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Broadway Bullet Interview: In the Heights
By: Michael Gilboe Mar. 14, 2007
This week we interview two of the creators of the new musical "In the Heights." Lin-Manuel Miranda, who wrote the music and lyrics, and Quiara Algeria Hudes, who wrote the book joined us in the studio to discuss the process that went into creating a new musical, and they brought along live recordings of songs "In the Heights" and "It Won't Be Long."
"In the Heights" is a musical about three days in the life of residents of Washington Heights. The story is told from the perspective of Usnavi, the owner of the corner bodega, and covers the challenges and joys of the Latino community. Lin-Manuel Miranda wrote the first draft of "In the Heights" while still in college at Wesleyan University, and in 2005 he won the Georgia Holof Lyricist Award at the O'Neil Music Theater Conference. He also has composed music for campaign commercials for Fernando Ferrer and Eliot Spitzer. He is also a member of the hip-hop comedy group Freestyle Love Supreme. Quiara Alegria Hudes attended Yale (BA) and Brown (MFA) and her plays include "Elliot," "A Soldier's Fugue," "Yemaya's Belly," and "The Adventures of Barrio Grrrl!""In the Heights" is playing through June 3rd at 37 Arts Theatre. For tickets visit www.ticketmaster.comYou can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 105. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
Broadway Bullet Interview: Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Algeria Hudes of In the Heights
BROADWAY BULLET: Many of my listeners may know that I am originally from Montana, I don't know if I've said, specifically though, that I currently live in New York in Washington Heights so I was very excited to see the new musical In the Heights. We have the book writer, Quiara Alegria Hudes.
QUIARA ALEGRIA HUDES: That's me!
BB: And the lyricist, composer, actor, I think he also cleans up the stage and mops afterwards, Lin-Manuel Miranda
Lin-Manuel Miranda: That's a stereotype, yes.
BB: How are you guys doing?
QUIARA and LIN: Good, how are you? Thanks for having us.
BB: You know, the first thing I have to say is I think people see In the Heights in different ways, I have to say right up front. My girlfriend came with me and we both had very different thoughts about how you captured Washington Heights. I saw, instantly, the joy and the family bonds and everything you guys captured; and my girlfriend missed the garbage.
QUIARA: There's a little bit of garbage in Act II. If you've got a craving for garbage, Act II is where it's at for you.
LIN: But you know what, it's funny. I grew up in Northern Manhattan, but I went to high school and elementary school in the upper east side; and my friends were scared to come to my house for play dates, I always had to go to upper east and upper west side. I mean they always thought I lived in the Bronx when I told them I lived on Dykeman Street. So there are a lot of perceptions, a lot of mistaken perceptions about Northern Manhattan. And I am glad that you caught the joy and the family, because it is really about the residential family neighborhood – largely Dominican – but it's really a stew. There's this great restaurant called Cougans on 168th and it's an old Irish restaurant, but they also have this salsa, blues, and shamrock festival every year, they've really welcomed every wave of immigration as it's come in. We're a stew up there, and we wanted to reflect that.
BB: You've been working on this music for seven years
LIN: Yeah.
BB: Since you were twenty.
LIN: Yes, yes. I thought of it when, I started writing it my sophomore year at Wesleyan, and it was one of those things I kept doodling the title on notes in class, and thought "I am going to write a full length musical". So I applied for the student run space at Wesleyan and they gave it to me for a weekend; and you know, like most people, I worked on deadline. Okay I have till April 20th-22nd, I'm sharing with the dance space for that weekend, I have to stage it on the Marley, and I've got to write a show. So I spent most of winter break writing and putting together everything I knew, everything I wanted to see in a musical. You know, Latinos, not wielding knives, but you know being in love and having businesses and having families, and sort of put it all into this musical. It was originally more of a love story set in Washington Heights. When I graduated, I moved back to Northern Manhattan, in 2002, and Tommy Kale, the director, and I worked for about a year on making it into a full length musical and, you know, much more about the community. Then we got a huge assist and boost, when we found Quiara; who, basically, had the same childhood as me in North Philly. I will let her take it from here.
