June 2, 2021 • 39 mins
Lin-Manuel Miranda shares his meaning of ‘home,’ the central theme of the musical and movie “In the Heights.” He talks about the importance of home being the universal truth that connects us all. Miranda, along with his longtime collaborators Quiara Alegría Hudes and Alex Lacamoire, tell host Eva Longoria personal stories about their experiences growing up Latino and how it helped shape the story of “In the Heights.” They describe how the concepts of familia, musica and the neighborhood of Washington Heights became the perfect combination for the stage show turned film.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. I'm so excited to welcome you
to this very special limited series in the Hives, the
story of one of the most groundbreaking shows in the
history of musical theater and how it now has become
equally groundbreaking motion picture releasing June eleventh on Warner Brothers.
(00:22):
And I can't even contain myself when y'all asked me
to do this, and whenever this was like being put together,
I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, can I act
out every role? And uh can I can? I just
sing every song? It's the most amazing musical, it's the
most amazing project. And uh, this particular episode, we're gonna
(00:44):
talk later about the motion picture, but we're gonna first
start kind of about talk about themes, and then we're
gonna talk about the actual musical and when that happened, um,
and then about the movie at the end. So we're
gonna pace ourselves. I know I sound crazy right now,
but we will pace ourselves. But this particular episode is
about home and it's a big theme in the movie.
(01:06):
And I'm excited to talk to everyone who's on this
podcast right now. Of course, we have Lynn Manuel, Miranda, Hello,
longtime fan, first time caller. Hello, you have won a mattress. Uh.
We're so excited to have you. UM. I have so
(01:28):
much to ask you. But how are you doing? What's
going on? Where are you calling from? I am I
am well, uh, and I am I'm calling you from
upstate New York where I am editing my directing debut
tick tick boom that will come out later this year.
But I'm thrilled to be on this call with all
my favorite folks. Uh, with so much is going on
(01:51):
with you. I can't wait to see that. Um. But
I'm so excited because this is a brand new podcast
that we're doing for My Heart, which is part of
the larger network called my Equila. And what better way
to launch Michael podcasts than with this project with these
wonderful visionaries that are gonna be on with us. I
think Latinos are long overdue for representation and podcasting, and
(02:13):
so it's really exciting to be a part of it.
It's the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Um, Okay, Well, today
we're gonna talk about the genesis of this remarkable show
in the Heights and how it grew out of your
own personal experience growing up in in Inwood, Washington Heights,
New York, and how it's been made into this groundbreaking movie. Um,
but I don't think we can tell the whole story
(02:34):
without two of your longtime collaborators. Indeed, I feel like
we won't have the complete story. So I want to
bring on writer producer Guiarra Allegria, who this who wrote
the book in the Heights. Hey, if we should define
what we mean by book, uh, please please, because it's
the most single confusing term in my life. You know,
(02:56):
everyone's like, oh, I can't find your book on Amazon.
You know, people think that the book of a musical
understandably is a book that the music was adapted from.
In fact, it's just the script and the story. It's
it's like another word for libretto. Okay, okay, great. I'm
so happy you did that because I was about to
go on Amazon and look for the book. Uh. And
(03:18):
we have executive music producer Alex Lackamore. Is that how
I say it? Yeah? I stayed with the French pronunciation
exactly like that. Yes? Oh great? Um, well, you and
Lynn have been thickest thieves for a very long time. Welcome,
Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Now are
you all both in New York as well? I'm uptown.
(03:39):
I'm in Washington Heights. Um. You know, once I wrote
the show, I was like, I mean, we gotta it's
we gotta move there. So I had spent a long
time kind of roaming the streets and like riding the
subway back and forth in the area, writing and um
on the subway, so you know, it made sense. So
this is where my family is. That is amazing. And Alex,
where are you? I'm on the Upper west Side Manhattan? Okay?
(04:03):
Is that I'm not? I don't know New York. I'm
probably one of the few people that New York. Does
that mean you're bougie? Yes? But I think a big
part of the genesis of this musical is there's a
lot of New Yorkers who think the world stops on
the Upper West Side or the world stops at Harlem
(04:24):
and aren't even aware that the A train goes all
the way up to Seventh Street. Um. So you know,
a lot of this was about putting us on the
map in a literal way. We you know, I I
can see the George Washington Bridge out my window, so
that's something that people know exists uptown. It's like, oh,
I live near the George Washington Bridge, and they're like, okay,
(04:44):
so we're associated with traffic to people who don't really
know much more than the than the bridge, right I do.
I guess I do know New York by bridges as well.
I'm like, oh, yeah, the Brooklyn Bridge. Okay, yeah, okay, great,
that's that's a good marker. But you know, in the
movie which we're gonna talk about the movie later. I
don't want to jump ahead of myself, but I love
how you you guys actually did the map, like to
(05:05):
show where what you're talking about. That was very helpful.
It's that Nina line. It's you know, she used to
think that the subway map was the map of her
life and that she lived at the top of the world,
which was the top of the subway map. Right. That's
a fairly autobiographical lyric. Linda, did you grow up in
(05:27):
in Wood? Yeah? I grew up north of Washington Heights.
Washington Heights was downtown to me growing up. I grew
up off Dykeman Street, which is the second to last
stop on the A train. Um and um my parents
are still there and um yeah and I took piano
lessons on Street, and UM really kind of grew up
(05:50):
um in this tiny Latin American neighborhood that happened to
be in New York City when I was growing up.
Is largely Dominican neighborhood, but a lot of the sort
of older residents were Puerto Rican and Cuban, and it
was sort of many waves of Latino migration in this neighborhood,
so much so that my abuela could go to any
(06:10):
store on our block and and be understood and never
have to speak English on that block. And so, UM,
I always just knew that I felt like I was
sitting on a secret growing up, Like I was sitting
in this very special place. You knew that you knew
that you felt that it like had texture to you. Yeah,
and you know again, I I got into a a
(06:34):
gifted public school when I was very young, and so
I I was code switching. I was doing what Nina
did in college when I was like six years old,
Like I'm I'm now shuttling from you know, two hundred
streets to the Upper east Side. And and that's when
that bifurcation that so many of us experience happened for me.
I was Lin Manuel at home. I became Lin at school.
I spoke Spanish at home, I spoke English at school. Um,
(06:57):
and then you kind of figure out what is the
best version of yourself for any given room. And I
think in the heights when I started writing in college
was really the beginning. And again this is like Chiara's term,
not mine, because she always has the best words for it.
It was like the beginning of figuring out how to
bring all of myself into the room. It was like
bringing the Latin culture I grew up with into the
(07:17):
musical theater that I loved and the cast albums I memorized.
It was really kind of me trying to write my
way into a situation where I could be my fullest self. GETA,
you can speak to this too, because you guys collaborated
on this so closely. Um, did you feel what Lynn felt,
which was like, oh yeah, I can write, Yes, absolutely,
(07:39):
I mean my version of it. You know, I'm born
and raised in Philly, and like kind of like Lynde said,
all of who I was made sense and tell I
was about five years old and then my parents, Uh,
my mom is a brown body, equal woman, my dad
is a white Jewish man. They separated, and all of
a suddenly parts of me that just went together very
(08:00):
Actually we're literally separated in my life, and so I
think that sense of you know, choosing which is the
right way to be in which room you're in. I
mean that was even my family life, you know. Um,
but I was raised by my mom. I was raised
by my stepfather who's also Puerto Rican. He's from Batrankias.
My mom is from Asibo, And you know, I thought
(08:22):
all these different I thought like one checkbox per room.
And when as you get older and you mature, you realize, like, no,
I can bring more of myself into this room. Whoever
else is in the room, they can handle it like
they're grown ups too, you know. And I remember the
first time Lyndon I met and we're kind of deciding
if we wanted to collaborate that part of our history.
(08:44):
Really we really connected over that. Wow, you guys were
like a match made in heaven, just like Alex. I
feel like Alex, it's I've seen you. And then when
way hang out and I'm like, you guys speak a
different language, like when bagch of nerds the language of
music nerds, right, like you are just as genius as Linen,
(09:06):
And uh, tell me how you guys came to me.
We met because there were some mutual friends that I
had met in Miami, which is where I spent my teens,
And there were some actors in Miami that I had
done some shows with and they did an early workshop
in the Heights, um and this was before I was
(09:27):
even a part of In the Heights, and they had
said to Limonuell, hey you should meet Alex. He's from Miami,
he's Cuban, he's a pianist, he's an a arranger like you.
