June 3, 2021 • 28 mins
Lin-Manuel Miranda and executive music producer Alex Lacamoire talk about the evolution of the music featured in “In the Heights.” How it started from its beginning stages of fusing hip-hop and Latin sounds, to the current movie soundtrack. They even share one of the early demos of the song “Blackout.” Miranda also discusses how music was a part of his personal journey before making it to Broadway. He takes us back to opening night of “In the Heights” and an emotional moment he had with his sister minutes before his Broadway debut.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to episode two of our very special series in
the Heights with star creator lin Manuel Miranda and longtime
collaborators writer producer Kiara Allegria who this and executive music
producer Alex Lackamore. How is everyone great? So we're gonna
pick up right where we left off. You guys were
(00:22):
talking about how you guys met and how the musical
was coming together, and I feel like a lot of
people go, oh, it must be easy to get a
musical on Broadway all of our twenties. So I want
to talk about, like, Okay, you finished the writing of it,
and and are you staging it as you go? Are
(00:43):
you talking about the process of getting it up and
on its feet and on a stage or what was
the stage? How did it happen? Well, finishing the writing
is doing that sentence is doing a lot of work
because I never I never felt like we finished the
writing of it. You know again, we are uh, two
unknown writers in the world. We're working with Tommy Kle,
(01:06):
an unknown director. Are most famous creative team member is
Alex Lackamore and he is the associate conductor on Wicked.
UM and Um. We are just doing reading after reading
and Um. What we had, which was really incredible was
the support of Jill Furman and the support of Kevin McCullum,
(01:26):
who was a producer on Rent the Musical and made
me want to start writing musicals, um and have a
new que. And so we were lucky enough to go
to There's like major kind of milestones in that writing,
one of which was the O'Neill Theater Center, which sort
of accepts different shows in reading and workshop phases. And
we spent two weeks on Eugene O'Neill's old estate. I
(01:49):
don't think I slept more than uh four hours a night. Uh.
We just wrote and wrote and wrote. We brought up
you bring up your actors with you. There are people
who bring you coffee and make copies for you, UM,
interns who are also aspiring playwrights and theater makers. And
saw a ghost, uh in the middle of writing one night. UM.
(02:12):
I didn't see a ghost, but I you know, I
remember writing black Out there. I had a Cassio keyboard
and I would wander around, um writing Blackout and UM,
actually I think we have a demo of it. And
what's amazing about the demo is you can hear like
the mic improven quality over the years as I continue
to rewrite Blackout from two thousand five all the way
(02:35):
until two thousand eight when we open. So in the
beginning the mica is very much like this, and then
by the end the mic is getting better because like
technology is advancing, UM, so you can hear the new
sections from the old sections. UM. Which is funny because
the first thing we had to do for the movie
version was rewrite a section of the Blackout. I feel
like I'll be rewriting the Blackout as long as I live.
(02:58):
Can we can we play that? You get us all
black out, black bag all ideals. So you get us
all black out, black all ideals, can't see what shock?
Then we've done a back This is a black Out chill.
(03:21):
We're gonna get killed, Campion. But I hear the cassio.
(03:50):
I hear the cassio and like, I can hear how
tired I was. I can hear the vocal parts that
were recorded at three in the morning, and I'm trying
to be quiet but still get I'm like, and I'm
not trying not to wake up my bunk mates. What
year is that? What years that does that's five through
(04:14):
two thousand and eight because there's sections in it that
didn't exist in the first version. I think that version
is the one that has we are Powerless way too
many times because I found it and loved it so
much that I put it throughout the thing, and they're like,
all right, we're gonna have to say I have this
thing that we're powerless, and so yeah, easy, easy, some
(04:44):
of them are powerless, um and so so yeah. So
that was I mean, it's a lot of being exhausted
and writing that and then you know, we we performed
at the end of our two weeks O'Neil experience, and
our producers said that thing that no one wants to hear.
It's not ready. There's still too many storylines. I still
(05:04):
don't quite know what the focus is and um, that's
very tough to hear after the work and the time
we've been doing. But it was the right call because
we all turned to each other at this point. Nina
Rosario had a brother in the show named Lincoln Rosario
that was a major character, and we all turned to
each other and said, I think we have to kill Lincoln. Um.
(05:28):
And he was played by an amazing singer and legend
in our community. Huey Dunbar at the O'Neil m of
d LG so like, his songs were amazing and he
sang the hell out of them. But we realized, if
we take out Lincoln, suddenly Nina gets all of this
richness and she gets these complex issues with her father
(05:49):
that we were exploring through Lincoln, and Nina becomes this
like much richer and much more multidimensional Um character. And
so we then did a workshop of that in two
thousand six. So who was that original cast? Was it
just people you knew? So many original casts? I mean
there were there were people who were really there in
the early versions. There were people who were just there
(06:12):
at the O'Neill and then popped up later in our lives.
Rick Negrong is a great example. He played Kevin for
the workshop and then like would go on to be
our second Kevin on Broadway. There and then there were
a few people who were constants throughout donein Montalvo. Um
was the first person to audition for US in two
thousand and two. She predates Kiara and Alex by two years.
(06:35):
Um and was in kind of every version of the
show and became so in this you know played Benny's mother.
When Benny's mother was a character, Um played, Damila, played,
played Daniela, played everybody, and then became the the cover
for every single one of those roles. Um and she
she actually passed away last year. She was the first
(06:56):
of our Heights family to pass away. And I so
grateful that she actually plays her role in the movie.
