In the Heights, page 10
BENNY:
For real, though, imagine how
it would feel
Goin’ real slow,
Down the highway of life
With no regrets
And no breakin’ your neck
For respect or a paycheck—
VANESSA:
I’ll be
Downtown,
See you
Around!
If I win the
Lottery,
You won’t see
A lot of me!
BENNY:
For real,
Though, I’ll
Take a break
From the
Wheel and
We’ll throw
The biggest
Block party,
Everybody
here.
It’s a weekend
When we can
Breathe, take
It easy.
For real,
Though,
Imagine how it
Would feel
Goin’ real
Slow, down
The highway
Of life with no
Regrets and
No breakin’
Your neck for
Respect or a
Paycheck.
USNAVI:
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread, then go
Ahead, create a
Set of goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’.
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread, then go
Ahead, create a
Set of goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’!
SONNY, DANIELA, ENSEMBLE:
Ninety-six thousand
CARLA: ¡No me diga!
SONNY, DANIELA, ENSEMBLE: Ninety-six thousand
CARLA: ¡No me diga!
DANIELA: ¡Noventa y seis mil!
SONNY, DANIELA: ¡No me diga!
ENSEMBLE: Why-ooh 12
WOMEN: Check one two three
MEN: And with the dollah dollah
WOMEN: With ninety-six g’s
MEN: We get to hollah, hollah.
WOMEN: Between you and me
MEN: We rock the hot
Impala.
ENSEMBLE: Why-ooh
VANESSA:
I’ll be
Downtown,
See you
Around!
Around!
BENNY:
For real,
Though,
I’ll take a
Break from
The wheel
And we’ll
Throw
The biggest
Block party,
Everybody
Here.
It’s a weekend
When we can
Breathe,
Take it easy.
Ooh, whoa, ho!
USNAVI:
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread,
Then go ahead,
Create a set of
Goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six
I know precisely
What I’m doin’!
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’!
WOMEN, MEN:
With ninety-six g’s
MEN: We movin’ on
Tomorrah.
WOMEN: A brand-new lease
MEn: We rock beyond
Mañana.
WOMEN: A Malibu Breeze
MEN: We drop the mama
Drama.
We stop at the
Bahamas!
WOMEN: Why-oh!
MEN: We drink piña
Coladas!
Poppin’ lockin’
WOMEN: Who-oh!
MEN: Drop it like it’s
Hot!
WOMEN, MEN: Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
VANESSA: I’ll be downtown!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY:
We could pay off
the debts
We owe.
VANESSA, CARLA, DANIELA:
We could tell everyone
We know.
USNAVI:
I could get on a
plane and
Go.
WOMEN, MEN:
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY:
We be swimmin’ in
dough,
Yo!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY,
VANESSA, GRAFFITI PETE,
MEN:
No tiptoein’
We’ll get the dough ’n’
Who-oaa!
COMPANY: Once we get goin’
We never gonna
Stop tiptoein’
We’ll get the dough ’n’
Once we get goin’
We’re never gonna— 13
PIRAGUA GUY, MAN,
BENNY, DANIELA,
CARLA, VANESSA:
Ninety-six
thousand
Ninety-six
thousand
Ninety-six
thousand
WOMEN, MEN:
We’ll get the
dough
’N’
Once we get
goin’
USNAVI, SONNY,
GRAFFITI PETE:
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
COMPANY: We’ll get the dough ’n’
Once we get goin’
We’re never gonna stop!
Skip Notes
1. Why $96,000? It’s not enough money to permanently change someone’s life…it’s just enough to get a little breathing room. Which is all any of us really wants, at the end of the day.
I also think the number ninety-six represents a socioeconomic divide in my head: I went to school on Ninety-fourth Street, and Ninety-sixth Street was the dividing line between the Upper East Side and East Harlem. The same McDonald’s cheeseburger was more expensive on Eighty-sixth Street than it was on 106th Street. I crossed that line from uptown every day to go to school. So I think, subconsciously, the number ninety-six has a wealth-line connotation for me.
2. The first verse of this song is probably the one most influenced by our hip-hop improv group, Freestyle Love Supreme. I really wanted this to feel like the characters are making up lyrics impromptu. There are few places in musicals where you’re really aware that the characters themselves are lyricists: Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett singing “A Little Priest” comes to mind.
3. The original lyric in the stage version referred to D-nald T—p, back when he was a cartoon version of a rich man for the working class. He had a board game, books, and his name on a bunch of New York buildings. Now his name connotes some of the most shameful/saddest chapters of our country’s young history, so in the movie version, we swapped him out.
