A “Best Musical” Is Born

In the Heights, this year’s Tony Award-winning Best Musical, tells a salsa- and hip hop-infused story set in the Latino community at the upper reaches of Manhattan Island. At The Broadway League’s recent Spring Road Conference, we invited the show’s creators to trace the show’s journey from the germ of an idea to a fully-realized theatrical production.

Our panelists included In the Heights composer/lyricist/star Lin-Manuel Miranda, director Thomas Kail, bookwriter Quiara Allegría Hudes, choreographer Andy Blankenbueler, and orchestrator/arrangers Bill Sherman and Alex Lacamoire.  Jesse Green of the New York Times moderated.

Jesse Green:  Lin, what was the first thing you thought of that became part of this show?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Like a lot of stories, it starts with a girl. I was 19 years old, a sophomore at Wesleyan University.  I had written several one act-musicals in high school and I wanted to write a full-length musical. I wanted a life in musical theatre

and I knew I didn’t dance well enough to be Bernardo in West Side Story or Paul in A Chorus Line.  So I basically wrote the kind of story I always wanted to do.

The reason I had time to write was because my high school sweetheart was going to study abroad, in the Dominican Republic.  It was the first time we’d spent any time apart and I was very conflicted and confused. All of that adolescent angst went into my winter break.  I didn’t sleep; I wrote an 80-minute show, this show in one burst.

The first song I wrote was for a character that is no longer in the show, Benny’s mother. Benny was originally this Latin lothario-type character, and it was this song sung by his mom to him.  The first five notes are the only five notes that remain from the original college song: (sings) “In Washington Heights.”  I was from Inwood, just north of Washington Heights, but “Inwood” doesn’t sing as well.

So I started writing, and I mounted a production in the spring at the student-run theatre organization at Weslyan called Second Stage. I wasn’t doing it for credit. I was doing it because I had to write.  I wanted to write the kind of music I like and that I listen to. I listen to a mix of musical theatre – I was a theatre geek – but also hip hop music and Latin music.  In The Heights was actually my first attempt to write Latin music. I’d written pop rocky Jonathan Larson-lite-esque theatre music until then, and it was really my first attempt to write about things I knew about from my upbringing, and a score that reflected my upbringing.

Jesse Green:  That was in April, 2000. How did Tommy Kail get involved?

show, which almost never happens. Tommy had graduated the year before. He was a senior when I was a freshman and we never met at school.  The show ended up in his hands because of the CD.

One of the things that Tommy picked up on in that first run was that there were two scenes in the original production where people rapped, and that moved the story along. You could literally see the audience sit up. We were inventing the rules, telling the story using hip hop and making sure the audience doesn’t get lost.  All of that happened in that first incarnation.

Jesse Green: So, Thomas, you met Lin and you were handed this CD.

Thomas Kail: I got the demo CD and the script the summer of 2000.  I was immediately struck by the energy of the show, and the way that the story was being told.  I decided to come up to Wesleyan and see Lin’s senior play in May, 2002, and then invited him down to the basement of The Drama Book Shop, which is where this little theatre company that two friends and I started was housed. Lin and I started a conversation in June, 2002, that is going on continuously until this moment.

Jesse Green:  What was the first element of that conversation?  What did you feel had to be done?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: At that point In the Heights was in a drawer in my room. I had put it away as I continued working and finished school. I went in with two years distance on the project.  Tommy said, “Usnavi’s great.  He owns the bodega, so he can be our ‘way in.’ He can be our narrator.” And then he said that “In Washington Heights” – those five notes – should be the first song in the show, instead of the third.  And also said the hip hop was the most exciting part of the show. I immediately agreed with those three things and realized this guy knew what he was talking about.  He understood how to open the show up from and 80 minute one-act thing born of romantic frustration into a two-act show.

Jesse Green: And at that point, what was your ambition for the show?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: It was really just to make the show better and see if we could get a production and turn it into a real, full fledged show.  It was very much a college show, with “in” jokes.

