Mandy Gonzalez with Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Courtesy of Mandy Gonzalez)
Mandy Gonzalez has been friends with Lin-Manuel Miranda since 2004. She starred in his original production of “In the Heights,” which won a Tony Award for Best Musical, and played Angelica Schuyler in “Hamilton,” which you may have heard of.
On April 25, Gonzalez will join the Philly Pops at the Kimmel Center to pay tribute to Miranda’s career and music in “Everything I Know: Mandy Gonzalez Sings Lin-Manuel Miranda.” But the show will be about Gonzalez, too, a Broadway actor and singer with a Jewish mother and Latino father.
Though her last name is Gonzalez, the Broadway star grew up Jewish. She often got questions about that, and she rarely felt fully Jewish or Latino. The experience motivated her to claim her identity at a young age.
“I had to get comfortable being different and not fitting into any box,” she said.
Gonzalez has played characters facing similar struggles. The one that felt most close to home was Elphaba from “Wicked,” the green-skinned girl with magical powers who grows into the Wicked Witch of the West.
“Elphaba was a big one, somebody who didn’t really fit,” Gonzalez said.
While the actor may have faced those perceptions and comments growing up, she never felt them from her own family. She has fond memories of large Jewish gatherings in
Southern California with her maternal grandparents.
They attended Shabbat services at a local synagogue in Tarzana, a neighborhood in Los Angeles. They went to High Holiday services at a bigger synagogue in Encino, another LA neighborhood. Perhaps most memorably, they would have huge extended family dinners.
“Everything was about family,” Gonzalez said.
The future Broadway star was raised Jewish because it was important to her mother. Her father, who grew up Catholic, had decided that his religion “wasn’t something he wanted to follow,” Gonzalez said.
He was also in love with Gonzalez’s mother. The two met in a way that could make for its own Broadway show.
The actor’s father was serving in the U.S. Army in the Vietnam War, and one of his soldier buddies was writing home to his wife. The buddy told his wife that Gonzalez’s father had no one to write to him, and asked if she could get her sister to do so.
The sister was Gonzalez’s mother.
“Through those letters, they fell in love,” the actor said.
After the war, her father had his pen pal’s address, so he showed up on her doorstep. She opened, “and they fell in love in person,” Gonzalez said.
Mandy Gonzalez with Lin-Manuel Miranda. (Courtesy of Mandy Gonzalez)
In the letters, Gonzalez’s mother also explained that she was Jewish, though her father had no idea what that meant. He had grown up in a family of farm workers in Fresno, California, that hadn’t really met Jews.
Yet all three of their kids were raised Jewish, with their dad’s full support. As Gonzalez put it, “He even knows a good brisket from a bad brisket.”
“He’s like Jew-ish,” she added.
For a long time, Gonzalez felt similarly, but she no longer does.
The Broadway star had a bat mitzvah as a kid, and her daughter has now had one, too.
When she spoke for this interview, she was preparing to host a Passover Seder at her North Jersey home.
“It’s integral to who I am,” she said.
Gonzalez will sing about this and more on April 25 at the Kimmel Center. She will also sing some of Miranda’s biggest hits.
Gonzalez met Miranda, who wasn’t famous at the time, when she got a call from her agent about a Latino composer who was putting together an all-Latino production. He wanted to meet Gonzalez in the basement of The Drama Book Shop.
“I walked downstairs, and there was Lin-Manuel,” she recalled.
He offered her the part of Nina Rosario, the smart girl in “In the Heights”, who returns home from Stanford University and falls in love with Benny, the cab driver who works for her father. The show launched her career, as it rose from off-Broadway to Broadway, ultimately winning four Tony Awards.
But while “In the Heights” changed her life, “Hamilton” might have been its most exhilarating experience.
“When the lights go out, we’re all in this together,” she said of Broadway shows. “When the lights go out at ‘Hamilton,’ it’s like a rock concert.”
Gonzalez has been performing with orchestras like the Philly Pops for over 10 years. While appearing with the Boston Pops a few years ago, she got the idea for the show she’ll be headlining at the Kimmel Center. The Boston Pops asked her to sing “Everything I Know,” a song from “In the Heights.”
“I wrote to Lin-Manuel, ‘I have an idea to put together a concert of your music, but also how our lives have intertwined over the years,’” she recalled. “There are stories about our families and coming to America. There are stories and songs for everybody.”