4. Another note on these pop culture references: Being firmly aware that pop culture references date really quickly (I remember reading the libretto to Godspell in high school and not understanding literally two-thirds of the jokes), I gave myself a hundred-year rule: Don’t reference it if we won’t still be talking about it in a hundred years. Frodo. Pinocchio. Big Pun. Y’know, forever sh—.
5. The joke here being that Graffiti Pete is flipping a hacky/racial old joke (“more chins than Chinatown”—I think I first heard this in a Weird Al lyric) and using it wrong—Ho isn’t a popular Japanese last name at all; Pete can’t even racism right. Anyway, I wanted a really wrong punch line here so Usnavi would react quickly and efficiently to shut him up. It doesn’t age well. In the movie, we swapped it out for “I got more flows than Obi-Wan Kenobi, yo,” which I like better, because it feels like he’s riffing off Benny’s Frodo reference but got the wrong sci-fi/fantasy franchise.
6. This is a very Pharcyde-influenced punch line. I also like hanging a lantern on the fact that it isn’t that much money, but it’s enough to dream.
7. In my own personal journey of Writing to Chris Jackson’s Voice, I think this refrain is probably my biggest breakthrough. “For real, though…” is something Chris just naturally says (alongside “That’s what’s up”), and building on that to create a whole picture was great fun.
8. I tried to trace the origins of “check one two three,” a hip-hop trope, but I fell so far down the rabbit hole. It’s been memorably done by the Fugees, Black Star, KRS-One (probably the earliest), and many others.
9. It’s fun to change Usnavi’s flow. He’s so methodical when he’s just talking to his friends—rat-a-tat, every sixteenth note. Then Vanessa comes in, and he’s all over the place, as syncopated as possible.
10. Something I always point out with school groups is that Sonny, the youngest character, is the only one who immediately thinks about others in his fantasy. Not just a better life for himself, but a better world. I shudder at how relevant his immigration lyrics have become in recent years, but I still think that’s true. The youngest among us will save us.
11. “And you know this, man,” is a signature Snoop lyric.
12. By the time Andy, Tommy, Alex, and I were working on “Non-Stop” for Hamilton, we’d had practice with “96,000.” (And Andy, Alex, and I had further practice working on Bring It On: The Musical, which thrived on enormous musical builds like this one.)
13. Jon Chu’s cinematic translation of the “whisper section” is transcendent to me.
It took only one preview performance for Andréa Burns to feel better. After worrying whether the salon ladies could become more than just comic relief, and generate actual sympathy, she was delighted to find that the audience was right there with them.
“It was really beautiful. I remember people laughing, but they were also so caring,” she says of the first performance Off-Broadway. “I got how beloved the salon was.”
She wasn’t the only one learning lessons. All through the preview period, Voltron watched the audience watch the show. Day after day they fired a volley of changes at the cast and the seven-member band, trying to make the best possible version of what they had created in time for the critics to arrive.
Nobody at 37 Arts was learning more than the audience. It’s not easy to convey the sensation now, after more than a decade in which musical theater has gotten more adventurous in both style and subject matter, but In the Heights represented a genuine breakthrough in 2007. A couple of them, in fact.
For decades, musical theater had resisted almost every attempt to diversify its sonic palette. Consider Latin music. Since West Side Story in 1957, the salsa wave of the ’70s had crested and the Latin explosion of the ’90s had remade mainstream pop, but all the Broadway musical had to show for it was sixty-eight performances of Paul Simon’s Latin-inflected score for The Capeman in 1998. Hip-hop had long since proven to be a powerful, dexterous way of telling stories and had become the shared culture of young people everywhere, but only flickers of it had reached Broadway. No show had integrated rap this completely into its score, or tapped so fully into its storytelling potential, returning theater (if you view it from the right angle) to its ancient roots as verse drama.
Lin’s score would have represented a new frontier for musical theater if it had drawn on either of these traditions. It drew on both.
Then there was the story that Lin and Quiara were telling. Unlike West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Phantom of the Opera, Spring Awakening, Rent, Les Misérables, and The Who’s Tommy, to cite a few ready examples, Heights wasn’t an adaptation of an existing book, play, opera, or album. Unlike Evita, Gypsy, and Hamilton, it wasn’t based on a real person’s life. Even Cats was something else before it was Cats. In the Heights asked its audience to take seriously a completely original story depicting life as it was really lived, right here in the present day, in a neighborhood a couple miles north of where they were sitting.
The show’s fusion of new sounds (new for musical theater, anyway) with traditional craft can be heard to best effect in “Paciencia y Fe,” the showcase number for the community’s matriarch, Abuela Claudia. Musically, the song is a mambo, a form of dance music from Cuba; lyrically, it’s an evocative trip back through her memories, all the way to her youth in Havana.