QUIARA: Well, see Lin was talking about the story, but when he tells me the story of how In the Heights was created, he always tells me about also wanting to create a piece of theater that also reflected the diversity of music in the neighborhood, just kind of taking a walk through a neighborhood. When I came on board I said, "okay, let's just take a walk, give me a tour" because I was new to New York in general.
BB: Where are you from originally?
QUIARA: I am from northern Philadelphia.
BB: Okay.
QUIARA: So he took me for a walk, and he was telling me the way he had always imagined the show sounded, like you were taking a walk through ten blocks and you would walk by a bodega and would hear a cha-cha beat, then a car goes by and you would hear a hip hop beat. And this diversity of sound also reflects the diversity of the residents, so it has that kind of up beat musical feel to it too. When I came on board, of course, it already had all of these amazing sounds and this amazing, vibrant life, and these great characters. And so it was just me taking all these beautiful tings Lin had been creating and continuing to sculpt a more focused story out of it that was about the neighborhood.
BB: One of the first things I noticed when I moved to the heights was all of the parties in the summer. I thought "my god!" the noise and the music coming from below.
LIN: Yeah, actually it's really funny. One of the critics said, "Why are there fireworks on July 3rd instead of July 4th?" I said, "You don't understand. In Washington Heights there are fireworks from June 1st to August 30th!" I mean, the amount of kids setting off fireworks, it's constant in the summer, constant.
BB: Actually, when I first moved up here it was the blackouts, one of the first blackouts in 1999.
LIN: 1999, the one that just affected us. I remember I had to go to my friends' house on the Upper West side to get some sleep. And that was a huge deal. And it was funny, when that blackout was in place, we put it in the script in 2002, and people were like, "That's very unrealistic, that wouldn't affect just one neighborhood." Then the blackout of 2003 happened, and everyone sort of had a better sense of what it was like.
BB: The biggest thing that surprised me, the musical is marketed as the "contemporary music saver" you know how there are always a few musical every year that are marketed as "new music, it's not theater music" like trying to drag in new people. So I don't know what I was expecting. I mean it is, the music is indeed fresh and new, but a lot of times when they advertise that, it's all put together by people who don't seem to get theater a lot of the times. But I walked in and I was like, "these people know theater! These people know musical theater!" I got a sense that you people knew history, you knew how to tell a story with lyrics, and you knew how to phrase everything, and I appreciate that immensely.
LIN: Yeah, I was a musical theater nerd, and at the same time I was listening to hip hop albums. In sixth grade, at Hunter we do a thing called the sixth grade play – which is basically all you do. And our year did twenty minute versions of six musicals, and by the time I was twelve I had been Captain Hook, Bernardo, a son in Fiddler, a farmer in Oklahoma!, a back up in The Wiz, and Conrad Birdie. So I had this lethal dose of musical theater by the time I was very young. So it's always been, kind of, engrained in my psyche. And, you know, my parents always took us to musicals, when we were little. But at the same time, you'd put on your soundtrack items on for your friends, and they'd be like, "Get that shit off of there! I want to listen to Biggie!" So I wanted to write musical theater music that I wouldn't be ashamed to blast in my car at full volume.
QUIARA: Yeah, it's traditionally – one of the things that excited me when I came on board was that it is a traditional piece. It has love stories, it has a comic number, it has a big dance number, it has all of these traditional musical theater elements, and it's a traditional book musical. But in using a traditional book musical structure to bring in new sounds and a new lyrical voice, because I think Lin's lyrics are the most unique features of the show. They are so exciting and, I don't know, whenever I listen to his stuff, especially when he brings in new things for me to hear, I get that feeling of being on the edge of my seat and thinking "wow, how did he rhyme all that stuff?" And a story that is very traditional in some ways, but is also bringing together new colors and some new elements. So it is a blend of something that is completely playing homage to something with that traditional structure, but also with that new voice too.
BB: Well we opened up this segment with just a brief part of the opening number, from In the Heights, and maybe we should continue. This was recorded live at one of your performances.
LIN: Yeah, this our opening and we're trying, we've got the hip hop section, but we also have imagine the car blasting the salsa song whizzing by, and its that fusing of all the music in our opening number. And this is Usnavi opening his shop and introducing us to his day.
