The Distance Home is the real thing — a Broadway musical with something to say and the craft to say it. Director Ramón Alvarado-Shin’s production at the Harrington Theatre is the first show this season that made me forget I was sitting in a seat.

That’s high praise. I mean every word.

Soledad Arango-White plays Consuelo Reyes, a Puerto Rican grandmother who left San Juan in 1968 and swore she would never look back. Fifty-eight years later, her American-born daughter Camille — played by Mireille Osei, ferocious and funny and breaking your heart in the same breath — has booked them both on a plane. The musical spans the week before departure and the trip itself, told in non-linear time through the score of composer Elías Vega-Núñez, whose songs don’t so much underscore the emotion as excavate it.

What Vega-Núñez does with the orchestra — conducted from the pit with visible urgency by Tomas Brellet — is work in the tradition of Sondheim at his most harmonically restless. Nothing resolves when you want it to. The songs sit in the dissonance and ask you to sit there too.

Arango-White is why you buy the ticket. She’s been a fixture of downtown theater for fifteen years and this is the role that’s going to make everyone who missed her feel like they owe her an apology. In the Act One closer, “Still There,” she stands at the edge of a bare stage — no orchestra under her for the first verse, just her voice and the weight of a half-century — and the Harrington went completely still. Not politely still. Surgically still. The kind of quiet that comes when an audience knows something historic is happening and doesn’t want to breathe on it.

The set, designed by Fiona Aldgate-Park, earns its own conversation. The main playing space is a single apartment room that rotates and reassembles itself to become a departure terminal, a San Juan street corner, a childhood kitchen. The transitions are staged so cleanly that you barely notice they’re happening until the world has already changed. It’s the best scene-change design I’ve seen since the old revolving stage at the Vance, and it serves the story instead of competing with it.

So why is this a four-star review and not five? Because the second act, mija, meanders. There’s a twenty-minute stretch in the middle where Alvarado-Shin loses the thread — two back-to-back ballads that say the same emotional thing, followed by a comedic duet that belongs in a lighter show. The structure holds eventually, and the final fifteen minutes are as good as Broadway gets. But you feel the weight of those twenty minutes, and they cost the piece something real.

Osei, for what it’s worth, does not meander. Her second-act confrontation with Arango-White across a hotel breakfast table is so precise in its fury — the way Camille keeps trying to use her fork normally while everything inside her is coming apart — that the audience I saw it with started laughing at the wrong moment, then caught themselves, then went silent when they realized what they’d laughed at. That’s a performance that does the work.

You need to see this show. Not because it’s perfect. Because Arango-White is doing the best work of her career and it deserves your witness, and because Vega-Núñez’s score is going to sound extraordinary on a cast recording but nothing like what it sounds like in that room. Go before they figure out they can raise the prices. Go knowing the second act is going to test you, and go anyway.

The distance home is always longer than you think. This show knows that. Estamos aquí.