“One of the things I’ve always been curious about is: Where did that song come from?” asks Jeffrey, more than a decade later. “I did not understand. How can a twenty-four-year-old man write a song about a seventy-five-year-old woman with such heart? You can have that big of a heart at twenty-four, but how do you know so many details about her life that make the song feel so powerful, deep, organic, whole? ‘Scrubbing the whole of the Upper East Side’—you know what I mean?”
Lin’s answers to Jeffrey’s questions can be found in his annotations on pages 88–90. But to appreciate the total effect on audiences at 37 Arts, you have to know about two vital collaborators, both of whom share Abuela Claudia’s roots in Cuba.
eing Cuban is a difficult thing,” says Olga Merediz, who played Abuela Claudia at 37 Arts. “It means having to leave everyone behind. Everything you know. Your home, you know?”
She was born in Guantánamo. In 1961, in the aftermath of the revolution, her family was living in Havana. Her parents told their friends that they were taking five-year-old Olga and her brothers on a trip to Jamaica. She brought a suitcase of clothes, but not any toys. They told everybody they’d be gone for the weekend. She didn’t see Cuba again for fifty-four years.
Alex Lacamoire and Olga Merediz
From Jamaica they went to Miami, from Miami to San Juan. That’s where Olga grew up, among other exiles. After college she moved to New York to start a new life as an actor—or at least to try.
“All of that is in ‘Paciencia y Fe,’ ” she says.
The song is long enough, and demanding enough, to challenge anybody who tries to sing it. Finding an actor who had the wherewithal to perform it eight times a week, and was the right age for the role, proved to be a challenge of its own. (Olga wasn’t the right age. She needed a gray wig and stooped shoulders to seem like she was.) But that doesn’t mean it came easily to her.
To prepare to sing the song each night, she had to get into a kind of trance, attaching a memory to each of the lines, all of the sweet and bitter memories. She needed to take the audience on a journey through Claudia’s life: the story of losing one home and trying to find another—an experience that Olga knew intimately.
For real, though, imagine how
it would feel
Goin’ real slow,
Down the highway of life
With no regrets
And no breakin’ your neck
For respect or a paycheck—
VANESSA:
I’ll be
Downtown,
See you
Around!
If I win the
Lottery,
You won’t see
A lot of me!
BENNY:
For real,
Though, I’ll
Take a break
From the
Wheel and
We’ll throw
The biggest
Block party,
Everybody
here.
It’s a weekend
When we can
Breathe, take
It easy.
For real,
Though,
Imagine how it
Would feel
Goin’ real
Slow, down
The highway
Of life with no
Regrets and
No breakin’
Your neck for
Respect or a
Paycheck.
USNAVI:
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread, then go
Ahead, create a
Set of goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’.
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread, then go
Ahead, create a
Set of goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’!
SONNY, DANIELA, ENSEMBLE:
Ninety-six thousand
CARLA: ¡No me diga!
SONNY, DANIELA, ENSEMBLE: Ninety-six thousand
CARLA: ¡No me diga!
DANIELA: ¡Noventa y seis mil!
SONNY, DANIELA: ¡No me diga!
ENSEMBLE: Why-ooh 12
WOMEN: Check one two three
MEN: And with the dollah dollah
WOMEN: With ninety-six g’s
MEN: We get to hollah, hollah.
WOMEN: Between you and me
MEN: We rock the hot
Impala.
ENSEMBLE: Why-ooh
VANESSA:
I’ll be
Downtown,
See you
Around!
Around!
BENNY:
For real,
Though,
I’ll take a
Break from
The wheel
And we’ll
Throw
The biggest
Block party,
Everybody
Here.
It’s a weekend
When we can
Breathe,
Take it easy.
Ooh, whoa, ho!
USNAVI:
It’s silly when
We get into
These crazy
Hypotheticals.
You really
Want some
Bread,
Then go ahead,
Create a set of
Goals
And cross them
Off the list as
You pursue ’em,
And with those
Ninety-six
I know precisely
What I’m doin’!
And with those
Ninety-six I
Know precisely
What I’m doin’!
WOMEN, MEN:
With ninety-six g’s
MEN: We movin’ on
Tomorrah.
WOMEN: A brand-new lease
MEn: We rock beyond
Mañana.
WOMEN: A Malibu Breeze
MEN: We drop the mama
Drama.
We stop at the
Bahamas!
WOMEN: Why-oh!
MEN: We drink piña
Coladas!
Poppin’ lockin’
WOMEN: Who-oh!