Guys would hit it off, and they introduced us and
they were right, you know. Once I I often tell
people that it wasn't until I met Limonuel in New
York that I felt like I had a certain part
of my life brought back to me. And what I
(09:49):
mean by that is I was born in l A, right,
and it's not a big Cuban community, and moved to Miami.
There is a big Cuban community there, right, So I
got used to what that's like, right, And you get
spoiled thinking to yourself that everybody speaks Spanish. You get spoiled.
You think that there's gonna be you know, storefronts written
in Spanish everywhere you go. And I left Miami to
(10:10):
go to college. I went to Boston, and no one
really knew that I was lett, you know at all. Right,
you know, people would like flip out when they'd see
me pick up the phone and start talking to my
mom in Spanish. They had no idea, um. And then
so I just didn't really have a lot of like,
uh Latin influence around me. But then I come to
New York and I meet Li Manuel, and then we
(10:30):
start amassing all these amazing collaborators, and care comes on board,
and we have all these actors, and all of a sudden,
like you know, we're celebrating what makes us us. And
in a way that just felt like home that the
very thing you were talking about, all these elements that
I just didn't realize how important they were to me
until I didn't have them. Right, Yeah, try try going
to Starbucks and ordering not in Spanish in Miami, right
(10:54):
right right? I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I gotta
pull up my Spanish here. Uh yeah. There's a lot
of things you take, you take for granted, and I
think there's so many of us that straddle a hyphen right,
like Puerto Rican, American, Cuban American, Mexican American, and you know,
like lynn Wood was talking about that code switching, navigating
that identity is uh, it's heavy. But then when you
(11:17):
find a group of people who are just like okay,
not only you feel like you found your tribe, but
they feel like home. Yeah, and that's exactly what I
felt when I met Linn and k Are. There's just
something about it. Oh, here's a we understand what that
code switching is like where we understand kind of having
to you know, as we've been talking live that that
(11:38):
dual life in that way, because yeah, I feel very
Americanized in that way, right like I was. You know,
when you're at the dinner table, Dad's like, okay, speak
Spanish at the dinner table, but you can speak English
anywhere else, right, And then yes, you know, like going
to the parties where music is blasting salsa, but then
going home and listening to my led Zeppelin and Beatles
records or whatever. You know, it's just it's very trying
to find how to you know, all those things make me.
(12:00):
But yeah, there's definitely that kind of hyphen between some
of that stuff that you try to bridge. Well, you know,
it's so funny, Alex because I when I grew up
in Texas, same thing. We spoke Spanish. I mean we
didn't really speak that much Spanish, but there were certain
words I didn't know the English word for, Like to
this day, I say Salah, like where the keys, My
keys are in the sala? You know what is sala?
(12:21):
And they're like living room and I'm like living room,
yeah yeah. Or mancha like if I had these um
sun spots on my face and I went to the
dermatologists and I go, I have these manchas. I don't
know what you like, I could. There were places that
I got so stuck in my I couldn't. There was
no code switching for it, right like there that just
(12:41):
the word that it is. Okay, Lynn, I want to
I want your version of that story. Like they both
felt like, Okay, I found my I found my other,
my other half of my orange as we say in Spanish, Um, yeah,
well it's me. Kiara's arrival in my life was very heralded. Um.
(13:05):
Everyone who met her before me was like, I think
you should meet her I want to see what you
feel like when you meet her. First it was Jill Furman,
who was a producer who has already involved with In
the Heights UM, and she said, I met Kiara, I
think you should meet her, and no one wanted to
say anything. I was like, I was feeling very intimidated
(13:26):
before our first meeting because again Carol like went a
Yale for music composition, she had an n f A
from Brown like went to grad school player. I was like,
what if you need me for like, you can do
all my jobs very easily. UM. And then Tommy met
with her. Tommy Carole our director, and again said the
exact same thing, I think you should meet her. UM.
(13:49):
And I walked in kind of intimidated with my scrappy
little eighty minute one act show and it was sort
of like this pod has like we just immediately started
talking about family. We met at the now extinct Market
Cafe on Ninth Avenue, UM, and it became it. It
(14:11):
just became very familial and familiar very quickly. UM. And
it was just like a you know, it was like
just meeting an old friend for the first time and
I'll never forget sort of saying goodbye to Kiara at
the four at the support Authority stop, I sort of like, Okay,
I'm gonna get on the train goodbye. I gave her
hug goodbye. I went down into the a train like
(14:34):
ran through and came up the other side. I did
like a fake goodbye because I couldn't wait to take
the train all the way to to a Seventh Street
home to tell Tommy, like, this is it. She's gonna
write it with us, She's the one. UM. I was
so excited that I met a kindred spirit who understood UM,
who had the same lens on their community that I did, UM,
(14:54):
one of love and one of like I want to
tell these stories to UM and so I couldn't wait
the forty minutes it would have taken me to get
home on the train. So just like did a fake goodbye,
came up another thing and called Tommy UM and UM.
And you know, it was a similar thing with with Alex.
Alex came recommended from actors who were doing readings of
(15:17):
In the Heights for us in the basement of the
drama bookshop. Um Janet Decol who would go on to
originate the role of Carla on Broadway was like, well,
I went to high school with this guy named Alex
Lacko and he's a genius and and he's playing and
he's working on the show called That Boy. But I
think he's gonna be working on Wicked. Um So already,
(15:40):
like Alex was the grown up in the room. He
was the one who was actually already making theater on
a professional level. We were, you know, former students in
the basement of a bookshop. Um and and again it
was that similar thing. He just he he fell in
with us. Um So immediately and and and and Kiara
and Alex really entered our lives around the same time.
(16:03):
Before that, it was me, Tommy Klee and Bill Sherman
who had gone to college with me and worked on
all of my musical projects in college. And and it
we we very quickly dubbed ourselves Vultron. It was like finally,
like the five parts of the Lion could like make
something greater. Um. But but I I remember that summer
very very well. Oh my gosh, well, Carrot, maybe I
(16:24):
want you to speak to that. When you sat down
to write, So you meet with Lynn and he like
emotionally vomits on you. We vomited on each other emotionally
and all fairness, we were on us. Um, what what
were you like? This is what I want to get across?
Or like, was there a fundamental definition of home or
this idea of like roots or what was like your
(16:46):
thematic drive when you sat down to write it. So
for me, the definition of home was largely I mean,
one of the things Lynn and I bonded over was
the stories of our fathers. Even though they're very different,
there were some commonalities. They were just kind of naturally
out in the community, building the community they wanted to
live in. They were really doing that thing, building the
world you want to to have, you know. Um, my
(17:08):
father is more of a businessman. He's a contractor. You know,
he went to the job corpse, so he he does
things with his hands. But he was doing that and
he was, you know, creating jobs in the community. So
we did bond over that. But I think for me,
one of the things I was most excited about that
for me is community is the women. So I was like, Okay,
(17:29):
I want to really and there were the women were
already there, they were in Lynn's script, but I was like,
I want to build them up. I want to make
them as strong as the men, Like, you know, I
want to know what makes Vanessa more than kind of
brassy and sassy, but what makes her real and grounded,
What what she's struggling against, what she's going towards, and
(17:50):
all that stuff was already there, but that's just my
natural inkling. So I gravitated towards that, towards the story
of nina Um and the other The other thing is that,
you know, when when I came on board, I was like,
rather than this be the story of individual you know,
heroes or lead characters, to me, I felt like this
(18:11):
was the story of the community. Was the lead character,
and how they would you know, celebrate together, how they
would go their different ways and either leave or bring
that community with them as they left, how they would
stay but define themselves as individual So everyone has a
different answer to how to be a part of the community,
but they're they're doing there, you know, forging those paths
(18:33):
together and in concert with each other too. That is
such a beautiful way to put it in. It's so
amazing that you thought about the gender lens. Yeah, they're
just alright, like Vanessa already had. It won't be long
Now I was kind of like an opera when I arrived.
So it's not that they were missing, it's just I
was like, I want to that's the threat. I really
(18:54):
really want to follow, um. And so that was that
was super exciting. Yeah, you know, I my family just
personally was very very matriarchal. And you know, it's many
generations in one room, and it's mostly women, and it's
a lot of life, and it's a lot of points
of view. It's a lot of different versions of what
strength is. Some are very humble, some are very loud, um.
(19:16):
And so yeah, it was just really fun to dig
in on that stuff. Yeah. I also I come from
a similarly matriarchal family. Like my family and Puerto Rico
revolved around my dad's mom. She ran the travel agency
in town. She knew when people were going and when
people were staying because she set up all their plane tickets. Um.