She is that woman who sings mea Nina bore and
breathe yeah, And she's that on Broadway and in the movie.
(07:21):
Um And I'm so glad we never imagined anyone else
for the movie but her. But she I think she
tracks the longest line. But people like Janet to call
Mandy Gonzalez did an early workshop, then booked a Broadway show,
then came back to us to originate Nina on Broadway. So,
you know, so many actors over the years gave us
so much information. Chris Jackson began by playing a Latino character.
(07:44):
Benny was a Latino character. But then Chris was just
so effortlessly charming. That was actually one of the things
that came out of the O'Neil was You've got Chris
who's so charming and an effortless and he's playing this
Latino character. It's like, just start writing for Chris um
and then we decided that character is African American and
(08:05):
and what what does that add to to sort of
the mosaic of this neighborhood. And so again, like our
actors gave us a lot of information at every step. Well,
there's so many Again we're gonna talk about the movie
in episode three, but there are so many hidden easter
eggs in the movie. Like you just said, you know
of people playing these tinatto parts, and they pop up
(08:27):
a lot of your Hamilton's buddies as well. Um. So
after the O'Neill, it goes to we go to like
one more workshop where we we we sort of start
working on the dance and what it looks like on
its feet. And that was in two thousand six, and
we recorded three songs from that workshop with like a
three piece band, and then we open off Broadway in
(08:52):
the winter of two thousand seven. And you talked about
when the writing is done. I told you that sentence
did a lot of work. Um. Kiara at this point
in previews is nine months pregnant and we are up
against two deadlines. Um, I think you should take over
this part of the storytelling of like really when we
(09:12):
kind of were pens down off Broadway. You know, the
writing is done in theater when the show quote unquote freezes,
when you cannot make any more script changes because technically
there's no more time left to rehearse them, and your
actors need to have a set thing to get their
heads and hearts around. It is a deadline based decision,
(09:33):
you know. And so off Broadway and yeah, I was
there for these workshops, um every step of the way.
You know. I did see a ghost at the O'Neil,
and I wrote a lot of scenes that got thrown
out too, So there's like ghost scenes that also were created. Um, yeah,
the character of Lincoln, you know, became a kind of
in the Heights ghost too. But by the time we
(09:54):
got to Off Broadway, there were some songs and some
scenes off Broadway that we still couldn't c We tried,
you know, and we made strides, but we could feel
we weren't totally there, and so the show was going
to freeze. At five pm or six pm, I can't
remember that day. It's five pm. I'm trying to write
basically a punch line to button the scene to end
(10:16):
the scene on a kind of bright note. But I
think Lynn and I knew that the song and the
scene probably didn't work. We He had done so many
lyric fixes on this song. I had done so many.
It was a song Chris Jackson sang called That's What's Up,
which is Chris Jackson is um that I turned into
us off, And it's like it just felt like it
(10:37):
was trying to oversimplify something that we needed to let
be more complicated. So I was just trying to write
the funny line. I'm throwing lines at Mandy Gonzalez, I'm
throwing lines at Chris Jackson. And then the stage manager
was like, that's it. So I didn't even know. I
didn't even remember what was the last line I threw
at her. It was just like, Okay, I guess that's it.
And I went off to dinner and I went into
labor about twenty minutes after over that last line at her.
(11:02):
So my whole body was like, Okay, you can release
now and then. And we had a preview that night,
because this is the thing when you're when you're working
on theater, it's not that the show freezes or you
finished writing the script and then performances start. No, you
have this this section of previews where you're seeing what
is the audience laughing at? Where is the audience crying?
(11:23):
Where are they leaning in? And really could feel the breathlessness.
You're watching their faces and going, Okay, where are they
like creating their to do list for what they have
to do in the morning, you know, like where are
they tuning out? And then you're you're noticing that and
you're paying attention. You're trying to write a better punch line,
You're trying to write a better scene for the next day.
And you do that for a few weeks and that
is so stressful and there's so much going on, and
(11:45):
you're just part of you is just going, I hope
they like me. I hope they like me. And the
other part of you is going, all right, enough of that,
like do the best writing you Can's daughter Cecilia for
waiting till the show was frozen to be like all right,
so what was the reaction? What was the early audience reaction? Audience?
And then I want to talk about critical There was
there was ninety six thousand. I mean, there's some things
(12:07):
that just become consistent. Laugh lines, which is really cool.
There's some things that are laugh lines more when there's
more of a Latino audience versus a general audience. And
then there's some things like thousand for instances such an
explosive song and you could feel the audience This is
I'm talking off Broadway here. You could feel the audience
just elevate. You could feel the energy be electric in
(12:27):
the theater. But then somehow by the end of the
song that had dissipated. So that was one we knew
we wanted to work on more to keep building that
that electricity and that excitement all the way through to
the very end. But again we ran out of time
and we didn't totally realize that in the moment um.
And same with it won't be long now. But with
(12:48):
that one, we wanted it to have a softer ending.
So how do you kind of manage those like explosive endings,
those softer endings and keep the audience with you where
you want them to be. So there's a lot of
watching and learning. Um, it was really fun. You know,
you could feel just like when Alex listened to that
cassette and heard the glave a beat, you could feel
the audience have that experience of like what is this?
(13:09):
Who are these people? You know, they come in, they
sit down, they've had a they've had too many drinks
before coming to the theater, they've had a long work day.
And that glove A beat just starting out it does something.