Thomas Kail: It was sophomoric – but then again, Lin wrote it his second year of college. One of the things we felt so fortunate about with the Drama Book Shop is we had a physical location [where we could] sit down with Lin and with Bill [Sherman] and actors and to pull this show apart and to have something to go towards. We couldn’t see beyond trying to make the next song a little bit better or to try to open up the story.  We just decided to get in there and roll up our sleeves and see what happened.

Jesse Green: Was there anything that you kept from the version that had played at Wesleyan in your sophomore year?

Lin-Manuel Miranda: (sings) “In Washington Heights.”  The first year was doing the best we could with that college draft turning it into a two-act show.

Jesse Green:  Bill Sherman, you were working on the show at that point. In what form would the new songs come to you?

Bill Sherman: Lin is a keyboard player and a singer, but he doesn’t write music. So he gives you tapes and garage band files. Our job later on was to take Lin’s singing and synthesize Lin’s stuff. It’s all we did.  We lived together after college, basically in the In the Heights frat, for four years or so. At two in the morning he’d knock on my door and say, “I got the idea for this, quick.” We’d sit down at the piano and figure it out.  I would take Lin’s info and I would write it down as best as I could and figure out a way we could have these things exist in some sort of form. I don’t play the piano, which is hard if you’re making a Broadway musical, or a musical in general. I would piece them together as best I could so somebody else could play them.

Jesse Green: This story gets unlikelier and unlikelier.  This is the lesson you don’t want your kids to hear. So somehow we get from this moment to having producers.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: Every week Tommy said, “Bring something in for Friday.” So we would gear up – I work really well on deadlines – and he’d say, “We’re gonna do a workshop in October and we should have an Act I.”  We did a reading, and that’s when I started playing Usnavi. One, we couldn’t find an actor who could learn those lines in a 29-hour Equity workshop; and two, I could free-style the remainder of the show. I would get up and say, “Then Benny gets up and walks into the store/He doesn’t know what for...,” and I would tell the rest of the plot and make it rhyme. It was Tommy’s idea to cast me as Usnavi. The side effect was that Usnavi’s part got bigger and bigger.  I was like, “You know, I think another song for me might be great right here.”

Jesse Green: How did you get to the producers? What was the condition of the work at that time?

Thomas Kail: The work had the energy that people still feel now. There were flashes within that structure, musical moments, scenes that really had something to them. The producers recognized that a tremendous amount of work needed to be done, but there was something that existed that had a very vibrant pulse to it.  A guy who came to see the show early on was an actor who was in a movie that Jill Furman, one of our producers, had produced. Now we’re in February, 2003 – our fourth reading – and Jill came to see it and responded very strongly. So we kept giving ourselves deadlines to work towards.

In June, 2003 we were doing another presentation, and Kevin McCollum was present.  He had a very strong reaction to Usnavi and to the energy that was cascading off of Lin. Kevin and Jill got together after that reading and decided to work together.  We knew we wanted to, with the producers support, try to remove one of the hats from Lin’s head. We really wanted to find a book writer.

Jesse Green: That brings us to Quiara Alegría Hudes.  Quiara, when you came into the project and the producers asked you to look at the book, what did you see? What immediately struck you worth preserving, and what needed to go?

Quiara Alegría Hudes: That was what I was figuring out right up until we opened on Broadway. When they first approached me I had been writing plays about a similar community in Philadelphia. They knew we might have something in common as writers in what story we were telling. They basically came to me with a full CD of music from the show and a 100-page script and said, “Do you want to write this show?” I was like, “But it’s written already. What on earth would I do?”

Lin and I have some similarities in our lives.  I had very personal connections to some of the characters, so I knew I could bring myself to it fully. What I really loved about the show was that it had an incredibly positive energy. I also loved that it was a tale of three generations. It felt really large, and I could go in so many directions with it. There were 16 or 17 lead characters at the time, and part of it was figuring out which of these characters would stay, what stories am I telling, and how do I tell it. Because most of the characters had something that was worth preserving in some way, the whole block would be the character. It was about a community, and it was about three generations and the changes that they’re going through.