(19:36):
And he arrived, he arrived three days ago. He's here, right, Yeah, no, no,
he's here. She left, and and so like there was
that that my dad was coming from. And then there
was also his grandmother. He would tell the story about
how his grandmother ran the house and like everyone gave
like people would marry into the family, go into the house,
(19:57):
and then give all their checks to his grandmother and
then she would kind of redistribute um. Like so I'm
very familiar um with that. But but what you know,
I think the biggest shift that happened when Kiara came
on board again, Like the college version really reflects where
I was at nineteen, which was like obsessed with romantic relationships.
It was sort of a romantic It was all romantic
(20:19):
storylines set against the backdrop of Washington Heights and I'd
grown up, I moved back up town and it was like, well, wait,
why is this really set in Washington Heights? And I
think KR and I together and Kara really brought it
into focus of like, let's focus on this block. What
are the businesses on this block? And and like where
are they going to be at the beginning and where
they're going to be at the end. And that notion
(20:40):
of home that you mentioned that really was finally the
word we circled around because we looked at Fiddler on
the Roof a lot, we looked at other musicals that
are about communities undergoing change, and Jerome Robbins drilled into
the writers of that show. He was a genius director,
and he said, what's the show out in one word,
(21:01):
what's the show about? And they said tradition. And he said,
that's your opening number. Stop writing all these other things.
That's your opening number. And and for us, a big
part of the process was we've got all of these
characters in search of the story, and we've got all
these businesses, um, that existed before the storylines that you
now see existed, and what are they all struggling with?
(21:22):
And and that became home, which is a loaded word
when you were first generation, when you are second generation,
when when home is somewhere else to your parents, um.
And so that that became sort of the word. We
we circled everything around, right. Well, I I do want
to talk about your early influences, um in theater, because
ever heard you tell this story a lot of times
(21:43):
about like why even the why you created in the
Heights because you didn't see you on Broadway? UM, can
you touch upon that? And then I want to go
into the musical aspects of like you know, non traditional
hip hop into musicals. But so like you were talking about,
you know, Fiddler on the Roof, what were some of
your things that you memorized and you were like, oh yeah,
(22:04):
well yeah again. Like our family was like most families.
We didn't fall in love with Broadway musicals from seeing
Broadway shows. We didn't have the money, um, but we
fell in love via cast albums. Like I think my
parents have a like this story that like on their
second day they realized they both had the vinyl of
Man of La Mancha and they went um, and on
(22:25):
their wedding day went to go see Runaways by Lizzie
Suados on Broadway, which is like a crazy depressing musical
about runaway children. But like that's how much they love musicals, um,
and so I grew up memorizing the stuff they played.
It was Camelot, Men of La Mancha, my Fair Lady,
like the great sort of sixties and seventies stuff. And
(22:48):
then the show that took me from loving musicals, and
then again I fell in love by doing musicals in
the high school and in elementary school, like I got
to be in God's Spell, I got to be in
Pirates of Henzans and um. And then when I was
seventeen years old, on my seventeenth birthday, I saw Rent
on Broadway and it was the first contemporary musical I
(23:09):
had ever seen. They all took place in some other
land and some other place. Lame is Phantom, They're all
in Europe, and it was like, this was written by
a young guy. It takes place now, it takes place downtown,
and it's so clearly written from a place of love
about this community of artists. Um And And also I
(23:31):
have to say like it's there was a part of
it that felt like a personal indictment because there's this
character in Rent named Mark, and he's always got a
camera rolling and he's kind of documenting his community. And
at one point when the other characters turns to him
and says, you hide in your work. You pretend to
create and detach, you know, you pretend to create an
observe when you really detach. Um And I was a
(23:52):
very neurotic high schooler who always had a VHS camcorder
on my arm. I was Mark. I was that kid
who's like found it easier to film his friends that
actually be with his friends and hang out with them.
Um And so I was like, oh, he's talking to me.
Um And So I started writing one act musicals in
high school because of the influence of rent and and
(24:14):
a couple of things happened at the same time, you know,
like in the heights of the explosion of a lot
of different things. One my senior year, one of my
musical heroes, Paul Simon, wrote a Broadway musical called The
Cape Man, and it started two of my other hero
three of my other heroes, um A, Nita Mazario, Mark Anthony,
(24:35):
and Reuben Blades. Like that is top ten of my
favorite artists all working on the same thing. And I went,
holy shit, here comes my dream show. And I saw
it three times in previews and it died on arrival.
It only lasted sixty one shows. And the even more
heartbreaking thing was there's gorgeous music in it. It takes
(24:56):
place in the exact same location and era as West
Side Story. It's about a true life story about these
gang members in the nineteen fifties who were Puerto Rican
and and it's like, God, I think this subsection of
Lapinos has been very well represented godway, like two major
(25:19):
musicals about like gang members in the nineteen fifties on
the West Side of New York. Um. So it was
this like gut punch really like I took it really
personal of like, like, no one's going to write your
dream show. Those are your favorite artists and they didn't
make your dream show. And um and I think I
(25:41):
spent two years of my life trying to fix Kate
Man in my head. Well maybe if you don't do it,
and maybe you don't, maybe do it in flashback. Maybe
if you start in prison. And then like I finally
just started writing In the Heights, like can we be
more fully ourselves? Can we tell different stories? Um? And
And I started writing that my my sophomore here in college.
(26:03):
It was me trying to write a full length show
for the first time and trying to get out of
the shadow of West Side Story and Capeman and all
the other times we had a knife in our hands? Right,
can we be something else? Pleased? Right? Yeah, within this
genre I love so much. Um And I knew it
was possible because I saw Rent and and that was
like a very contemporary story about that guy's friends. Yeah. Yeah, Alex,
(26:27):
you you have a similar story as far as representation
and musicals. Um. You know, I'll say this for me,
hearing a demo of In the Heights for me was
a revelation because you know, I had heard about the men. Well,
you know, I think I had met Tommy. I don't
think i've even met him in person yet, but I
know I was handed a cassette tape of a recording
(26:50):
of a performance at his time. This is when my
recordings were still on an eight track. Are we that old?
We're talking? Oh my god? Yeah, I pop nikas saide.
I pressed play. First thing I hear is the sound
of like a hip hoppy playing played on buckets, like
you know, like on the quarter. And then I hear
like this Puerto Rican dude rapping over the buckets, and
(27:11):
I'm here like these over the bar line rhymes. I'm
hearing these complex like inter rhymes and stuff. I'm like,
oh my god, this is like amazing. And and I'm
hearing songs with titles like no Memento, you know, I'm like,
oh my god. It's like I feel like I can
like understand like where this person is coming from and
and and what this is and like, wow, there's spanglish
in the song, like I don't know it just really
(27:34):
I just felt the charge right away. And it's one
of those things like when you hear music from a
show for the first time and you see yourself in
it and like, oh my god, I need to be
involved with this, And that's just what it felt like.
Um yeah, you know. One of the things I love
about let Manuel is that, you know, around the time
that we've met, right, like, here's the dude who is
enjoying the new eminem album as much as he's enjoying
(27:57):
the cast recording of Light in the Piazza that just
came out, you know, as much as he'sion doing or
we're talking about Weezer or whatever, like all these like
disparate styles and they're all him, And I just love
that who he is and what he knows it just
comes out and is writing in a way that just
feels natural. And he's never putting anything on. He's never like,
you know, trying to write in the style of like
(28:19):
in an homage in a way to be like, oh,
here's he's just so I don't know about I'm gonna
try to do that. He knows the style, he is
the style, and I just love that there's just a
fluidity and what comes out, and there's always a hook.
It's always like amazing lyrics, it's always complex, and it's
always like accessible. All those things, so um. Yeah, I
(28:39):
just I know for me that anytime I would hear
the competition that he was doing and I would just
be like, yeah, this is amazing. More of that, please, yes, please? Um,
well let's talk about that, because you know, Lynn, I
feel like you have created this non traditional um musical
with hip hop and really just the kinds of things
that you were listening too as a kid, Like you
(29:01):
were like, this is this is you know, that's what
I like. I kind of want to put it in UM.
And for me, I feel like, you know, hip hop's
all about words, and you are brilliant at combining words,
which I felt because I didn't grow up with theater,
but the little theater I was in Wind in the
Willows when I was in elementary, I was a weasel.
(29:21):
I didn't have a line. I was a dancing weasel.
My mom was like, yeah, maybe you shouldn't go down
this route. Uh, and I but I remember just being
punched in the gut and and my heart uh pounding
when I watched in the Heights because of the words
like each in Hamilton's as well, but each sentence is loaded.