It's like, come on it. It's like a very soft,
gentle entrance, and that you could feel like we were
we were onto something. Yeah, the glave A beat is
it's one of it's like kind of the d N
(13:31):
a sequence of a lot of Latin rhythms, so it
can go to three or three too. So you've heard
people clap it in the dance club. Just just do
we do it in that direction for in the heights
or do we do um um um lights up Washington,
set the break of day and wake up? And I
(13:51):
got this little punk, I gotta chase away the Great
get the Collector dawn sing while I wipe down the
awning good morning. Yeah, you know it's I think people forget.
We ran close to seven months off Broadway and we
did fine. Like the people that loved the show loved
the show and kept coming back. And we were pretty
(14:13):
cheap ticket. We were in a theater that no longer
exists on Street and tenth Avenue. Um. You know, the
cast would go to their coffee shop, UM, which was
the gas station around the corner, UM where they had
a little duncan stand. Um. But that neighborhood, like it
really like it wasn't really a neighborhood yet. Um. And
(14:34):
it was hard for people to find us. And you know,
our our producers were pretty committed to moving us on
Broadway because we got lovely reviews. But there were there
were a lot of people in the industry where they
were like, you're not even selling out your off Broadway house.
Why are you coming in? How is that possible? Um?
And we knew, you know. And again, like it was
(14:55):
very surreal for me as as one of the writers
to perform in this show every night, knowing what I
wanted to do if I got another chance to keep
writing with Kiara and and Land the button of nineties
thousand and Land, you know, the the end of it
won't be long now, um, and and reconfigure what happens
(15:15):
instead of that's what's up? Um. Like we had the
mental checklist and um, again, this isn't it's so hard
because it's you only learn by doing. This is something
we talked about in the industry a lot, like all
the internships in the world will not prepare for putting
a show on in front of an audience. And I
had seven months of information in a tactile way as
(15:37):
a performer as to what works every night, what only
works when there's Latinos there, what works when there's tourists there.
It takes them a little longer to get the snabi
name joke um like. And so we just like when
we when we finally got the call that we were
we had a theater and we were moving to Broadway,
we had so much information. We knew exactly what we
(15:59):
wanted to do, and we were surgical about it, like
I just remember, like I know exactly what needs to
happen to elevate this to the next place. And you
also know what works every night, so you know the
tent poles to stick with and to build towards. Like
Buss and c I f A. You could feel people
connecting on a deep level in that theater, people connecting
(16:19):
with their memories, people connecting, you know, people grieving, people
being ingratitude to remember their elders, are saying Hey, I'm
that elder you know, and love them to see their stories.
And now why don't wait a million they're too late.
I talk to you, badge, and what you do remembering
(16:40):
what we weren't like to say? So those are the
things that you know you're going to keep and just
(17:01):
even build up more and you know that you that
you're aiming for as you do that some of the changes. Yeah,
and Alex, what do you remember about that time? Do you?
Did you have the same emotions of like I get like, guys,
this is we got it. Yeah. You know it's interesting
because like, uh, like Lynn, I was performing the show
every night, I was conducting the show, and it's a
(17:21):
different experience because you know, I would have my headphones
on and be very concerned about getting my piano parts
played right and leading the band and connecting with the cast.
So you know, I it wasn't the same experience as
someone like you are who could, like you, sit in
the house with the audience and feel what that energy is.
I mean, yes, I could hear the applause, I could
hear the reactions, but like Lynn said, I think that
(17:43):
period of time that we have between off Broadway and
Broadway was so crucial because I often think to myself, guys,
I don't know, like Karen Len how you feel, but
when I think about how different the show was off Broadway,
the fact that we had songs like planed b off Roadway,
Like there's entire songs off Broadway. Yes, dude, I'm telling you,
it's like the club number ended differently, you know, ninety
(18:05):
six thousand had a different button, all those things, and
we just made all these changes because, as Lind said,
we knew what it needed, we knew how to make
it better, and we just like drilled down and we
just spent all that time just really you know, um,
cutting things that we didn't think needed to be there. Uh,
making ending stronger and more powerful, augmenting the size of
(18:26):
the band, uh, you know, adding rich moments like for example,
Off Roadway got Naval, didn't have the whole Barada moment
at all. We've all those things happened between Off Roadway
(18:51):
and Broadway in what is probably a fourd to five
months span, which and now in retrospect, seems crazy to
me that we accomplished that much in that showing amount
of time. But we knew what we wanted to do,
we just went in and thrilled like the whole big
ending to kind about it, as we said, Once we
(19:16):
could tell that things weren't landing in the way that
we intended them to, that we weren't getting that sense
of either connection or applause. We can just tell that
the audience wasn't just feeling like completely satisfied at the
end of a song. So we would just try to
do what we could to get the songs at that level.
There's there's a term in musical theater called the button,
and that's the final moment in the song that makes
(19:38):
you go and started like clapping, and it's I mean,
it's it's a literal term, it's a practical term, like
the lights will bump, and that gives you a subconscious
cue that this is over. Um. And I hadn't gone
to button school. No one teaches you how to write
a great button to a song, and most pop songs
fade out like you don't learn that in pop music.
(19:59):
Um and so I really went to button school between
off Broadway and Broadway, and we really, like, you know,
watch the musical numbers that we loved and like studied
how they ended and figured out how to apply that
to our own thing. And for Opening night on Broadway,
Tommy Cale gives me a box and it's a box
of buttons of every ship. That was my opening night.
(20:23):
I want to talk about that Opening night on Broadway.