MEN: Drop it like it’s
Hot!
WOMEN, MEN: Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
VANESSA: I’ll be downtown!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY:
We could pay off
the debts
We owe.
VANESSA, CARLA, DANIELA:
We could tell everyone
We know.
USNAVI:
I could get on a
plane and
Go.
WOMEN, MEN:
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
Who-oaa!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY:
We be swimmin’ in
dough,
Yo!
USNAVI, BENNY, SONNY,
VANESSA, GRAFFITI PETE,
MEN:
No tiptoein’
We’ll get the dough ’n’
Who-oaa!
COMPANY: Once we get goin’
We never gonna
Stop tiptoein’
We’ll get the dough ’n’
Once we get goin’
We’re never gonna— 13
PIRAGUA GUY, MAN,
BENNY, DANIELA,
CARLA, VANESSA:
Ninety-six
thousand
Ninety-six
thousand
Ninety-six
thousand
WOMEN, MEN:
We’ll get the
dough
’N’
Once we get
goin’
USNAVI, SONNY,
GRAFFITI PETE:
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
Wha’?
COMPANY: We’ll get the dough ’n’
Once we get goin’
We’re never gonna stop!
Skip Notes
1. Why $96,000? It’s not enough money to permanently change someone’s life…it’s just enough to get a little breathing room. Which is all any of us really wants, at the end of the day.
I also think the number ninety-six represents a socioeconomic divide in my head: I went to school on Ninety-fourth Street, and Ninety-sixth Street was the dividing line between the Upper East Side and East Harlem. The same McDonald’s cheeseburger was more expensive on Eighty-sixth Street than it was on 106th Street. I crossed that line from uptown every day to go to school. So I think, subconsciously, the number ninety-six has a wealth-line connotation for me.
2. The first verse of this song is probably the one most influenced by our hip-hop improv group, Freestyle Love Supreme. I really wanted this to feel like the characters are making up lyrics impromptu. There are few places in musicals where you’re really aware that the characters themselves are lyricists: Sweeney and Mrs. Lovett singing “A Little Priest” comes to mind.
3. The original lyric in the stage version referred to D-nald T—p, back when he was a cartoon version of a rich man for the working class. He had a board game, books, and his name on a bunch of New York buildings. Now his name connotes some of the most shameful/saddest chapters of our country’s young history, so in the movie version, we swapped him out.
4. Another note on these pop culture references: Being firmly aware that pop culture references date really quickly (I remember reading the libretto to Godspell in high school and not understanding literally two-thirds of the jokes), I gave myself a hundred-year rule: Don’t reference it if we won’t still be talking about it in a hundred years. Frodo. Pinocchio. Big Pun. Y’know, forever sh—.
5. The joke here being that Graffiti Pete is flipping a hacky/racial old joke (“more chins than Chinatown”—I think I first heard this in a Weird Al lyric) and using it wrong—Ho isn’t a popular Japanese last name at all; Pete can’t even racism right. Anyway, I wanted a really wrong punch line here so Usnavi would react quickly and efficiently to shut him up. It doesn’t age well. In the movie, we swapped it out for “I got more flows than Obi-Wan Kenobi, yo,” which I like better, because it feels like he’s riffing off Benny’s Frodo reference but got the wrong sci-fi/fantasy franchise.
6. This is a very Pharcyde-influenced punch line. I also like hanging a lantern on the fact that it isn’t that much money, but it’s enough to dream.
7. In my own personal journey of Writing to Chris Jackson’s Voice, I think this refrain is probably my biggest breakthrough. “For real, though…” is something Chris just naturally says (alongside “That’s what’s up”), and building on that to create a whole picture was great fun.
8. I tried to trace the origins of “check one two three,” a hip-hop trope, but I fell so far down the rabbit hole. It’s been memorably done by the Fugees, Black Star, KRS-One (probably the earliest), and many others.
9. It’s fun to change Usnavi’s flow. He’s so methodical when he’s just talking to his friends—rat-a-tat, every sixteenth note. Then Vanessa comes in, and he’s all over the place, as syncopated as possible.
10. Something I always point out with school groups is that Sonny, the youngest character, is the only one who immediately thinks about others in his fantasy. Not just a better life for himself, but a better world. I shudder at how relevant his immigration lyrics have become in recent years, but I still think that’s true. The youngest among us will save us.
11. “And you know this, man,” is a signature Snoop lyric.
12. By the time Andy, Tommy, Alex, and I were working on “Non-Stop” for Hamilton, we’d had practice with “96,000.” (And Andy, Alex, and I had further practice working on Bring It On: The Musical, which thrived on enormous musical builds like this one.)
