Robin De Jesús

Hometown: “I'm from Norwalk, Connecticut, and my parents are Puerto Rican.”

Currently: Playing Sonny, the wisecracking bodega clerk and younger cousin of In the Heights' central character, Usnavi [Lin-Manuel Miranda].

Starting Out: While De Jesús loved singing growing up, he didn't start acting until just before high school. “It was in ninth or tenth grade when I was like ‘This is it,'” he recalls. One of the only ethnic kids involved in school plays, he found himself consistently cast in Asian roles, including Ling of Ling and Ching in Anything Goes and Ito in Mame. His hard work paid off when he won the leading role of the Public Poet in his final high school musical, Kismet. “Every character's from Baghdad, so everyone was [playing] Asian,” De Jesús recalls. “Everyone!”

Summer Camp: Just three weeks after high school graduation, De Jesús landed his first professional audition—for the film Camp, which became a popular favorite with stage fans. He played the leading role of Michael, a confused teen spending his summer at a musical theater camp. “It was overwhelming,” he says now. “I had never done film. I had never done anything. It was my version of college.” He learned the first rule of movies very quickly: Less is more. “I came from a high school where we were always told ‘Bigger is better!'” he notes. “So going to film was about learning to pull back to what was just enough.” After making the movie, De Jesús jumped head first into show business by coming to New York, waiting tables while struggling to get a break.

Paying the Rent: In 2005, De Jesús made his Broadway debut in Rent, joining the cast as Steve, the waiter and the squeegee man, as well as understudying Angel. “When I was in high school, everyone always said, ‘You should play Angel!'” The prophecy came true, and De Jesús took the stage with the show's original cast to sing a reprise of “Seasons of Love” at Rent's 10th anniversary performance. “The next day, I remember I had no voice,” he says of the aftermath of the enormous gala commemorating the event. “But I still came into work. I was like ‘I don't care!' It was such a great night.”

Scaling the Heights: For a brief period between projects, De Jesús considered leaving New York and entering college to study acting. But while participating in a workshop of a Kander & Ebb musical which became All About Us, he heard about In the Heights. Figuring it might be nice to do one last show before heading back to school, he joined the cast of a workshop at the O'Neill Center in Connecticut. “For two weeks, we worked our asses off, and I remember afterward [director] Tommy Kail going, ‘Let's do this again sometime!'” “Sometime” was three years later with Rent in between when In the Heights opened off-Broadway last winter. Sharing only two dressing rooms at 37 Arts Theatre, the huge cast was forced to bond. “When you changed your pants, you would elbow the person behind you, that's how tight it was,” De Jesús says. The sense of community that emerged from literally being so close traveled with the cast to Broadway's Richard Rodgers Theatre. “At five minutes to every show, we all round up downstairs in the green room, hold hands and do a prayer. I haven't experienced [something like] that since high school.”

Here Comes Sonny! De Jesús' character has expanded at each stage of In the Heights' development, giving him more of a chance to balance serving as the show's comic relief with packing a bit of an emotional punch. “Andrea [Burns, who plays sassy salon owner Daniela] and I feel like our characters are symmetrical and we're constantly saying, ‘Are we staying true? Are we pushing too much?' We're the check point for each other,” he explains. “There's more heart now; the jokes aren't just jokes for the sake of being funny, the jokes are the truth of life.” When asked to put his character into words, De Jesús doesn't hesitate: “Sonny is actually a very smart kid. He's a truth-speaker, and he's aware that things in the community are changing. He would like to glorify the ghetto a little bit more. But he's the kind of kid—you just want to squeeze his cheeks.”

We Are Family: The portrayal of the Latino community in In the Heights has renewed De Jesús' ties to his own family. “They love it,” the young actor happily reports. “This is the only show I've done that my brother has seen four times.” His siblings played a special part during the musical's emotional opening night as well. “I kept trying to get to them,” he says of the opening night party, but there were so many obstacles—press, well-wishers—that when De Jesús finally saw his family, he felt overwhelmed. “When I got to them, I bawled,” he says. “I didn't expect it. I grabbed my brother and my sister, and I just bawled. I never had a show that I cared about for my family as much as this one.”