Listen to "In the Heights" in Broadway Bullet volume 105
BB: Are there tons of actors in New York that were just waiting for a chance like this, or because there aren't that many roles, like this did you have to go hunting to find the people?
LIN: Oh no. They've been I mean Latino performers have been waiting for a shot like this forever, seriously. I mean you could go to any one in our cast right now and sing a bar of West Side Story, we've all done it. We all know the choreography backwards and forwards, everyone's been in a summer stage production of it. We have some people who saw The Cape Man, and we're a gorgeous score but we're wielding knives again, and people who have been. You know, there are Latinos who work a lot, and a lot of our cast worked their butts off in shows that aren't necessarily Latino, and they're just great. So I think a lot of performers have been waiting for a show where they can be themselves, and I think that's just been pretty exciting to watch, especially in the casting process.
QUIARA: I think I saw somewhere posted Andrea Burns, who plays Daniela, she has so much experience and is such a great performer, I saw on the blog or something that someone posted "Oh my god, I've been such a fan of Andrea's for years and I had no idea she was Latina because she never had a role like this.
LIN: She was Belle.
QUIARA: She was Belle in Beauty and the Beast and it's like now she comes out as this salon owner with a lot of flavor.
LIN: Yeah, we're very happy that we get to employ all of these Latino actors who, you know, have just been waiting for their chance, it's really exciting.
QUIARA: And it's cool to have new, people who are just starting out their career, and people who have so much experience, all together on one stage kind of in this generational story.
BB: And I think at some point too, Karen Olivo is going to have a really big career on stage.
LIN: Oh yeah, she's amazing.
QUIARA: When she came in, I remember her, seeing her for the first time. And it was like this for a lot of roles, where you just have to see someone on the material for the first time and you say, "Oh my god, this person was born to play this role", and it's such a great match. I think it was like that with Lin and Usnavi. Not because he was the lead actor in this, but because the producers came to realize with Tommy. I wasn't around when this decision was made.
LIN: Yeah, I know, it was one of those things when I first started working on this – before the producers came on board and it was just Tommy and I working with his production company Backhouse – and it was a five day Equity workshop; and we couldn't teach the raps to anyone in five days, who could learn it? A lot of musical theater actors don't have hip hop in their repertory, and they have to learn to dance, they have to be fluent in Spanish, there are so many special skills. So I thought, just let me do Usnavi for now, we didn't have the whole freestyle rap version and what happens in the rest of the plot, and I just kept doing it, and it sort of became the thing I do in the rest of my part got correspondingly larger and here we are.
BB: Back in college, I had an experience once of acting in a show that I had written as well – it was a musical – and I it was the worst decision I had ever made in my life. We mounted it that summer and I got someone else to do the role, my mother was all upset because she didn't get to see me on stage, so what was I really doing?
LIN: Right, right.
BB: But when I acted in a show I wrote, I couldn't drop it, I was thinking way more about what everyone else was doing in the show. "Are they getting it right? Yeah! They nailed it!" just all that stuff and, "oh shit, I have to go onstage!?"
LIN: Yeah, it's funny for me, because the process is really a process of subtraction. Because I've written the music, it's all I can do to not mouth along with them while everyone else is singing their lyrics. It's one of the great things that we have such an amazing cast.
BB: Yes, I think one of the things was that someone told me that I did that too.
LIN: That you mouthed the words. No, that is my fear, I have nightmares that I am doing that. And if you start thinking as a writer onstage, you've already missed two lines. Which is hard with the amount of lyrics we have in this show, it's a testament to how great this cast is. I'm probably the least experienced actor on that stage, but they make it so easy because they're so good and so in it that it just does itself.
BB: Why don't we take a listen to the second song we've got keyed up for this.
LIN: This is Vanessa, she works at the salon next door. I think she lives a little farther north, by the elevated one train, and she just can't wait to get out of this neighborhood.
BB: This is Karen Olivo?
LIN: This is Karen Olivo, future star if not already a huge star. This is called "It won't be long now"
QUIARA: She visits the bodega where Usnavi works with his young cousin.