13. Jon Chu’s cinematic translation of the “whisper section” is transcendent to me.
It took only one preview performance for Andréa Burns to feel better. After worrying whether the salon ladies could become more than just comic relief, and generate actual sympathy, she was delighted to find that the audience was right there with them.
“It was really beautiful. I remember people laughing, but they were also so caring,” she says of the first performance Off-Broadway. “I got how beloved the salon was.”
She wasn’t the only one learning lessons. All through the preview period, Voltron watched the audience watch the show. Day after day they fired a volley of changes at the cast and the seven-member band, trying to make the best possible version of what they had created in time for the critics to arrive.
Nobody at 37 Arts was learning more than the audience. It’s not easy to convey the sensation now, after more than a decade in which musical theater has gotten more adventurous in both style and subject matter, but In the Heights represented a genuine breakthrough in 2007. A couple of them, in fact.
For decades, musical theater had resisted almost every attempt to diversify its sonic palette. Consider Latin music. Since West Side Story in 1957, the salsa wave of the ’70s had crested and the Latin explosion of the ’90s had remade mainstream pop, but all the Broadway musical had to show for it was sixty-eight performances of Paul Simon’s Latin-inflected score for The Capeman in 1998. Hip-hop had long since proven to be a powerful, dexterous way of telling stories and had become the shared culture of young people everywhere, but only flickers of it had reached Broadway. No show had integrated rap this completely into its score, or tapped so fully into its storytelling potential, returning theater (if you view it from the right angle) to its ancient roots as verse drama.
Lin’s score would have represented a new frontier for musical theater if it had drawn on either of these traditions. It drew on both.
Then there was the story that Lin and Quiara were telling. Unlike West Side Story, Guys and Dolls, My Fair Lady, Oklahoma!, South Pacific, The Phantom of the Opera, Spring Awakening, Rent, Les Misérables, and The Who’s Tommy, to cite a few ready examples, Heights wasn’t an adaptation of an existing book, play, opera, or album. Unlike Evita, Gypsy, and Hamilton, it wasn’t based on a real person’s life. Even Cats was something else before it was Cats. In the Heights asked its audience to take seriously a completely original story depicting life as it was really lived, right here in the present day, in a neighborhood a couple miles north of where they were sitting.
The show’s fusion of new sounds (new for musical theater, anyway) with traditional craft can be heard to best effect in “Paciencia y Fe,” the showcase number for the community’s matriarch, Abuela Claudia. Musically, the song is a mambo, a form of dance music from Cuba; lyrically, it’s an evocative trip back through her memories, all the way to her youth in Havana.
“One of the things I’ve always been curious about is: Where did that song come from?” asks Jeffrey, more than a decade later. “I did not understand. How can a twenty-four-year-old man write a song about a seventy-five-year-old woman with such heart? You can have that big of a heart at twenty-four, but how do you know so many details about her life that make the song feel so powerful, deep, organic, whole? ‘Scrubbing the whole of the Upper East Side’—you know what I mean?”
Lin’s answers to Jeffrey’s questions can be found in his annotations on pages 88–90. But to appreciate the total effect on audiences at 37 Arts, you have to know about two vital collaborators, both of whom share Abuela Claudia’s roots in Cuba.
eing Cuban is a difficult thing,” says Olga Merediz, who played Abuela Claudia at 37 Arts. “It means having to leave everyone behind. Everything you know. Your home, you know?”
She was born in Guantánamo. In 1961, in the aftermath of the revolution, her family was living in Havana. Her parents told their friends that they were taking five-year-old Olga and her brothers on a trip to Jamaica. She brought a suitcase of clothes, but not any toys. They told everybody they’d be gone for the weekend. She didn’t see Cuba again for fifty-four years.
Alex Lacamoire and Olga Merediz
From Jamaica they went to Miami, from Miami to San Juan. That’s where Olga grew up, among other exiles. After college she moved to New York to start a new life as an actor—or at least to try.
“All of that is in ‘Paciencia y Fe,’ ” she says.
The song is long enough, and demanding enough, to challenge anybody who tries to sing it. Finding an actor who had the wherewithal to perform it eight times a week, and was the right age for the role, proved to be a challenge of its own. (Olga wasn’t the right age. She needed a gray wig and stooped shoulders to seem like she was.) But that doesn’t mean it came easily to her.
To prepare to sing the song each night, she had to get into a kind of trance, attaching a memory to each of the lines, all of the sweet and bitter memories. She needed to take the audience on a journey through Claudia’s life: the story of losing one home and trying to find another—an experience that Olga knew intimately.
