The life of the musical

Hugh Jackman informed this year’s Oscar audience that the musical “is back.” That certainly seems to be the case on television, where the “High School Musical” phenomenon has spread like morning glory, the latest bloom being Fox’s hey-kids-let’s-put-on-a-high-school dramedy, “Glee.”

So it’s only fitting that PBS would want to remind everyone that the old-school musical remains alive and well and performing nightly on Broadway. Tonight’s “Great Performances” is titled “In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams,” and you don’t get more musical-theater than that.

“In the Heights” debuted on Broadway last year as the little show that could (it’ll be coming to Hollywood’s Pantages Theatre in June 2010). With a cast that makes “Rent” look white-bread and with an attitude more salsa and rap than Rodgers and Hammerstein, “In the Heights” won four Tonys including best musical. More important, it offered hope to a genre that has lately seemed bogged down in reprises and Disney adaptations.

Tonight’s documentary takes viewers behind the scenes, where we meet Lin-Manuel Miranda, who created the concept, wrote the music and lyrics and starred in the original production, along with director Thomas Kail and many of the hard-working but still starry-eyed performers who made up the original cast (including Tony winner Priscilla Lopez, who was the original Diana Morales in “A Chorus Line”).

Produced by the same team behind the play, “In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams” has the same quick and saucy beat of its subject. Instead of having some longtime critic or (shudder) academic opine about the show’s rather rule-breaking score (Rapping? On Broadway?) and racially eclectic cast, we have Miranda explaining, simply, that he wanted to create a show that he would actually want to be in, Robin De Jesus expressing relief that he was finally not having to carry a gun or play a criminal, and Karen Olivo admitting that she finally felt like a legitimate Latina. (Olivo went on to play Anita in the current revival of “West Side Story.”)

For every predictable “admission” -- this one always wanted to be an actor, that one has been singing since she was a child and every member of the cast spent their childhood feeling “different” -- there are also lovely little glimpses into the reality of the theatrical life.

Though still a very young man, Seth Stewart has been dancing his whole life and it shows, not only in his ability, but also in the joint-strengthening elixirs he gags down and the many braces, bandages and pads he must wear.”Those people are paying $110 for a ticket,” he says at one point. “They don’t care if you’re hurt.”

Christopher Jackson struggles to maintain his famously capricious dream while taking responsibility for a family that includes an autistic child. “How am I going to be an actor and provide for a child with special needs when I don’t have anything?” he says.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the career spectrum, we watch as Lopez finally gets her portrait in Sardi’s, Broadway’s local milestone/honor that actually you would have thought she’d have been granted long ago.

So if you, or someone you know, longs for life in the theater, for song and dance that is more sawdust and greasepaint than Jonas Brothers or even show choir, “In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams” is required viewing.

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mary.mcnamara@latimes.com

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‘Great Performances: In the Heights: Chasing Broadway Dreams’

Where: KCET

When: 8 tonight

Rating: TV-PG (may be unsuitable for young children)