(29:44):
And what I remembered about musical theater was they were like,
I'm going to the store to get some mel like
it took so long to get to the point of
the song or the story, and you're every single line
moves through through story and and rhyme and spanglish like
(30:04):
it was so it was just too much for for
my senses to absorb. Um. But in hindsight, it feels like, yeah,
this is a natural fit for musical theater. People should
always do theater in hip hop. So at what time, uh,
what was the reaction from people, obviously, like like Alex
when you first started writing musical theater with with that music. Yeah,
(30:26):
well it's it's a great point. Again, I have to
like doff my cap to Jonathan Larson, who really was
like his whole thesis statement was popular music and musical
theater used to be friends. You used to go to
the theaters, you know, in in the early part of
the twenty century, to go here the hit songs you
heard on the radio, to hear the new Irving Berlin song,
(30:47):
or to hear the new girlswin tune in that review.
And they used to be one and the same. And
at a certain point rock and roll happened, and musical
theaters specialized um. And I think that's to the benefit
of musical theater, you know, like the fact that Stephen
Sondheim can come along and write a musical about a
(31:08):
homicidal barber um like you can never say again, like, oh,
that's not a good idea for musical because he he
and Andrew Lloyd Andrew Lloyd Webber was like, yeah, cats,
that's the whole idea. It's cats, and they all thing
about what kind of cats they are and like that
can run forever, like they just like I think musical
theater expanded to be able to tell a lot more stories.
(31:30):
But Jonathan Larson was very much like, and we can
be friends with pop music again, because my favorite pop
songs tell stories, and for me, my favorite hip hop
songs tell stories. My favorite like hip hop artists like
Biggie and jay Z, like I was always keyed into
the storytelling aspect in addition to the dazzling wordplay uh
and the rhymes and and and similarly with with Latin music,
(31:53):
like the album I remember most well from my parents
collection in vinyl was this picture of when Blades naked
in blue with his band looking up and the title
was Bud America. And those songs are all storytelling songs.
They're like Jim Steinman in Spanish. They're these six minute
(32:14):
epics about these different Latino stories. And so again, it
just it made sense to me to try to bring
that to the musical theater. I love. It was just like, oh,
I get to fit in more information per bar and
I get to um use flow to illuminate character. Snavi
raps very differently from Benny, who raps very differently from Sonny.
(32:37):
And again I'd like go on to do even more
of that with with Hamilton's to really use flow to
illuminate character. Um. But it was so fun um seeing
how much I could pack in, Like there's a lyric
in carnaval Um where Carla goes my dad is Dominican Cuban,
my mom is from Chile NPR, which means I'm chilly,
(33:00):
don't minic weaken, But I always say I'm from Queens.
That's like a microcosm of the whole show, right, Like
if we are all hyphen it's and we're all from somewhere,
how do we define ourselves and what do we pass on? Um?
So it's it's a funny, it's a good line with
a funny punch line, but it also is like the
show in miniature. Yeah, yeah, I would think that you
(33:23):
burn through story that way, but no, you get you
get so much information out in a way that you
need to whether it's like I've got to hit the
emotion right now, I've got you know, in that same song,
you know, when the snab comes and then Vanessa comes
and she's mad and everybody has so many different emotions
within this same song. It's like it's the most beautiful song. Alex,
(33:43):
did you did you feel that way when you, like
you said you first heard in the nights and you're like,
oh my god, I get this. But were you nervous
about hip hop or were you like boom, we found it.
We're doing this, Linds Virginia. But yes, Linda Genius, I
really said that. Um, you know, I don't have this
huge hip hop background, like you know, the stuff I
(34:05):
listened to as I was growing up, like when hip
hop was really at zenith, I was kind of more
like on the alternative rock side of things. And you know,
yes I listened to Beastie Boys in high school. Yes,
I listened to Black Sheep, you know like that there
are definitely things that that influenced me. But I really
gained a real appreciation for hip hop through lit Manuel
because of you know again, I had such immense respect
(34:26):
for him and still do. And when we could talk
about how much we love this station Robert Brown song,
and then he would like, you know, like I said,
just press play and then just start wrapping along to
your biggie on this whole rap, I'm like, oh my god,
how does this guy know that music as intimately as
he knows Camelot? Like I had not seen someone like
that in my life. And uh, that just like makes
you pay attention and then like you just as a musician,
(34:49):
like you just want to know what way these are
so you can just catch that. So it definitely like
made me look at that, appreciate the music and buy
more albums and really like pour over it and just
try to understand what makes Lynn lynn, just so I
could try to keep up with him, right, And then Kiera,
did you did you grow up with hip hop or
did you like it? Or what was your take on
(35:09):
on this when you heard it or read it? Because
as as the writer, I was, I don't know how
it works, Like do you just write the words and
then Lynna inserts insert music here. It's way more like
messy and organic than that. I mean I was. I
was super excited when I heard the hip hop because yeah,
I did grow up with it, being from West Philly.
(35:29):
Before the Roots were the Roots, before they were on powerm.
They were on the street corner on my walk to
Clark Park and they were singing past the popcorn and
I was like, that sounds cool, um, you know. So
it was part of my life too. I wasn't steeped
into it in the way that lynn was, but it
was very much part of the landscape. But I loved
(35:49):
using that vocabulary. I mean, actually I lived in West Philly,
which was historically a middle class and working class black
neighborhood and a kind of diverse first generation immigrant neighborhood.
And then my extended family was in North Philly, which
was just in Barrio is just Borequa. And then as
I grew older, more Dominican, Central American, South American, and
(36:12):
so actually that kind of merging of hip hop and
Latino music kind of reflected the map of my life, um,
which I loved, and what it looked like in terms
of how we actually do it the nuts and bolts.
Lynn used to live um an in Wood when we
first started working together, so we'd either hang it my
apartment back then, or we'd hang up at his apartment
(36:34):
and he'd be like skateboarding up and down the hallway.
We would we would have a task at hand, like, Okay,
let's look at Nina and Benny. How what what happens
when they wake up together the morning after? Right? So
what does that look like? And you know, Lynne's skateboarding
up and down his hallway. I'm kind of writing in
my corner, and if I have an interesting idea, I
have an interesting bit of dialogue or an interesting little
(36:56):
monologue that has an idea, I might hand it to
him and he might be like, oh, that might be
a cool idea for a song. Let me take that,
get back to you later, um so, and and vice versa.
I stole. I stole songs from him and turned them
into scenes too. There's a scene um where Nina and
her parents getting a big fight about what happened while
(37:17):
she was off at school. And we had tried that
as a song for a long time, and then somehow
it was just like the scene version of it. Ended
up feeling um better for that moment, and but a
lot of the Nina Benny stuff, the you know sunrise.
I remember dialogue versions of that too, and I can't
remember exactly what order it went in, but it's messy.
(37:39):
We're just bringing each other new words every day. Yeah, totally.
I remember really distinctly, um Kira setting up the notion
between Vanessa Noo Snabi first one out of the hood
buys the other a bottle of champagne, and it was
a line. It was like a line of dialogue we
threw into the opening number and then like smash cut
two years later when there was a different Usnavi even
(38:01):
as a song in Act two called Goodbye, where they're
kind of saying goodbye to each other. But then I
wrote when the Sun Goes Down, and I was like,
these are two sad songs of two couples breaking up,
Like this is getting to be a very sad act
to um, we need to liven it up, And so
I ran with the notion that Kara came up with
of like, oh, the bottle of champagne will center the
(38:22):
song around that, and you know, Vanessa's bringing the bottle
of champagne and us Nave is like too obsessed with
opening the bottle to like see that she's saying she
loves you, you dummy, um and and then like and
then threading the musical version of that back into the
opening number. So like it was very fluid in terms
of what the best idea was. Not Tommy Cale, our
(38:44):
director was really good at fostering and environment where the
best idea in the room wins and we all right
to them. Yeah, that's everything I know comes to mind too.
That's Nina's big turnaround moment where I would look, Claudia
has passed and Nina and his navy they're kind of
adoptive siblings. They were raised by weoklow on the block
and um, so they're going through her stuff and they're
just looking through, Oh, here's your second grade book report,
(39:06):
you know, here's these old lotto tickets that she never
threw away. And that also kind of became a chicken
and egg that then a whole song comes of like
what do you learn from going from rifling through the
old stuff and seeing the child you once were and
seeing it with different and more mature eyes. Now, So yeah,
all these all these um kind of scene and song
(39:27):
things they develop organically over time as the idea unfolds. Well,
I'm I'm so excited. I'm gonna wrap up this first
episode of our special limited podcast series in the Heights.