Were you like, holy shit, this is happening, Like what
were you feeling land at the time, and and give
us a picture like where were you living? Were you like,
I hope I make money on this. Yeah. Yeah, Again,
(20:44):
I'm I'm pretty you know, I'm a New Yorker, so
I'm pretty morbid. I'm pretty superstitious, and I just was like, please,
let's get this musical out of our heads and onto
a stage. So for me, the first real triumph UM
was the first preview on Broadway. And I made some
crucial mistakes on that day. One which is my my
(21:07):
dad invited everyone he knew and they were in the
front row. UM. So literally all the people I love
most in the world, like my college friends and my
elementary school friends are in the front row to this
thing that is not done yet. UM. And I was like, no,
no, no no, come back in a month. We have lots
to learn. UM. But also I don't know if I've
(21:28):
ever told the story before. But again, I'm in my
Broadway dressing room for the first time. It's like five
minutes to places, which means the cast is going to
gather in the basement and and do a prayer in
our prayer circle, and my family is hanging in. I'm like, okay,
you guys gotta go. I gotta get like my head
right and and do the show. And my family all
leaves and my sister stays behind. My sister who is, um,
(21:53):
maybe the quietest member of my family, probably because she
feels so much, and she turns to me. This is
five minutes before my Broadway debut and shows. I just
want to say all those times that you wrote songs
at the piano when we were little, and I never listened,
and I wish I'd listen to more. And it's like crying,
(22:14):
and I'm like, I can't have this complex to go
do a two and a half hour show like this
is a wonderful moment of emotional guitars is, but like
not now now. I like pushed her sobbing out the door.
So it was all like too much, too soon, um
(22:36):
and then um and then we learned again so much
through Broadway previews and that suite of Nomadriga are really
funny number into nineties thousand, which now has a killer
button into into when Your Home is this like crazy
quadruple punch now um and and really gives us this
(22:59):
incredible head of steam going into the rest of the show.
And so we we just learned so much in that month,
so that by opening night we really felt like this
is our best swing. Like I really felt confident, like
I'm sure there's a better show here, but I don't
know how to write it yet. Like we really, um,
we we we did so much work um in that month. Yeah,
(23:22):
can I tell my Opening Nights story? So one of
my favorite memories is, um, when we get to the
finale of the show on opening night and my family
had flown up from Miami. And mind you, like my
family had seen workshops along the way because as soon
as I told them, you guys are working on the
show and it's got that music in it is Spanglish.
You know that they were fans from in the heighth
(23:43):
its like you know, before anyone knew what the show was, right,
And we get to the finale and there's a moment
where I don't actually play piano anymore. I gave all
the piano parts to the second keyboard so that I
could lift up my hands and conduct and look at
the stage and conduct the choir. And we get to
that moment where you know, on the conductor's podium, I
have the best seat in the house, right, like no
one is closer to the stage watching it than me.
(24:06):
And then then man walls right up there in front
of me and he sings, he wraps that passage. I
could say goodbye to you's smiling. I find my island.
I've been on it this whole time. I'm Poe. And
Lynn's voice breaks just enough because he just gets overrun
with emotion that I get overrun with emotion. So my
(24:29):
hands are up in the air conducting, and then it
just hits him and like, oh my god, we made it.
We're here, we open and I just started sobbing. I
just my head goes down and like my hands are
still waving in the air, and I'm just like we
(25:04):
could but because like I just felt, oh my god,
we did it, you know, like here we are. You know,
as we talked Earli about friends who found each other,
and we were just creating art because we believe in something.
You know. It wasn't like, oh, we're gonna We're doing
this because we want to be famous, you know. It
wasn't like we're doing this because we want to make money.
Like no, We're getting together because we love what we do.
(25:25):
And there was no other real um goal other than
to just make something that we were proud of and
to make something that felt like it represented us and
make something with our friends and everything else was just
like icing on the cake. And to know that we
had achieved it that just the goopening. I just felt
like a mile marker. And I suppose all those years
of work, all those nights staying up late to worry
(25:46):
about whether or not the high Hats should play on
Beat four or not, you know, we're stressing about every
choir harmony, all that stuff, it just came. It just
that sense of of of completion and it just felt
so wonderful to have there because I felt like everything
in my life led up to that moment and it
was a big male market for me. That is a
(26:07):
beautiful way to wrap up episode two about the play.