We were working with all of these producers and the artists, and everyone’s goal was to make the show as good as possible.  I definitely felt like I had 100% creative room to play.  It was like dancing with Lin the whole time – doing a tango.  I was given something that I wanted to honor, but I was also asked to change.  We kept a few songs, like “96,000.” He had just started to work on “Paciencia y Fe.” There were a couple of things I knew I had to stick to, but that push and pull – figuring out what to keep and where to go in new directions –was the back-and-forth of the entire collaboration. You have to bring in one thing new and then keep all the old stuff. And then a few weeks later maybe you can let one of the old things fall away if something new happens that you realize is more truthful and honest to piece, or more exciting in a different direction for the piece. You’re adding one petal here and taking one away, one at a time.

Jesse Green: At this point were you thinking about the requirements of a big musical theatre piece? Or were you doing it merely for yourselves as an artistic expression at this point?

Quiara Alegría Hudes: Tommy always had the outside perspective. With Lin and I, our hands were dirtier. We were grappling with how to best structure the scene? How to best structure this song? What are we missing? What story needs to pop out more?

Lin-Manuel Miranda:  Tommy was basically our dramaturg. We would get into fights over Fiddler on the Roof as a major template.

Jesse Green: Where Fiddler has “Tradition,” you have “In the Heights” to introduce the whole community. Alex Lacamoire, the co-orchestrator, co-arranger and music director, and keyboardist – you came into the project somewhere within this vicinity.

haven’t seen. They were looking for a music director, and the fact that I was Latin was a plus.  But I said to Tommy, “I can’t work on the show right now. I’m about to work on a show called Wicked. I’m not sure where that’s gonna go.  Maybe we’ll find out what happens after that.”  Once things died down my schedule started to open up. I was invited by Tommy and by Jill Furman to meet with them. We would meet every week, and Lin would have pieces of a new song.

The reason this show succeeds so well is that Lin instinctively knows about all this stuff. If you look at Lin’s iPod, he’s listening to hip-hop, he’s listening to musical theatre, he’s listening to pop. He’s got it all happening. So for him, it’s a natural flow to be able to say, “This is how I want to speak. This how I want to write.”

I remember when Lin had a first draft for In the Heights.  There was a lot of rap. And I remember saying, “We need a hook Where’s the hook? Can we have a chorus that keeps coming up every now and again?” We were about to start a reading.  Lin wrote the hook on Sunday and we start rehearsal on Monday, and I’m sitting at the piano making up vocal arrangements on the spot. “Ok, sopranos, you sing the D, altos, you sing the B-flat, here’s the lyrics. Go.” And that’s literally how it happened. We would sometimes shape the show on the spot.

Jesse Green: You had a workshop in 2006 and then you had your Off Broadway production last year in January. Andy Blankenbeuhler, the choreographer, was brought on for the Off Broadway production. 

Andy Blankenbeuhler: In the first conversation I had with [producer] Jeffrey Seller, [he asked], “Why should I hire you for this show? You don’t choreograph hip-hop or salsa.” I pulled out the Jerome Robbins card and said, “Jerome Robbins could do anything because he told the story first.” That’s what I try to do in the show. Through thousands of hours of research I would figure out how to choreograph what looked like what we were hearing. And the blueprint of what we were hearing always took us on the right emotional trip. The music shifted in the right places and so all I had to figure out was how to visualize where that picture shift was. I did my research to figure out the style of hip-hop and then I would choreograph my own steps and then slowly, with my associates, we’d make things look like the real thing. But the show has to be based in truth. I’m the first person to cut a dance step when I feel it’s not based in truth.  I’m lucky that the whole score danced on it’s own to begin with.  Lin’s music is the kernel of the emotional beat. The right music tells the right story in this show.

In the Heights opened on Broadway at the Richard Rogers Theatre on March 19, 2008.  On June 15, the show won four Tony Awards, including Best Musical, Best Score (Lin-Manuel Miranda), Best Choreography (Andy Blankenbuehler), and Best Orchestrations (Alex Lacamoire and Bill Sherman).

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