In the Heights, page 20
She decided to stop those doubts—for herself and the other salon ladies. She grabbed the hands of Daphne and Stephanie Beatriz, who played Carla, and formed the women into a profane prayer circle.
“Shake that shit off,” she told them. “I’m not going to let anyone or anything interfere with my performance today.”
Daphne laughs as she tells the story. “She was so hilarious and said we were going to protect each other from that insecurity. That was such a beautiful thing—going in there with that determination to represent.”
By 5:30 a.m., when the sun rose over Queens, sixty dancers had arrived. Christopher Scott, the film’s choreographer, tried to prepare them for what was coming, backed by his full team of associate choreographers: Emilio Dosal, Ebony Williams, and Dana Wilson, as well as associate Latin choreographer Eddie Torres, Jr., and assistant Latin choreographer Princess Serrano. By six a.m., dozens of crew members had joined them, making the thousand careful adjustments needed to help a movie look spontaneous.
It was almost nine a.m. by the time Jon called “Action.” The cameras started rolling, Daphne started singing, and the clock kept ticking.
Daniela in the film version
Incredibly impactful experiences have this prism-like quality, where the meaning changes over time, for the better and the worse. Rent meant one thing, and then somebody wasn’t there to experience the fruits of their labor, which meant the rest of us had to bear witness. And that was excruciating.
The thing doesn’t change. We do, and that changes how we see the thing. I can’t help but wonder: By the time In the Heights comes out, how different will we be, and how different will the world be, from right now [January 2020]? We’re living in a time when shit can happen. When shit will happen. But I don’t know what it will be.
I collect chairbacks from the projects I work on. I kept mine from In the Heights. It’s special to me. It’s my memento, and it makes me feel a kind of giddy anticipation. I can’t wait to see what the world is going to do with the movie. I have a feeling things might be different, but I don’t know what they’ll be. Except for this one thing:
What’s going to be different is there won’t be as many people who grow up the way I did—who watch films and never see anybody who looks like them. It won’t be like that. Whatever else might happen, it won’t be like that ever again.
rrange the actors, position the cameras, do a take, reset everybody, do it again. As the sun climbed higher that morning, the temperature rose to what one crew member estimated to be nine hundred degrees. Look closely—see the sweat on people’s bodies? Most of it didn’t come from the makeup department. But there wasn’t time for extra breaks to cool off.
“Please be quiet,” a voice on the loudspeaker boomed. “We gotta go.”
At one point that morning, Jimmy Smits got his turn to shine. Playing Kevin Rosario wasn’t his first Heights experience. He had seen the show Off-Broadway and been “blown away” by it, he says. He had offered to help in any way he could, eventually recording a radio ad for the show.
His devotion to Heights carried into rehearsals for the film. As they got underway, he told Chris Scott and the choreography team, “I know I’m playing the dad, but the last thing I want to see is myself in the background, just waving my hands. I want to go all in.” They obliged him. He sometimes hobbled home from the dance studio to ice himself for hours.
His payoff came on “Carnaval” day. He had a featured moment in the song: an intricate, whirling combination. The cast and crew watched him do it again and again, cheering him on. He could feel “a lightning bolt of energy” around the set, something he’d experienced only rarely in his long career.
Over the applause after one take, a voice rang out, ricocheting off the walls: “That shit was crazy! For our ancestors!” It was Anthony Ramos. He, too, had a long history with Heights, but it wasn’t as happy as Jimmy’s.
Very early in his career, he had tried to get cast as Sonny on the show’s national tour. It meant taking a bus into Manhattan from a gig he was doing in New Jersey, going through round after round of auditions. At last he made it to the big moment: a callback in front of Tommy Kail, Alex Lacamoire, and Lin himself.
He gave the song everything he had. He didn’t get the part.
He thought he’d missed the one chance he would get to work with Lin, the writer who’d evoked Anthony’s own world, Latino New York, so beautifully on a Broadway stage. He needn’t have worried. A few years later, the same guys would hire him to originate the roles of John Laurens and Philip Hamilton, Alexander’s son, in Hamilton.
When Anthony got to know Tommy and Lac well enough, he asked if they remembered not casting him as Sonny. They said they did.
“You weren’t ready yet,” Lac said.
Anthony knew he was right. “Only a homie would tell you that,” he says.