This show went on to be nominated for thirteen Tony
Awards and one four run over a thousand performances on Broadway,
and it launched a truly remarkable journey for Linn Manuel
Miranda and his collaborators that would take them through Hamilton's
(26:28):
which one eleven Tony's and a pullitzerprise no less music
for a massive hit Disney animated film I Wanna and
a lot of trips to the White House, and then
the proposal to make In the Heights into a full
feature film with Warner Brothers. Uh. That's where we're going
to pick it up for our third and final episode,
dropping tomorrow June four. Um, Lynn, will you tell us
(26:52):
about the book though, because the book is the play correct. Yeah,
so again if if if In the Heights was born
as an idea, uh, at age nineteen, it's old enough
to drink forty one years sold. Our baby is a
grown thing, and and um, you know, during during the pandemic,
we we got together and sort of started chronic ling
(27:14):
the journey with Jeremy McCarter, who wrote the book about
the making of Hamilton's. He's written these essays on the
twenty year journey from from Wesleyan to from that first
production at Wesley into the movie version that we're all
going to see um and and KR has written essays
for that book, and I've written annotations to all the lyrics,
so so a lot of these stories are also in
(27:35):
that book. Then they will come out June fifteenth. It's
called In the Heights Finding Home June the book. And
tomorrow we have the third and final episode of In
the Heights. This has been a production of the Michael
Podcast Network and we will see you tomorrow. The b
Welcome to episode two of our very special series in
the Heights with star creator lin Manuel Miranda and longtime
collaborators writer producer Kiara Allegria who this and executive music
producer Alex Lackamore. How is everyone great? So we're gonna
pick up right where we left off. You guys were
(00:22):
talking about how you guys met and how the musical
was coming together, and I feel like a lot of
people go, oh, it must be easy to get a
musical on Broadway all of our twenties. So I want
to talk about, like, Okay, you finished the writing of it,
and and are you staging it as you go? Are
(00:43):
you talking about the process of getting it up and
on its feet and on a stage or what was
the stage? How did it happen? Well, finishing the writing
is doing that sentence is doing a lot of work
because I never I never felt like we finished the
writing of it. You know again, we are uh, two
unknown writers in the world. We're working with Tommy Kle,
(01:06):
an unknown director. Are most famous creative team member is
Alex Lackamore and he is the associate conductor on Wicked.
UM and Um. We are just doing reading after reading
and Um. What we had, which was really incredible was
the support of Jill Furman and the support of Kevin McCullum,
(01:26):
who was a producer on Rent the Musical and made
me want to start writing musicals, um and have a
new que. And so we were lucky enough to go
to There's like major kind of milestones in that writing,
one of which was the O'Neill Theater Center, which sort
of accepts different shows in reading and workshop phases. And
we spent two weeks on Eugene O'Neill's old estate. I
(01:49):
don't think I slept more than uh four hours a night. Uh.
We just wrote and wrote and wrote. We brought up
you bring up your actors with you. There are people
who bring you coffee and make copies for you, UM,
interns who are also aspiring playwrights and theater makers. And
saw a ghost, uh in the middle of writing one night. UM.
(02:12):
I didn't see a ghost, but I you know, I
remember writing black Out there. I had a Cassio keyboard
and I would wander around, um writing Blackout and UM,
actually I think we have a demo of it. And
what's amazing about the demo is you can hear like
the mic improven quality over the years as I continue
to rewrite Blackout from two thousand five all the way
(02:35):
until two thousand eight when we open. So in the
beginning the mica is very much like this, and then
by the end the mic is getting better because like
technology is advancing, UM, so you can hear the new
sections from the old sections. UM. Which is funny because
the first thing we had to do for the movie
version was rewrite a section of the Blackout. I feel
like I'll be rewriting the Blackout as long as I live.
(02:58):
Can we can we play that? You get us all
black out, black bag all ideals. So you get us
all black out, black all ideals, can't see what shock?
Then we've done a back This is a black Out chill.
(03:21):
We're gonna get killed, Campion. But I hear the cassio.
(03:50):
I hear the cassio and like, I can hear how
tired I was. I can hear the vocal parts that
were recorded at three in the morning, and I'm trying
to be quiet but still get I'm like, and I'm
not trying not to wake up my bunk mates. What
year is that? What years that does that's five through
(04:14):
two thousand and eight because there's sections in it that
didn't exist in the first version. I think that version
is the one that has we are Powerless way too
many times because I found it and loved it so
much that I put it throughout the thing, and they're like,
all right, we're gonna have to say I have this
thing that we're powerless, and so yeah, easy, easy, some
(04:44):
of them are powerless, um and so so yeah. So
that was I mean, it's a lot of being exhausted
and writing that and then you know, we we performed
at the end of our two weeks O'Neil experience, and
our producers said that thing that no one wants to hear.
It's not ready. There's still too many storylines. I still
(05:04):
don't quite know what the focus is and um, that's
very tough to hear after the work and the time
we've been doing. But it was the right call because
we all turned to each other at this point. Nina
Rosario had a brother in the show named Lincoln Rosario
that was a major character, and we all turned to
each other and said, I think we have to kill Lincoln. Um.
(05:28):
And he was played by an amazing singer and legend
in our community. Huey Dunbar at the O'Neil m of
d LG so like, his songs were amazing and he
sang the hell out of them. But we realized, if
we take out Lincoln, suddenly Nina gets all of this
richness and she gets these complex issues with her father
(05:49):
that we were exploring through Lincoln, and Nina becomes this
like much richer and much more multidimensional Um character. And
so we then did a workshop of that in two
thousand six. So who was that original cast? Was it
just people you knew? So many original casts? I mean
there were there were people who were really there in
the early versions. There were people who were just there
(06:12):
at the O'Neill and then popped up later in our lives.
Rick Negrong is a great example. He played Kevin for
the workshop and then like would go on to be
our second Kevin on Broadway. There and then there were
a few people who were constants throughout donein Montalvo. Um
was the first person to audition for US in two
thousand and two. She predates Kiara and Alex by two years.
(06:35):
Um and was in kind of every version of the
show and became so in this you know played Benny's mother.
When Benny's mother was a character, Um played, Damila, played,
played Daniela, played everybody, and then became the the cover
for every single one of those roles. Um and she
she actually passed away last year. She was the first
(06:56):
of our Heights family to pass away. And I so
grateful that she actually plays her role in the movie.
She is that woman who sings mea Nina bore and
breathe yeah, And she's that on Broadway and in the movie.