Please join us tomorrow June three for episode two. This
has been a production of the Michael Podcast Network on
(39:48):
I Heart Media and we'll see you tomorrow
Hi, I'm Eva Longoria. I'm so excited to welcome you
to this very special limited series in the Hives, the
story of one of the most groundbreaking shows in the
history of musical theater and how it now has become
equally groundbreaking motion picture releasing June eleventh on Warner Brothers.
(00:22):
And I can't even contain myself when y'all asked me
to do this, and whenever this was like being put together,
I was like, yes, yes, yes, yes, can I act
out every role? And uh can I can? I just
sing every song? It's the most amazing musical, it's the
most amazing project. And uh, this particular episode, we're gonna
(00:44):
talk later about the motion picture, but we're gonna first
start kind of about talk about themes, and then we're
gonna talk about the actual musical and when that happened, um,
and then about the movie at the end. So we're
gonna pace ourselves. I know I sound crazy right now,
but we will pace ourselves. But this particular episode is
about home and it's a big theme in the movie.
(01:06):
And I'm excited to talk to everyone who's on this
podcast right now. Of course, we have Lynn Manuel, Miranda, Hello,
longtime fan, first time caller. Hello, you have won a mattress. Uh.
We're so excited to have you. UM. I have so
(01:28):
much to ask you. But how are you doing? What's
going on? Where are you calling from? I am I
am well, uh, and I am I'm calling you from
upstate New York where I am editing my directing debut
tick tick boom that will come out later this year.
But I'm thrilled to be on this call with all
my favorite folks. Uh, with so much is going on
(01:51):
with you. I can't wait to see that. Um. But
I'm so excited because this is a brand new podcast
that we're doing for My Heart, which is part of
the larger network called my Equila. And what better way
to launch Michael podcasts than with this project with these
wonderful visionaries that are gonna be on with us. I
think Latinos are long overdue for representation and podcasting, and
(02:13):
so it's really exciting to be a part of it.
It's the thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Um, Okay, Well, today
we're gonna talk about the genesis of this remarkable show
in the Heights and how it grew out of your
own personal experience growing up in in Inwood, Washington Heights,
New York, and how it's been made into this groundbreaking movie. Um,
but I don't think we can tell the whole story
(02:34):
without two of your longtime collaborators. Indeed, I feel like
we won't have the complete story. So I want to
bring on writer producer Guiarra Allegria, who this who wrote
the book in the Heights. Hey, if we should define
what we mean by book, uh, please please, because it's
the most single confusing term in my life. You know,
(02:56):
everyone's like, oh, I can't find your book on Amazon.
You know, people think that the book of a musical
understandably is a book that the music was adapted from.
In fact, it's just the script and the story. It's
it's like another word for libretto. Okay, okay, great. I'm
so happy you did that because I was about to
go on Amazon and look for the book. Uh. And
(03:18):
we have executive music producer Alex Lackamore. Is that how
I say it? Yeah? I stayed with the French pronunciation
exactly like that. Yes? Oh great? Um, well, you and
Lynn have been thickest thieves for a very long time. Welcome,
Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having us. Now are
you all both in New York as well? I'm uptown.
(03:39):
I'm in Washington Heights. Um. You know, once I wrote
the show, I was like, I mean, we gotta it's
we gotta move there. So I had spent a long
time kind of roaming the streets and like riding the
subway back and forth in the area, writing and um
on the subway, so you know, it made sense. So
this is where my family is. That is amazing. And Alex,
where are you? I'm on the Upper west Side Manhattan? Okay?
(04:03):
Is that I'm not? I don't know New York. I'm
probably one of the few people that New York. Does
that mean you're bougie? Yes? But I think a big
part of the genesis of this musical is there's a
lot of New Yorkers who think the world stops on
the Upper West Side or the world stops at Harlem
(04:24):
and aren't even aware that the A train goes all
the way up to Seventh Street. Um. So you know,
a lot of this was about putting us on the
map in a literal way. We you know, I I
can see the George Washington Bridge out my window, so
that's something that people know exists uptown. It's like, oh,
I live near the George Washington Bridge, and they're like, okay,
(04:44):
so we're associated with traffic to people who don't really
know much more than the than the bridge, right I do.
I guess I do know New York by bridges as well.
I'm like, oh, yeah, the Brooklyn Bridge. Okay, yeah, okay, great,
that's that's a good marker. But you know, in the
movie which we're gonna talk about the movie later. I
don't want to jump ahead of myself, but I love
how you you guys actually did the map, like to
(05:05):
show where what you're talking about. That was very helpful.
It's that Nina line. It's you know, she used to
think that the subway map was the map of her
life and that she lived at the top of the world,
which was the top of the subway map. Right. That's
a fairly autobiographical lyric. Linda, did you grow up in
(05:27):
in Wood? Yeah? I grew up north of Washington Heights.
Washington Heights was downtown to me growing up. I grew
up off Dykeman Street, which is the second to last
stop on the A train. Um and um my parents
are still there and um yeah and I took piano
lessons on Street, and UM really kind of grew up
(05:50):
um in this tiny Latin American neighborhood that happened to
be in New York City when I was growing up.
Is largely Dominican neighborhood, but a lot of the sort
of older residents were Puerto Rican and Cuban, and it
was sort of many waves of Latino migration in this neighborhood,
so much so that my abuela could go to any
(06:10):
store on our block and and be understood and never
have to speak English on that block. And so, UM,
I always just knew that I felt like I was
sitting on a secret growing up, Like I was sitting
in this very special place. You knew that you knew
that you felt that it like had texture to you. Yeah,
and you know again, I I got into a a
(06:34):
gifted public school when I was very young, and so
I I was code switching. I was doing what Nina
did in college when I was like six years old,
Like I'm I'm now shuttling from you know, two hundred
streets to the Upper east Side. And and that's when
that bifurcation that so many of us experience happened for me.
I was Lin Manuel at home. I became Lin at school.
I spoke Spanish at home, I spoke English at school. Um,
(06:57):
and then you kind of figure out what is the
best version of yourself for any given room. And I
think in the heights when I started writing in college
was really the beginning. And again this is like Chiara's term,
not mine, because she always has the best words for it.
It was like the beginning of figuring out how to
bring all of myself into the room. It was like
bringing the Latin culture I grew up with into the
(07:17):
musical theater that I loved and the cast albums I memorized.
It was really kind of me trying to write my
way into a situation where I could be my fullest self. GETA,
you can speak to this too, because you guys collaborated
on this so closely. Um, did you feel what Lynn felt,
which was like, oh yeah, I can write, Yes, absolutely,
(07:39):
I mean my version of it. You know, I'm born
and raised in Philly, and like kind of like Lynde said,
all of who I was made sense and tell I
was about five years old and then my parents, Uh,
my mom is a brown body, equal woman, my dad
is a white Jewish man. They separated, and all of
a suddenly parts of me that just went together very
(08:00):
Actually we're literally separated in my life, and so I
think that sense of you know, choosing which is the
right way to be in which room you're in. I
mean that was even my family life, you know. Um,
but I was raised by my mom. I was raised
by my stepfather who's also Puerto Rican. He's from Batrankias.
My mom is from Asibo, And you know, I thought
(08:22):
all these different I thought like one checkbox per room.
And when as you get older and you mature, you realize, like, no,
I can bring more of myself into this room. Whoever
else is in the room, they can handle it like
they're grown ups too, you know. And I remember the
first time Lyndon I met and we're kind of deciding
if we wanted to collaborate that part of our history.
(08:44):
Really we really connected over that. Wow, you guys were
like a match made in heaven, just like Alex. I
feel like Alex, it's I've seen you. And then when
way hang out and I'm like, you guys speak a
different language, like when bagch of nerds the language of
music nerds, right, like you are just as genius as Linen,
(09:06):
And uh, tell me how you guys came to me.
We met because there were some mutual friends that I
had met in Miami, which is where I spent my teens,
And there were some actors in Miami that I had
done some shows with and they did an early workshop
in the Heights, um and this was before I was
(09:27):
even a part of In the Heights, and they had
said to Limonuell, hey you should meet Alex. He's from Miami,
he's Cuban, he's a pianist, he's an a arranger like you.
Guys would hit it off, and they introduced us and
they were right, you know. Once I I often tell
people that it wasn't until I met Limonuel in New
York that I felt like I had a certain part
of my life brought back to me. And what I
(09:49):
mean by that is I was born in l A, right,
and it's not a big Cuban community, and moved to Miami.
