Wall-to-wall, the touring version of In the Heights that settled onto the Belk Theater stage last week was exactly as I remembered the scenery at the Richard Rodgers Theatre, where I saw the original Broadway version in August 2009. Even in the scenes where budgeting might seem strapped, like in the pre-4th of July dinner when Usnavi’s family gets together with Nina’s, they were doing it exactly as I saw it in New York, with the lights turned down and the dinner table out in the street.

No, the difference was in the atmosphere, diluted when you take a musical out of an 86-year-old house that seats 1380 and plop it into a place that is more than 50% larger. Though I sat nearly as close to the stage at the Belk, the feeling that I was with the characters onstage in the Washington Heights neighborhood was gone. The building didn’t shake with block party merriment as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s score – a Molotov cocktail of rap, pop, and salsa – poured into hall. I had to content myself simply watching in relative calm.

News has just gotten out that Charlotte outdrew more than two-thirds of the other markets on the In the Heights tour, posting a higher week-long gross than Orlando, Portland, Minneapolis, and Austin – with a cash total that was better than any single week during any of the multi-week runs in Houston, Seattle, or San Fran – affirming Charlotte’s receptiveness to multicultural fare. Looking up to the uppermost row in the uppermost balcony at the Belk, I saw people in seats before the show opened last Tuesday, so walk-ups were minimal. If I did feel separated from the action, it was hard to miss the phenomenon of one melting pot watching another.

The ramshackle streetscape near the towering GWB – that’s the George Washington Bridge, y’all – nearly brought me to tears anyway this time around. Perhaps that’s because I attended Yeshiva University High School in that neighborhood, often taking the train that stopped at 181st Street (with an entrance closely resembling the one that haunts stage left in Anna Louizos’ set design) back to my home in Queens. More likely, it was because Danny Bolero gave such a powerful performance as Nina’s father, who feels “Inutil (Useless)” after the neighborhood’s great shining hope has lost her scholarship at Stanford University. Nina’s is an immigration success story on hold, and Bolero’s keenly-felt anguish reminded me that this was actually a family story – or a quintessentially American story that I closely identify with.

If Bolero was marginally better than the Kevin that I saw on Broadway, then I must say there was a perceptible gap between most of the others and the original cast. Yet aside from the fact that the sound wasn’t as crisp at the Belk, an essential factor when Joseph Morales as Usnavi is spraying plot points in rapidfire rap, there was only one small aspect about the touring version, directed by Thomas Kail, that distressed me. Street vandal/dealer Graffitti Pete, as portrayed by José-Luis Lopez, ceased to strike me as a dangerous loose cannon long before the sudden denouement.

There was no lack of intensity from the stage, particularly from Natalie Toro as Nina’s mom, Camila, telling off her husband and her daughter in her signature moment. Lexi Lawson as Usnavi’s heartthrob, Vanessa, strutted and sizzled like the alpha female of the Heights, a déclassé counterpart to the overachieving Nina. I did warm up to Genny Lis Padilla as Nina, but it took awhile; chemistry between her Benny, her dad’s loyal taxicab dispatcher, occasionally sputtered because of Nicholas Christopher’s inconsistency.

Comedy from Ana Noguiera as Carla, the beauty shop owner where Vanessa toils, was always on-target, warm-hearted beneath the big-city attitude. The real warmth came from Elise Santora as the beloved Abuela Claudia, the neighborhood matriarch who wins the $96,000 in the lottery that will solve everybody’s problems – including Usnavi’s return to his homeland and Nina’s return to Stanford – or not. Utterly superfluous and indispensible was David Baida as the Piragua Guy, a single hard-working street peddler defying the corporate incursion of Smoothies and Slushies with a pushcart and a song in the heat of July.

Totally cool.