multilayered spectatorship through processes of familiarization and defamiliarization. These processes are carried out in several ways: through The Capeman’s representation of the island; in West Side Story and In the Heights’ depiction of the New York City barrio; and around Hamilton’s central scenic element, its turntable. This chapter argues that the commodification and micro-colonization of the barrio presented both within the world of In the Heights and external to it, in the form of the unrealized Ciudad de Sueños project, are in dialogue with the Roselló administration’s incentives to lure wealthy investors to the island to live as “Puertopians,” in response to the mass migration of islanders after Hurricanes Irma and Maria. Another response to these natural disasters, the touring production of Hamilton to Puerto Rico represents the next phase of Miranda’s evolution as a “healer” figure.