There is a big Cuban community there, right, So I
got used to what that's like, right, And you get
spoiled thinking to yourself that everybody speaks Spanish. You get spoiled.
You think that there's gonna be you know, storefronts written
in Spanish everywhere you go. And I left Miami to
(10:10):
go to college. I went to Boston, and no one
really knew that I was lett, you know at all. Right,
you know, people would like flip out when they'd see
me pick up the phone and start talking to my
mom in Spanish. They had no idea, um. And then
so I just didn't really have a lot of like,
uh Latin influence around me. But then I come to
New York and I meet Li Manuel, and then we
(10:30):
start amassing all these amazing collaborators, and care comes on board,
and we have all these actors, and all of a sudden,
like you know, we're celebrating what makes us us. And
in a way that just felt like home that the
very thing you were talking about, all these elements that
I just didn't realize how important they were to me
until I didn't have them. Right, Yeah, try try going
to Starbucks and ordering not in Spanish in Miami, right
(10:54):
right right? I was like, oh, okay, yeah, I gotta
pull up my Spanish here. Uh yeah. There's a lot
of things you take, you take for granted, and I
think there's so many of us that straddle a hyphen right,
like Puerto Rican, American, Cuban American, Mexican American, and you know,
like lynn Wood was talking about that code switching, navigating
that identity is uh, it's heavy. But then when you
(11:17):
find a group of people who are just like okay,
not only you feel like you found your tribe, but
they feel like home. Yeah, and that's exactly what I
felt when I met Linn and k Are. There's just
something about it. Oh, here's a we understand what that
code switching is like where we understand kind of having
to you know, as we've been talking live that that
(11:38):
dual life in that way, because yeah, I feel very
Americanized in that way, right like I was. You know,
when you're at the dinner table, Dad's like, okay, speak
Spanish at the dinner table, but you can speak English
anywhere else, right, And then yes, you know, like going
to the parties where music is blasting salsa, but then
going home and listening to my led Zeppelin and Beatles
records or whatever. You know, it's just it's very trying
to find how to you know, all those things make me.
(12:00):
But yeah, there's definitely that kind of hyphen between some
of that stuff that you try to bridge. Well, you know,
it's so funny, Alex because I when I grew up
in Texas, same thing. We spoke Spanish. I mean we
didn't really speak that much Spanish, but there were certain
words I didn't know the English word for, Like to
this day, I say Salah, like where the keys, My
keys are in the sala? You know what is sala?
(12:21):
And they're like living room and I'm like living room,
yeah yeah. Or mancha like if I had these um
sun spots on my face and I went to the
dermatologists and I go, I have these manchas. I don't
know what you like, I could. There were places that
I got so stuck in my I couldn't. There was
no code switching for it, right like there that just
(12:41):
the word that it is. Okay, Lynn, I want to
I want your version of that story. Like they both
felt like, Okay, I found my I found my other,
my other half of my orange as we say in Spanish, Um, yeah,
well it's me. Kiara's arrival in my life was very heralded. Um.
(13:05):
Everyone who met her before me was like, I think
you should meet her I want to see what you
feel like when you meet her. First it was Jill Furman,
who was a producer who has already involved with In
the Heights UM, and she said, I met Kiara, I
think you should meet her, and no one wanted to
say anything. I was like, I was feeling very intimidated
(13:26):
before our first meeting because again Carol like went a
Yale for music composition, she had an n f A
from Brown like went to grad school player. I was like,
what if you need me for like, you can do
all my jobs very easily. UM. And then Tommy met
with her. Tommy Carole our director, and again said the
exact same thing, I think you should meet her. UM.
(13:49):
And I walked in kind of intimidated with my scrappy
little eighty minute one act show and it was sort
of like this pod has like we just immediately started
talking about family. We met at the now extinct Market
Cafe on Ninth Avenue, UM, and it became it. It
(14:11):
just became very familial and familiar very quickly. UM. And
it was just like a you know, it was like
just meeting an old friend for the first time and
I'll never forget sort of saying goodbye to Kiara at
the four at the support Authority stop, I sort of like, Okay,
I'm gonna get on the train goodbye. I gave her
hug goodbye. I went down into the a train like
(14:34):
ran through and came up the other side. I did
like a fake goodbye because I couldn't wait to take
the train all the way to to a Seventh Street
home to tell Tommy, like, this is it. She's gonna
write it with us, She's the one. UM. I was
so excited that I met a kindred spirit who understood UM,
who had the same lens on their community that I did, UM,
(14:54):
one of love and one of like I want to
tell these stories to UM and so I couldn't wait
the forty minutes it would have taken me to get
home on the train. So just like did a fake goodbye,
came up another thing and called Tommy UM and UM.
And you know, it was a similar thing with with Alex.
Alex came recommended from actors who were doing readings of
(15:17):
In the Heights for us in the basement of the
drama bookshop. Um Janet Decol who would go on to
originate the role of Carla on Broadway was like, well,
I went to high school with this guy named Alex
Lacko and he's a genius and and he's playing and
he's working on the show called That Boy. But I
think he's gonna be working on Wicked. Um So already,
(15:40):
like Alex was the grown up in the room. He
was the one who was actually already making theater on
a professional level. We were, you know, former students in
the basement of a bookshop. Um and and again it
was that similar thing. He just he he fell in
with us. Um So immediately and and and and Kiara
and Alex really entered our lives around the same time.
(16:03):
Before that, it was me, Tommy Klee and Bill Sherman
who had gone to college with me and worked on
all of my musical projects in college. And and it
we we very quickly dubbed ourselves Vultron. It was like finally,
like the five parts of the Lion could like make
something greater. Um. But but I I remember that summer
very very well. Oh my gosh, well, Carrot, maybe I
(16:24):
want you to speak to that. When you sat down
to write, So you meet with Lynn and he like
emotionally vomits on you. We vomited on each other emotionally
and all fairness, we were on us. Um, what what
were you like? This is what I want to get across?
Or like, was there a fundamental definition of home or
this idea of like roots or what was like your
(16:46):
thematic drive when you sat down to write it. So
for me, the definition of home was largely I mean,
one of the things Lynn and I bonded over was
the stories of our fathers. Even though they're very different,
there were some commonalities. They were just kind of naturally
out in the community, building the community they wanted to
live in. They were really doing that thing, building the
world you want to to have, you know. Um, my
(17:08):
father is more of a businessman. He's a contractor. You know,
he went to the job corpse, so he he does
things with his hands. But he was doing that and
he was, you know, creating jobs in the community. So
we did bond over that. But I think for me,
one of the things I was most excited about that
for me is community is the women. So I was like, Okay,
(17:29):
I want to really and there were the women were
already there, they were in Lynn's script, but I was like,
I want to build them up. I want to make
them as strong as the men, Like, you know, I
want to know what makes Vanessa more than kind of
brassy and sassy, but what makes her real and grounded,
What what she's struggling against, what she's going towards, and
(17:50):
all that stuff was already there, but that's just my
natural inkling. So I gravitated towards that, towards the story
of nina Um and the other The other thing is that,
you know, when when I came on board, I was like,
rather than this be the story of individual you know,
heroes or lead characters, to me, I felt like this
(18:11):
was the story of the community. Was the lead character,
and how they would you know, celebrate together, how they
would go their different ways and either leave or bring
that community with them as they left, how they would
stay but define themselves as individual So everyone has a
different answer to how to be a part of the community,
but they're they're doing there, you know, forging those paths
(18:33):
together and in concert with each other too. That is
such a beautiful way to put it in. It's so
amazing that you thought about the gender lens. Yeah, they're
just alright, like Vanessa already had. It won't be long
Now I was kind of like an opera when I arrived.
So it's not that they were missing, it's just I
was like, I want to that's the threat. I really
(18:54):
really want to follow, um. And so that was that
was super exciting. Yeah, you know, I my family just
personally was very very matriarchal. And you know, it's many
generations in one room, and it's mostly women, and it's
a lot of life, and it's a lot of points
of view. It's a lot of different versions of what
strength is. Some are very humble, some are very loud, um.
(19:16):
And so yeah, it was just really fun to dig
in on that stuff. Yeah. I also I come from
a similarly matriarchal family. Like my family and Puerto Rico
revolved around my dad's mom. She ran the travel agency
in town. She knew when people were going and when
people were staying because she set up all their plane tickets. Um.