(07:21):
Um And I'm so glad we never imagined anyone else
for the movie but her. But she I think she
tracks the longest line. But people like Janet to call
Mandy Gonzalez did an early workshop, then booked a Broadway show,
then came back to us to originate Nina on Broadway. So,
you know, so many actors over the years gave us
so much information. Chris Jackson began by playing a Latino character.
(07:44):
Benny was a Latino character. But then Chris was just
so effortlessly charming. That was actually one of the things
that came out of the O'Neil was You've got Chris
who's so charming and an effortless and he's playing this
Latino character. It's like, just start writing for Chris um
and then we decided that character is African American and
(08:05):
and what what does that add to to sort of
the mosaic of this neighborhood. And so again, like our
actors gave us a lot of information at every step. Well,
there's so many Again we're gonna talk about the movie
in episode three, but there are so many hidden easter
eggs in the movie. Like you just said, you know
of people playing these tinatto parts, and they pop up
(08:27):
a lot of your Hamilton's buddies as well. Um. So
after the O'Neill, it goes to we go to like
one more workshop where we we we sort of start
working on the dance and what it looks like on
its feet. And that was in two thousand six, and
we recorded three songs from that workshop with like a
three piece band, and then we open off Broadway in
(08:52):
the winter of two thousand seven. And you talked about
when the writing is done. I told you that sentence
did a lot of work. Um. Kiara at this point
in previews is nine months pregnant and we are up
against two deadlines. Um, I think you should take over
this part of the storytelling of like really when we
(09:12):
kind of were pens down off Broadway. You know, the
writing is done in theater when the show quote unquote freezes,
when you cannot make any more script changes because technically
there's no more time left to rehearse them, and your
actors need to have a set thing to get their
heads and hearts around. It is a deadline based decision,
(09:33):
you know. And so off Broadway and yeah, I was
there for these workshops, um every step of the way.
You know. I did see a ghost at the O'Neil,
and I wrote a lot of scenes that got thrown
out too, So there's like ghost scenes that also were created. Um, yeah,
the character of Lincoln, you know, became a kind of
in the Heights ghost too. But by the time we
(09:54):
got to Off Broadway, there were some songs and some
scenes off Broadway that we still couldn't c We tried,
you know, and we made strides, but we could feel
we weren't totally there, and so the show was going
to freeze. At five pm or six pm, I can't
remember that day. It's five pm. I'm trying to write
basically a punch line to button the scene to end
(10:16):
the scene on a kind of bright note. But I
think Lynn and I knew that the song and the
scene probably didn't work. We He had done so many
lyric fixes on this song. I had done so many.
It was a song Chris Jackson sang called That's What's Up,
which is Chris Jackson is um that I turned into
us off, And it's like it just felt like it
(10:37):
was trying to oversimplify something that we needed to let
be more complicated. So I was just trying to write
the funny line. I'm throwing lines at Mandy Gonzalez, I'm
throwing lines at Chris Jackson. And then the stage manager
was like, that's it. So I didn't even know. I
didn't even remember what was the last line I threw
at her. It was just like, Okay, I guess that's it.
And I went off to dinner and I went into
labor about twenty minutes after over that last line at her.
(11:02):
So my whole body was like, Okay, you can release
now and then. And we had a preview that night,
because this is the thing when you're when you're working
on theater, it's not that the show freezes or you
finished writing the script and then performances start. No, you
have this this section of previews where you're seeing what
is the audience laughing at? Where is the audience crying?
(11:23):
Where are they leaning in? And really could feel the breathlessness.
You're watching their faces and going, Okay, where are they
like creating their to do list for what they have
to do in the morning, you know, like where are
they tuning out? And then you're you're noticing that and
you're paying attention. You're trying to write a better punch line,
You're trying to write a better scene for the next day.
And you do that for a few weeks and that
is so stressful and there's so much going on, and
(11:45):
you're just part of you is just going, I hope
they like me. I hope they like me. And the
other part of you is going, all right, enough of that,
like do the best writing you Can's daughter Cecilia for
waiting till the show was frozen to be like all right,
so what was the reaction? What was the early audience reaction? Audience?
And then I want to talk about critical There was
there was ninety six thousand. I mean, there's some things
(12:07):
that just become consistent. Laugh lines, which is really cool.
There's some things that are laugh lines more when there's
more of a Latino audience versus a general audience. And
then there's some things like thousand for instances such an
explosive song and you could feel the audience This is
I'm talking off Broadway here. You could feel the audience
just elevate. You could feel the energy be electric in
(12:27):
the theater. But then somehow by the end of the
song that had dissipated. So that was one we knew
we wanted to work on more to keep building that
that electricity and that excitement all the way through to
the very end. But again we ran out of time
and we didn't totally realize that in the moment um.
And same with it won't be long now. But with
(12:48):
that one, we wanted it to have a softer ending.
So how do you kind of manage those like explosive endings,
those softer endings and keep the audience with you where
you want them to be. So there's a lot of
watching and learning. Um, it was really fun. You know,
you could feel just like when Alex listened to that
cassette and heard the glave a beat, you could feel
the audience have that experience of like what is this?
(13:09):
Who are these people? You know, they come in, they
sit down, they've had a they've had too many drinks
before coming to the theater, they've had a long work day.
And that glove A beat just starting out it does something.
It's like, come on it. It's like a very soft,
gentle entrance, and that you could feel like we were
we were onto something. Yeah, the glave A beat is
it's one of it's like kind of the d N
(13:31):
a sequence of a lot of Latin rhythms, so it
can go to three or three too. So you've heard
people clap it in the dance club. Just just do
we do it in that direction for in the heights
or do we do um um um lights up Washington,
set the break of day and wake up? And I
(13:51):
got this little punk, I gotta chase away the Great
get the Collector dawn sing while I wipe down the
awning good morning. Yeah, you know it's I think people forget.