LIN: Yeah, she's sort of the love of Usnavi's life, and she sings this meringue number which was really influenced by an artist Quiara and I both love a lot, named Juan Usgerra, who is the best meringue writer in the world, and one of the best songwriters living. And he writes these amazing songs about the failing health care system, or if the Dominican Republic had oil, how things would be different. But they are the most danceable things you've ever heard, and if you stop to listen to the lyrics, you're like "oh my god, this guy's got knowledge!"
Listen to "It Won't Be Long Now" in Broadway Bullet volume 105
BB: I want to address one comment that a critic made in Time Out New York. He said he felt that the neighborhood was just not as gritty and dirty and why a person would want to escape there.
LIN: Ah! Where is the feces?
BB: Because a lot of the story centers around the character and whether or not she wants to go to Stamford and leave the neighborhood. Now you have, just like in the character of Karen Olivo who wants to escape. The first thing I saw when I saw the play was you don't have to be in a bug ridden, crime ridden area to want to escape. I'm from Montana and it's a nice middle class town, nobody's really rich, and the comedy kind of sucks, but it's not an awful place, but everybody wants out!
LIN: Absolutely! In the Heights is like a normal neighborhood like any other neighborhood in the country. The same problems that are some critics say we don't have enough of in In the Heights. Crime and drugs are a plague in every city in this country, and it's one of those things that what can you do? Every movie scene I've seen set in Washington Heights either has a knife fight in it or it's like the scene in Shaft when the drug deal happens. So that's just the perception of where we live; and frankly, I wasn't really surprised by that criticism. Hopefully this musical will correct that and people will be like "You know, these people are just like you, and they're getting priced out of Manhattan just like you are, and we're all just trying to get by."
QUIARA: Yeah there was, in my neighborhood where I grew up in in Philadelphia, there were similar misconceptions where I had friends that weren't allowed to come over and visit me because their parents were really scared of our neighborhood. But looking back on how I grew up, my neighborhood was one of the favorite things about my childhood. It's so interesting, so family oriented, so diverse, we were always playing out on the street. And I think there is a little of, what we were saying about Juan Louis Guerra also which is, he deals with these heavy issues through joy and through love and through this kind of passionate, exuberant music. And I think there's a little bit of that, where the people in our show are dealing with real problems; they are struggling to pay the bills, they are struggling to make rent, they are struggling to keep their businesses open, with gentrification and with all sorts of other family problems – but the way that they deal with them a lot is through exuberance and joy in the show also, it's not just someone's not wearing a bullet proof vest so they are living candy coated lives.
BB: My last question, this might be more suitable to ask Kevin McCullan if he's in the studio but he's not so I'll ask you, and I think it's what everyone is wondering. There are like seventeen people in this cast?
LIN: Twenty, twenty-two, twenty-three not counting backstage, there are twenty onstage.
BB: I think everyone is wondering how is this affordable in an Off-Broadway house? Do you know what their plans are?
LIN: I have no idea. I really don't know. The producers, we haven't had a transfer talk.
BB: Because we see this kind of thing happen when it's with the Atlantic Theater Company, or it's a theater company and they are doing a short run; but I don't know if we've seen this kind of large scale Off-Broadway production mounted by a commercial entity from the start.
LIN: Well one thing I'm very proud of is that we have this huge, I mean really this Broadway sized show in an Off-Broadway space.
BB: I know, the 37 Arts Center is more comfortable than any Broadway theater house, I will be in that theater any day.
LIN: Absolutely, I love it, it's gorgeous. It's a gorgeous, gorgeous theater. And it's this 499 seat theater and we have affordable ticket prices, which is great because residents of Washington Heights can come see our show and it doesn't break your wallet. You don't have to save a months rent – as I would have to do – to see a show with me and the family. So I'm very impressed with our Off-Broadway run, and we're having a great time in the space. So, I don't know anything about moving or anything like that, but we're having a great time where we are.
BB: Well alright, I wish you the best of luck as your run goes on and thanks very much for coming in.
LIN and QUIARA: Thank you, take care!
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You can listen to this interview and many other great features for free on Broadway Bullet vol. 105. Subscribe for free so you don't miss an episode.
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