(19:36):
And he arrived, he arrived three days ago. He's here, right, Yeah, no, no,
he's here. She left, and and so like there was
that that my dad was coming from. And then there
was also his grandmother. He would tell the story about
how his grandmother ran the house and like everyone gave
like people would marry into the family, go into the house,
(19:57):
and then give all their checks to his grandmother and
then she would kind of redistribute um. Like so I'm
very familiar um with that. But but what you know,
I think the biggest shift that happened when Kiara came
on board again, Like the college version really reflects where
I was at nineteen, which was like obsessed with romantic relationships.
It was sort of a romantic It was all romantic
(20:19):
storylines set against the backdrop of Washington Heights and I'd
grown up, I moved back up town and it was like, well, wait,
why is this really set in Washington Heights? And I
think KR and I together and Kara really brought it
into focus of like, let's focus on this block. What
are the businesses on this block? And and like where
are they going to be at the beginning and where
they're going to be at the end. And that notion
(20:40):
of home that you mentioned that really was finally the
word we circled around because we looked at Fiddler on
the Roof a lot, we looked at other musicals that
are about communities undergoing change, and Jerome Robbins drilled into
the writers of that show. He was a genius director,
and he said, what's the show out in one word,
(21:01):
what's the show about? And they said tradition. And he said,
that's your opening number. Stop writing all these other things.
That's your opening number. And and for us, a big
part of the process was we've got all of these
characters in search of the story, and we've got all
these businesses, um, that existed before the storylines that you
now see existed, and what are they all struggling with?
(21:22):
And and that became home, which is a loaded word
when you were first generation, when you are second generation,
when when home is somewhere else to your parents, um.
And so that that became sort of the word. We
we circled everything around, right. Well, I I do want
to talk about your early influences, um in theater, because
ever heard you tell this story a lot of times
(21:43):
about like why even the why you created in the
Heights because you didn't see you on Broadway? UM, can
you touch upon that? And then I want to go
into the musical aspects of like you know, non traditional
hip hop into musicals. But so like you were talking about,
you know, Fiddler on the Roof, what were some of
your things that you memorized and you were like, oh yeah,
(22:04):
well yeah again. Like our family was like most families.
We didn't fall in love with Broadway musicals from seeing
Broadway shows. We didn't have the money, um, but we
fell in love via cast albums. Like I think my
parents have a like this story that like on their
second day they realized they both had the vinyl of
Man of La Mancha and they went um, and on
(22:25):
their wedding day went to go see Runaways by Lizzie
Suados on Broadway, which is like a crazy depressing musical
about runaway children. But like that's how much they love musicals, um,
and so I grew up memorizing the stuff they played.
It was Camelot, Men of La Mancha, my Fair Lady,
like the great sort of sixties and seventies stuff. And
(22:48):
then the show that took me from loving musicals, and
then again I fell in love by doing musicals in
the high school and in elementary school, like I got
to be in God's Spell, I got to be in
Pirates of Henzans and um. And then when I was
seventeen years old, on my seventeenth birthday, I saw Rent
on Broadway and it was the first contemporary musical I
(23:09):
had ever seen. They all took place in some other
land and some other place. Lame is Phantom, They're all
in Europe, and it was like, this was written by
a young guy. It takes place now, it takes place downtown,
and it's so clearly written from a place of love
about this community of artists. Um And And also I
(23:31):
have to say like it's there was a part of
it that felt like a personal indictment because there's this
character in Rent named Mark, and he's always got a
camera rolling and he's kind of documenting his community. And
at one point when the other characters turns to him
and says, you hide in your work. You pretend to
create and detach, you know, you pretend to create an
observe when you really detach. Um And I was a
(23:52):
very neurotic high schooler who always had a VHS camcorder
on my arm. I was Mark. I was that kid
who's like found it easier to film his friends that
actually be with his friends and hang out with them.
Um And so I was like, oh, he's talking to me.
Um And So I started writing one act musicals in
high school because of the influence of rent and and
(24:14):
a couple of things happened at the same time, you know,
like in the heights of the explosion of a lot
of different things. One my senior year, one of my
musical heroes, Paul Simon, wrote a Broadway musical called The
Cape Man, and it started two of my other hero
three of my other heroes, um A, Nita Mazario, Mark Anthony,
(24:35):
and Reuben Blades. Like that is top ten of my
favorite artists all working on the same thing. And I went,
holy shit, here comes my dream show. And I saw
it three times in previews and it died on arrival.
It only lasted sixty one shows. And the even more
heartbreaking thing was there's gorgeous music in it. It takes
(24:56):
place in the exact same location and era as West
Side Story. It's about a true life story about these
gang members in the nineteen fifties who were Puerto Rican
and and it's like, God, I think this subsection of
Lapinos has been very well represented godway, like two major
(25:19):
musicals about like gang members in the nineteen fifties on
the West Side of New York. Um. So it was
this like gut punch really like I took it really
personal of like, like, no one's going to write your
dream show. Those are your favorite artists and they didn't
make your dream show. And um and I think I
(25:41):
spent two years of my life trying to fix Kate
Man in my head. Well maybe if you don't do it,
and maybe you don't, maybe do it in flashback. Maybe
if you start in prison. And then like I finally
just started writing In the Heights, like can we be
more fully ourselves? Can we tell different stories? Um? And
And I started writing that my my sophomore here in college.
(26:03):
It was me trying to write a full length show
for the first time and trying to get out of
the shadow of West Side Story and Capeman and all
the other times we had a knife in our hands? Right,
can we be something else? Pleased? Right? Yeah, within this
genre I love so much. Um And I knew it
was possible because I saw Rent and and that was
like a very contemporary story about that guy's friends. Yeah. Yeah, Alex,
(26:27):
you you have a similar story as far as representation
and musicals. Um. You know, I'll say this for me,
hearing a demo of In the Heights for me was
a revelation because you know, I had heard about the men. Well,
you know, I think I had met Tommy. I don't
think i've even met him in person yet, but I
know I was handed a cassette tape of a recording
(26:50):
of a performance at his time. This is when my
recordings were still on an eight track. Are we that old?
We're talking? Oh my god? Yeah, I pop nikas saide.
I pressed play. First thing I hear is the sound
of like a hip hoppy playing played on buckets, like
you know, like on the quarter. And then I hear
like this Puerto Rican dude rapping over the buckets, and
(27:11):
I'm here like these over the bar line rhymes. I'm
hearing these complex like inter rhymes and stuff. I'm like,
oh my god, this is like amazing. And and I'm
hearing songs with titles like no Memento, you know, I'm like,
oh my god. It's like I feel like I can
like understand like where this person is coming from and
and and what this is and like, wow, there's spanglish
in the song, like I don't know it just really
(27:34):
I just felt the charge right away. And it's one
of those things like when you hear music from a
show for the first time and you see yourself in
it and like, oh my god, I need to be
involved with this, And that's just what it felt like.
Um yeah, you know. One of the things I love
about let Manuel is that, you know, around the time
that we've met, right, like, here's the dude who is
enjoying the new eminem album as much as he's enjoying
(27:57):
the cast recording of Light in the Piazza that just
came out, you know, as much as he'sion doing or
we're talking about Weezer or whatever, like all these like
disparate styles and they're all him, And I just love
that who he is and what he knows it just
comes out and is writing in a way that just
feels natural. And he's never putting anything on. He's never like,
you know, trying to write in the style of like
(28:19):
in an homage in a way to be like, oh,
here's he's just so I don't know about I'm gonna
try to do that. He knows the style, he is
the style, and I just love that there's just a
fluidity and what comes out, and there's always a hook.
It's always like amazing lyrics, it's always complex, and it's
always like accessible. All those things, so um. Yeah, I
(28:39):
just I know for me that anytime I would hear
the competition that he was doing and I would just
be like, yeah, this is amazing. More of that, please, yes, please? Um,
well let's talk about that, because you know, Lynn, I
feel like you have created this non traditional um musical
with hip hop and really just the kinds of things
that you were listening too as a kid, Like you
(29:01):
were like, this is this is you know, that's what
I like. I kind of want to put it in UM.
And for me, I feel like, you know, hip hop's
all about words, and you are brilliant at combining words,
which I felt because I didn't grow up with theater,
but the little theater I was in Wind in the
Willows when I was in elementary, I was a weasel.
(29:21):
I didn't have a line. I was a dancing weasel.
My mom was like, yeah, maybe you shouldn't go down
this route. Uh, and I but I remember just being
punched in the gut and and my heart uh pounding
when I watched in the Heights because of the words
like each in Hamilton's as well, but each sentence is loaded.