We ran close to seven months off Broadway and we
did fine. Like the people that loved the show loved
the show and kept coming back. And we were pretty
(14:13):
cheap ticket. We were in a theater that no longer
exists on Street and tenth Avenue. Um. You know, the
cast would go to their coffee shop, UM, which was
the gas station around the corner, UM where they had
a little duncan stand. Um. But that neighborhood, like it
really like it wasn't really a neighborhood yet. Um. And
(14:34):
it was hard for people to find us. And you know,
our our producers were pretty committed to moving us on
Broadway because we got lovely reviews. But there were there
were a lot of people in the industry where they
were like, you're not even selling out your off Broadway house.
Why are you coming in? How is that possible? Um?
And we knew, you know. And again, like it was
(14:55):
very surreal for me as as one of the writers
to perform in this show every night, knowing what I
wanted to do if I got another chance to keep
writing with Kiara and and Land the button of nineties
thousand and Land, you know, the the end of it
won't be long now, um, and and reconfigure what happens
(15:15):
instead of that's what's up? Um. Like we had the
mental checklist and um, again, this isn't it's so hard
because it's you only learn by doing. This is something
we talked about in the industry a lot, like all
the internships in the world will not prepare for putting
a show on in front of an audience. And I
had seven months of information in a tactile way as
(15:37):
a performer as to what works every night, what only
works when there's Latinos there, what works when there's tourists there.
It takes them a little longer to get the snabi
name joke um like. And so we just like when
we when we finally got the call that we were
we had a theater and we were moving to Broadway,
we had so much information. We knew exactly what we
(15:59):
wanted to do, and we were surgical about it, like
I just remember, like I know exactly what needs to
happen to elevate this to the next place. And you
also know what works every night, so you know the
tent poles to stick with and to build towards. Like
Buss and c I f A. You could feel people
connecting on a deep level in that theater, people connecting
(16:19):
with their memories, people connecting, you know, people grieving, people
being ingratitude to remember their elders, are saying Hey, I'm
that elder you know, and love them to see their stories.
And now why don't wait a million they're too late.
I talk to you, badge, and what you do remembering
(16:40):
what we weren't like to say? So those are the
things that you know you're going to keep and just
(17:01):
even build up more and you know that you that
you're aiming for as you do that some of the changes. Yeah,
and Alex, what do you remember about that time? Do you?
Did you have the same emotions of like I get like, guys,
this is we got it. Yeah. You know it's interesting
because like, uh, like Lynn, I was performing the show
every night, I was conducting the show, and it's a
(17:21):
different experience because you know, I would have my headphones
on and be very concerned about getting my piano parts
played right and leading the band and connecting with the cast.
So you know, I it wasn't the same experience as
someone like you are who could, like you, sit in
the house with the audience and feel what that energy is.
I mean, yes, I could hear the applause, I could
hear the reactions, but like Lynn said, I think that
(17:43):
period of time that we have between off Broadway and
Broadway was so crucial because I often think to myself, guys,
I don't know, like Karen Len how you feel, but
when I think about how different the show was off Broadway,
the fact that we had songs like planed b off Roadway,
Like there's entire songs off Broadway. Yes, dude, I'm telling you,
it's like the club number ended differently, you know, ninety
(18:05):
six thousand had a different button, all those things, and
we just made all these changes because, as Lind said,
we knew what it needed, we knew how to make
it better, and we just like drilled down and we
just spent all that time just really you know, um,
cutting things that we didn't think needed to be there. Uh,
making ending stronger and more powerful, augmenting the size of
(18:26):
the band, uh, you know, adding rich moments like for example,
Off Roadway got Naval, didn't have the whole Barada moment
at all. We've all those things happened between Off Roadway
(18:51):
and Broadway in what is probably a fourd to five
months span, which and now in retrospect, seems crazy to
me that we accomplished that much in that showing amount
of time. But we knew what we wanted to do,
we just went in and thrilled like the whole big
ending to kind about it, as we said, Once we
(19:16):
could tell that things weren't landing in the way that
we intended them to, that we weren't getting that sense
of either connection or applause. We can just tell that
the audience wasn't just feeling like completely satisfied at the
end of a song. So we would just try to
do what we could to get the songs at that level.
There's there's a term in musical theater called the button,
and that's the final moment in the song that makes
(19:38):
you go and started like clapping, and it's I mean,
it's it's a literal term, it's a practical term, like
the lights will bump, and that gives you a subconscious
cue that this is over. Um. And I hadn't gone
to button school. No one teaches you how to write
a great button to a song, and most pop songs
fade out like you don't learn that in pop music.
(19:59):
Um and so I really went to button school between
off Broadway and Broadway, and we really, like, you know,
watch the musical numbers that we loved and like studied
how they ended and figured out how to apply that
to our own thing. And for Opening night on Broadway,
Tommy Cale gives me a box and it's a box
of buttons of every ship. That was my opening night.
(20:23):
I want to talk about that Opening night on Broadway.
