By SHARON EBERSON
Mandy Gonzalez, the original Nina in the Tony Award-winning In the Heights, possesses a genre-defying voice that inspired Lin-Manuel Miranda to gush that she is “one of the greatest singers on earth.” She has played some of the most memorable characters in some of the most memorable Broadway productions of the 2000s — Elphaba in Wicked and Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard among them — but it is her collaborations with the creator of In the Heights and Hamilton that brings her to Heinz Hall for Everything I Know: Mandy Gonzalez Sings Lin-Manuel Miranda, October 8-11, 2026.
Everything I Know and Breathe are Nina’s signature songs from In the Heights, and for you Hamilfans, Gonzalez was the first replacement for Tony-winner Rene Elise Goldsberry as Angelica Schuyler in Hamilton. She also won an OBIE Award for her performance in the off-Broadway production of Eli’s Comin’.
Her LMM song list will include selections from animated musicals such as Moana, Encanto and Vivo, a song written for Sesame Street, and the title song he wrote for her album Fearless, an anthem for teens experiencing isolation and loneliness, written at Gonzalez’s request. She is the founder of #FearlessSquad, a social media movement for inclusiveness and positivity.
The singer-actress (TV’s Madame Secretary) has been performing with orchestras for more than 15 years, “and I absolutely love it,” Gonzalez said via a recent Zoom conversation. “There’s nothing like singing with a full orchestra, especially like the one that I’ll be singing with.in Pittsburgh.”
The idea for the concert she will be performing in Pittsburgh began when she sang for a Boston Pops July 4th celebration, and she was asked to sing two songs by Miranda. She chose “Everything I Know” and “Fearless.”
“I had so many people of all ages come up to me after that Boston Pops show … to tell me how much his music meant, and how much my singing those songs meant to them.”
The outpouring lit a spark, with Gonzalez wondering, “Why is [Miranda’s] music not celebrated like other composers that I love? Like Andrew Lloyd Webber or Stephen Sondheim?I put his music in that category, because he’s truly a game-changer and a legend.”
It took one email exchange with her friend to get permission to use his songs, and “that’s when the work really started.”
Working with music arranger and music director Dan Lipton and director Dick Scanlan, they began to put together a “mixtape playlist,” she said, of songs she had sung or knew she would enjoy singing.
“It was so long that I remember my director was like, well, we can’t put all of it in, but these songs, I feel like we can weave a story,” Gonzalez said.
With orchestrations by Julio Caesar Barreto, her team arrived at “a full package, ready to go.” There is one day of rehearsal with the PSO before three concerts. Serving as conductor is Sean Mayes, whose Broadway credits include time with Broadway’s MJ: The Musical and Hadestown.
“We always work with the rhythm section ahead of time, because there’s so many different sounds within his music rhythmically,” Gonzalez said. “You know, you’re working with the best musicians in the country, who are able to sight read like nobody’s business, so you have to be ready to go.”
She recently was a featured performer, reuniting with her In the Heights co-star Christopher Jackson at the first The Festival, what she described as a three-day “Lollapalooza for Broadway fans.”
From the outdoor stages in Kingston, N.Y. to Heinz Hall will be a very different experience, she knows. Where orchestras call home, “It feels like hollowed halls, you know, it’s a very sacred space.”
From the Broadway stage to a concert hall is the stepping out of a character and connecting with an audience as herself, while singing songs of a composer she calls friend and reveres
“Everywhere I have performed Everything I Know, everybody’s so excited, from the conductor to the musicians. … It’s been thrilling everywhere we go, because of the audiences and letting them have this once-in-a-lifetime kind of experience.”
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra’s PNC Pops concert Everything I Know: Mandy Gonzalez Sings Lin-Manuel Miranda, is at Heinz Hall, Downtown, October 8-11, 2026. Tickets: https://pittsburghsymphony.org/production/104695/everything-i-know-the-music-of-lin-manuel-miranda
Categories: Arts and Ideas, Show Previews
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