(29:44):
And what I remembered about musical theater was they were like,
I'm going to the store to get some mel like
it took so long to get to the point of
the song or the story, and you're every single line
moves through through story and and rhyme and spanglish like
(30:04):
it was so it was just too much for for
my senses to absorb. Um. But in hindsight, it feels like, yeah,
this is a natural fit for musical theater. People should
always do theater in hip hop. So at what time, uh,
what was the reaction from people, obviously, like like Alex
when you first started writing musical theater with with that music. Yeah,
(30:26):
well it's it's a great point. Again, I have to
like doff my cap to Jonathan Larson, who really was
like his whole thesis statement was popular music and musical
theater used to be friends. You used to go to
the theaters, you know, in in the early part of
the twenty century, to go here the hit songs you
heard on the radio, to hear the new Irving Berlin song,
(30:47):
or to hear the new girlswin tune in that review.
And they used to be one and the same. And
at a certain point rock and roll happened, and musical
theaters specialized um. And I think that's to the benefit
of musical theater, you know, like the fact that Stephen
Sondheim can come along and write a musical about a
(31:08):
homicidal barber um like you can never say again, like, oh,
that's not a good idea for musical because he he
and Andrew Lloyd Andrew Lloyd Webber was like, yeah, cats,
that's the whole idea. It's cats, and they all thing
about what kind of cats they are and like that
can run forever, like they just like I think musical
theater expanded to be able to tell a lot more stories.
(31:30):
But Jonathan Larson was very much like, and we can
be friends with pop music again, because my favorite pop
songs tell stories, and for me, my favorite hip hop
songs tell stories. My favorite like hip hop artists like
Biggie and jay Z, like I was always keyed into
the storytelling aspect in addition to the dazzling wordplay uh
and the rhymes and and and similarly with with Latin music,
(31:53):
like the album I remember most well from my parents
collection in vinyl was this picture of when Blades naked
in blue with his band looking up and the title
was Bud America. And those songs are all storytelling songs.
They're like Jim Steinman in Spanish. They're these six minute
(32:14):
epics about these different Latino stories. And so again, it
just it made sense to me to try to bring
that to the musical theater. I love. It was just like, oh,
I get to fit in more information per bar and
I get to um use flow to illuminate character. Snavi
raps very differently from Benny, who raps very differently from Sonny.
(32:37):
And again I'd like go on to do even more
of that with with Hamilton's to really use flow to
illuminate character. Um. But it was so fun um seeing
how much I could pack in, Like there's a lyric
in carnaval Um where Carla goes my dad is Dominican Cuban,
my mom is from Chile NPR, which means I'm chilly,
(33:00):
don't minic weaken, But I always say I'm from Queens.
That's like a microcosm of the whole show, right, Like
if we are all hyphen it's and we're all from somewhere,
how do we define ourselves and what do we pass on? Um?
So it's it's a funny, it's a good line with
a funny punch line, but it also is like the
show in miniature. Yeah, yeah, I would think that you
(33:23):
burn through story that way, but no, you get you
get so much information out in a way that you
need to whether it's like I've got to hit the
emotion right now, I've got you know, in that same song,
you know, when the snab comes and then Vanessa comes
and she's mad and everybody has so many different emotions
within this same song. It's like it's the most beautiful song. Alex,
(33:43):
did you did you feel that way when you, like
you said you first heard in the nights and you're like,
oh my god, I get this. But were you nervous
about hip hop or were you like boom, we found it.
We're doing this, Linds Virginia. But yes, Linda Genius, I
really said that. Um, you know, I don't have this
huge hip hop background, like you know, the stuff I
(34:05):
listened to as I was growing up, like when hip
hop was really at zenith, I was kind of more
like on the alternative rock side of things. And you know,
yes I listened to Beastie Boys in high school. Yes,
I listened to Black Sheep, you know like that there
are definitely things that that influenced me. But I really
gained a real appreciation for hip hop through lit Manuel
because of you know again, I had such immense respect
(34:26):
for him and still do. And when we could talk
about how much we love this station Robert Brown song,
and then he would like, you know, like I said,
just press play and then just start wrapping along to
your biggie on this whole rap, I'm like, oh my god,
how does this guy know that music as intimately as
he knows Camelot? Like I had not seen someone like
that in my life. And uh, that just like makes
you pay attention and then like you just as a musician,
(34:49):
like you just want to know what way these are
so you can just catch that. So it definitely like
made me look at that, appreciate the music and buy
more albums and really like pour over it and just
try to understand what makes Lynn lynn, just so I
could try to keep up with him, right, And then Kiera,
did you did you grow up with hip hop or
did you like it? Or what was your take on
(35:09):
on this when you heard it or read it? Because
as as the writer, I was, I don't know how
it works, Like do you just write the words and
then Lynna inserts insert music here. It's way more like
messy and organic than that. I mean I was. I
was super excited when I heard the hip hop because yeah,
I did grow up with it, being from West Philly.
(35:29):
Before the Roots were the Roots, before they were on powerm.
They were on the street corner on my walk to
Clark Park and they were singing past the popcorn and
I was like, that sounds cool, um, you know. So
it was part of my life too. I wasn't steeped
into it in the way that lynn was, but it
was very much part of the landscape. But I loved
(35:49):
using that vocabulary. I mean, actually I lived in West Philly,
which was historically a middle class and working class black
neighborhood and a kind of diverse first generation immigrant neighborhood.
And then my extended family was in North Philly, which
was just in Barrio is just Borequa. And then as
I grew older, more Dominican, Central American, South American, and
(36:12):
so actually that kind of merging of hip hop and
Latino music kind of reflected the map of my life, um,
which I loved, and what it looked like in terms
of how we actually do it the nuts and bolts.
Lynn used to live um an in Wood when we
first started working together, so we'd either hang it my
apartment back then, or we'd hang up at his apartment
(36:34):
and he'd be like skateboarding up and down the hallway.
We would we would have a task at hand, like, Okay,
let's look at Nina and Benny. How what what happens
when they wake up together the morning after? Right? So
what does that look like? And you know, Lynne's skateboarding
up and down his hallway. I'm kind of writing in
my corner, and if I have an interesting idea, I
have an interesting bit of dialogue or an interesting little
(36:56):
monologue that has an idea, I might hand it to
him and he might be like, oh, that might be
a cool idea for a song. Let me take that,
get back to you later, um so, and and vice versa.
I stole. I stole songs from him and turned them
into scenes too. There's a scene um where Nina and
her parents getting a big fight about what happened while
(37:17):
she was off at school. And we had tried that
as a song for a long time, and then somehow
it was just like the scene version of it. Ended
up feeling um better for that moment, and but a
lot of the Nina Benny stuff, the you know sunrise.
I remember dialogue versions of that too, and I can't
remember exactly what order it went in, but it's messy.
(37:39):
We're just bringing each other new words every day. Yeah, totally.
I remember really distinctly, um Kira setting up the notion
between Vanessa Noo Snabi first one out of the hood
buys the other a bottle of champagne, and it was
a line. It was like a line of dialogue we
threw into the opening number and then like smash cut
two years later when there was a different Usnavi even
(38:01):
as a song in Act two called Goodbye, where they're
kind of saying goodbye to each other. But then I
wrote when the Sun Goes Down, and I was like,
these are two sad songs of two couples breaking up,
Like this is getting to be a very sad act
to um, we need to liven it up, And so
I ran with the notion that Kara came up with
of like, oh, the bottle of champagne will center the
(38:22):
song around that, and you know, Vanessa's bringing the bottle
of champagne and us Nave is like too obsessed with
opening the bottle to like see that she's saying she
loves you, you dummy, um and and then like and
then threading the musical version of that back into the
opening number. So like it was very fluid in terms
of what the best idea was. Not Tommy Cale, our
(38:44):
director was really good at fostering and environment where the
best idea in the room wins and we all right
to them. Yeah, that's everything I know comes to mind too.
That's Nina's big turnaround moment where I would look, Claudia
has passed and Nina and his navy they're kind of
adoptive siblings. They were raised by weoklow on the block
and um, so they're going through her stuff and they're
just looking through, Oh, here's your second grade book report,
(39:06):
you know, here's these old lotto tickets that she never
threw away. And that also kind of became a chicken
and egg that then a whole song comes of like
what do you learn from going from rifling through the
old stuff and seeing the child you once were and
seeing it with different and more mature eyes. Now, So yeah,
all these all these um kind of scene and song
(39:27):
things they develop organically over time as the idea unfolds. Well,
I'm I'm so excited. I'm gonna wrap up this first
episode of our special limited podcast series in the Heights.
Please join us tomorrow June three for episode two. This
has been a production of the Michael Podcast Network on
(39:48):
I Heart Media and we'll see you tomorrow
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