Lin Manuel Miranda’s first hit, Tony-winning musical sensation, “In the Heights,” was crafted when he was a sophomore at Wesleyan University in Middletown.

The show had its first production in Connecticut on the Wesleyan campus, before going on to Broadway and the world. On Friday, the film version of “In the Heights” opened in theaters everywhere and also streams for a month on HBO Max.

Miranda began writing the play over winter break In 1999. While the show is a kind of love letter to his hometown of Washington Heights, New York, in a recent interview with the Associated Press, Miranda said he wrote it out of fear.

“I had a real wake-up call when I was 18, 19 and starting to study theater. The fear was: I’m going into a field that has no space for me, that has no roles for me. It was sort of that thing of: No one’s going to write your dream show. The cavalry isn’t coming,” Miranda said.

In college, he found himself at odds with those who were more into experimental drama than the hip-hop musical he was envisioning. In a 2016 episode of the “WTF Podcast,” Miranda told host Marc Maron that “trying to make musical theater happen,” he declares, “was very hard at Wesleyan.”

“In the Heights” tells the story of Usnavi, a bodega owner in northern Manhattan. The film version emphasizes Usnavi’s quest to make enough money to return to his native Dominican Republic, but the heart of the show is its depiction of the Latino community in the Washington Heights neighborhood of New York — running small businesses, falling in love, chasing their dreams, throwing street parties and coming together in times of crisis. Through these trials, Usnavi comes to cherish the neighborhood and his role in it.

Miranda presented the show first as a one-act musical on campus in 2000. It was seen by two seniors, John Buffalo Mailer and Neil Stewart, who later co-founded a theater company in New York, Back House Productions. Back House staged readings of the play, which caught the attention of producers who took on the play and guided it through development. In 2005, “In the Heights” had a critical workshop period at the Eugene O’Neill center, whose National Musical Theater Conference hired Quiara Alegria Hudes to rework the book.

The show premiered off-Broadway in 2007 and on Broadway in 2008, starring Miranda as Usnavi. It was nominated for 13 Tony Awards and won for best new musical and best original score. Miranda and Hudes were finalists for the Pulitzer Prize in Drama.

Since then, small theaters and community theaters have embraced the show. A couple of years ago, both West Hartford’s Playhouse on Park and the Westport Country Playhouse staged “In the Heights” within months of each other.

An early attempt to film “In the Heights” — in 2011, directed by Kenny Ortega — was scuttled by Universal Studios, reportedly because the studio wanted to cast big stars and Miranda wanted up-and-comers. In 2016, Miranda announced the film would be produced by The Weinstein Company. Following the sexual misconduct accusations against Harvey Weinstein, Miranda and Hudes spoke out publicly against the producer and worked to move the production to a different company, Warner Bros.

The version out Thursday was filmed in the summer of 2019 with a screenplay by Hudes and direction by John Chu (“Crazy Rich Asians”). Usnavi is portrayed by Anthony Ramos, best known for the Spike Lee’s Netflix series “She’s Gotta Have It.” The film originally was scheduled to be released in June 2020, until the coronavirus pandemic shut down cinemas nationwide.

The first national tour of “In the Heights” played The Bushnell in 2010. When the show visited the Shubert in New Haven in 2012, Miranda attended an end-of-tour party. “We barely knew who he was then,” says the Shubert’s Director of Marketing & Community Relations Anthony Lupinacci.

In 2010, Miranda told The Courant’s Frank Rizzo about another musical he had in mind, based on a song he had performed.

“It is a rap song for Alexander Hamilton from the perspective of Aaron Burr. It’s ‘The Hamilton Mix Tape’ and it’s all hip-hop music but I’ve only written two songs so far. Did you read Hamilton’s biography? Every page is a hip-hop story, with so much of it echoing the tragic story of hip-hop figures: bastard orphan, entirely self-made man, self-taught, masterful at language, self-destructive tendencies, sex scandals.”

“In the Heights” can be seen at Cinemark theaters in Manchester and Enfield; AMC theaters in Plainville, Southington and Danbury; Cinepolis West Hartford; Holiday Cinemas in Wallingford; Mansfield Movieplex; and at Real Art Ways in Hartford. It is also streaming on HBO Max through July 11.

Christopher Arnott contributed to this story.

Susan Dunne can be reached at sdunne@courant.com .