Were you like, holy shit, this is happening, Like what
were you feeling land at the time, and and give
us a picture like where were you living? Were you like,
I hope I make money on this. Yeah. Yeah, Again,
(20:44):
I'm I'm pretty you know, I'm a New Yorker, so
I'm pretty morbid. I'm pretty superstitious, and I just was like, please,
let's get this musical out of our heads and onto
a stage. So for me, the first real triumph UM
was the first preview on Broadway. And I made some
crucial mistakes on that day. One which is my my
(21:07):
dad invited everyone he knew and they were in the
front row. UM. So literally all the people I love
most in the world, like my college friends and my
elementary school friends are in the front row to this
thing that is not done yet. UM. And I was like, no,
no, no no, come back in a month. We have lots
to learn. UM. But also I don't know if I've
(21:28):
ever told the story before. But again, I'm in my
Broadway dressing room for the first time. It's like five
minutes to places, which means the cast is going to
gather in the basement and and do a prayer in
our prayer circle, and my family is hanging in. I'm like, okay,
you guys gotta go. I gotta get like my head
right and and do the show. And my family all
leaves and my sister stays behind. My sister who is, um,
(21:53):
maybe the quietest member of my family, probably because she
feels so much, and she turns to me. This is
five minutes before my Broadway debut and shows. I just
want to say all those times that you wrote songs
at the piano when we were little, and I never listened,
and I wish I'd listen to more. And it's like crying,
(22:14):
and I'm like, I can't have this complex to go
do a two and a half hour show like this
is a wonderful moment of emotional guitars is, but like
not now now. I like pushed her sobbing out the door.
So it was all like too much, too soon, um
(22:36):
and then um and then we learned again so much
through Broadway previews and that suite of Nomadriga are really
funny number into nineties thousand, which now has a killer
button into into when Your Home is this like crazy
quadruple punch now um and and really gives us this
(22:59):
incredible head of steam going into the rest of the show.
And so we we just learned so much in that month,
so that by opening night we really felt like this
is our best swing. Like I really felt confident, like
I'm sure there's a better show here, but I don't
know how to write it yet. Like we really, um,
we we we did so much work um in that month. Yeah,
(23:22):
can I tell my Opening Nights story? So one of
my favorite memories is, um, when we get to the
finale of the show on opening night and my family
had flown up from Miami. And mind you, like my
family had seen workshops along the way because as soon
as I told them, you guys are working on the
show and it's got that music in it is Spanglish.
You know that they were fans from in the heighth
(23:43):
its like you know, before anyone knew what the show was, right,
And we get to the finale and there's a moment
where I don't actually play piano anymore. I gave all
the piano parts to the second keyboard so that I
could lift up my hands and conduct and look at
the stage and conduct the choir. And we get to
that moment where you know, on the conductor's podium, I
have the best seat in the house, right, like no
one is closer to the stage watching it than me.
(24:06):
And then then man walls right up there in front
of me and he sings, he wraps that passage. I
could say goodbye to you's smiling. I find my island.
I've been on it this whole time. I'm Poe. And
Lynn's voice breaks just enough because he just gets overrun
with emotion that I get overrun with emotion. So my
(24:29):
hands are up in the air conducting, and then it
just hits him and like, oh my god, we made it.
We're here, we open and I just started sobbing. I
just my head goes down and like my hands are
still waving in the air, and I'm just like we
(25:04):
could but because like I just felt, oh my god,
we did it, you know, like here we are. You know,
as we talked Earli about friends who found each other,
and we were just creating art because we believe in something.
You know. It wasn't like, oh, we're gonna We're doing
this because we want to be famous, you know. It
wasn't like we're doing this because we want to make money.
Like no, We're getting together because we love what we do.
(25:25):
And there was no other real um goal other than
to just make something that we were proud of and
to make something that felt like it represented us and
make something with our friends and everything else was just
like icing on the cake. And to know that we
had achieved it that just the goopening. I just felt
like a mile marker. And I suppose all those years
of work, all those nights staying up late to worry
(25:46):
about whether or not the high Hats should play on
Beat four or not, you know, we're stressing about every
choir harmony, all that stuff, it just came. It just
that sense of of of completion and it just felt
so wonderful to have there because I felt like everything
in my life led up to that moment and it
was a big male market for me. That is a
(26:07):
beautiful way to wrap up episode two about the play.
This show went on to be nominated for thirteen Tony
Awards and one four run over a thousand performances on Broadway,
and it launched a truly remarkable journey for Linn Manuel
Miranda and his collaborators that would take them through Hamilton's
(26:28):
which one eleven Tony's and a pullitzerprise no less music
for a massive hit Disney animated film I Wanna and
a lot of trips to the White House, and then
the proposal to make In the Heights into a full
feature film with Warner Brothers. Uh. That's where we're going
to pick it up for our third and final episode,
dropping tomorrow June four. Um, Lynn, will you tell us
(26:52):
about the book though, because the book is the play correct. Yeah,
so again if if if In the Heights was born
as an idea, uh, at age nineteen, it's old enough
to drink forty one years sold. Our baby is a
grown thing, and and um, you know, during during the pandemic,
we we got together and sort of started chronic ling
(27:14):
the journey with Jeremy McCarter, who wrote the book about
the making of Hamilton's. He's written these essays on the
twenty year journey from from Wesleyan to from that first
production at Wesley into the movie version that we're all
going to see um and and KR has written essays
for that book, and I've written annotations to all the lyrics,
so so a lot of these stories are also in
(27:35):
that book. Then they will come out June fifteenth. It's
called In the Heights Finding Home June the book. And
tomorrow we have the third and final episode of In
the Heights. This has been a production of the Michael
Podcast Network and we will see you tomorrow. The b
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