But he needed one more break to make his way back to Heights and find himself sweating in the courtyard that morning.
In 2018, Stephanie Klemons, an original cast member of both In the Heights and Hamilton, directed a production of Heights at the Kennedy Center in Washington. The night before rehearsals were set to begin, she lost an actor to an injury. She reached out to Anthony: Could he step in with zero notice?
He didn’t feel physically or mentally ready, and was about to pass, but decided to do it. That’s how he got a second chance to show Lin what he could do in Heights—not as Sonny this time, as Usnavi. In a series of tweets, reproduced on this page, Lin commemorated how overwhelmed he was watching Anthony step into the role he once played. He, Quiara, and Jon all agreed that when the cameras started rolling, Anthony should be their Usnavi.
The bond between Anthony and Lin added to the drama of filming “Carnaval.” Lin played Piragua Guy, so he was in the courtyard, too—or, rather, directly above it, on a fire escape. It meant that the whole cast and crew had a clear view of the brief duet that he and Anthony sing in the middle of the number. To people who knew their history, the sight made time go all swirly. Anthony had originated the role of Lin’s son in Hamilton, and now he was playing the role that Lin had originated, and somehow the two of them were singing a duet in Washington Heights.
A quirk of the production process made the moment even stranger and more potent. All day, the actors had been singing along to prerecorded versions of “Carnaval” piped over the loudspeakers. But somehow they hadn’t gotten around to recording Anthony’s side of his duet, so they had to fall back on the only other version on hand: the Broadway cast album. Which meant that Lin wasn’t just singing with Anthony that day, he was harmonizing with himself at age twenty-eight, when every bit of what was happening around him would have seemed like a ludicrous dream. “It was like time travel,” Lin says.
y three p.m., when everybody had returned from their lunch break—blood sugar bolstered by the ice cream truck that Stephanie Beatriz had hired—time was growing shorter, the day hotter. Now when choreographer Chris Scott talked to the dancers, many listened with hands on hips, hands on knees.
From his fire escape, Lin did his bit to keep up morale. He joined in the clapping that broke out between scenes; he made silly faces; he pulled up his shirt and did belly rolls. Guests watched from the edges of the shoot: Lin’s dad and wife, Quiara’s sister, Chris’s mom, Anthony’s sister and mom. Anna Wintour stopped by.
Jon is not the type to direct through a bullhorn, barking orders from the shade. When they’d filmed “96,000” earlier that month on a couple of unseasonably frigid days, he had jumped in the Highbridge Park pool with the cast. On this day, he darted around the courtyard, giving notes to actors, framing shots, conferring with Alice. He is also not the type to speak in mystical terms, but when he thinks back on that day, he remembers “the sun shining down like a laser—it was like the sun was shining out of everybody.”
By late afternoon, the boundary between the make-believe world of the movie and the real world of the shoot had all but melted away. They had reached the part of the song where Usnavi and Daniela try to call forth their neighbors’ pride in where they come from. Anthony climbed onto a picnic table and faced the whole cast, rapping, “Can we sing so loud and raucous they can hear us across the bridge in East Secaucus?” Daphne stood near him, arms wide apart, raising them up, willing everybody to stand tall, to keep going.
Both of them were throwing all their skill and commitment into their performances, the stars of two of Broadway’s epoch-making musicals doing what they had trained to do. But they also weren’t acting.
“To raise the flag for your country, to dance and recognize that we’re all here together, and belong here, we don’t need to be forgiven for it, or ashamed for it,” says Daphne of what she was feeling. “There’s a pride in being here from Colombia, or Panama, the D.R., Puerto Rico, Cuba, wherever.”
At eight o’clock, with the sun sinking toward New Jersey, the dancers were still dancing. Eleven hours had passed since Daphne had belted out “Hey!” to start the song. Now Jon was trying to get the right take of sixty-plus voices shouting “Hey!” to finish it. In the movie version of the scene, the blackout ends when the song does, so a voice on the loudspeaker would announce, “The power’s on!” That’s how the actors knew the right moment to cheer that it was over.
After one such cheer, it really was over. Not just the take—the song.
They had done it. They had made the day.
Jon jumped into a swarm of dancers. (Ever see a baseball player hit a walk-off home run, then leap onto home plate into the waiting arms of his cheering teammates? That’s what this jump looked like.) People were clapping and shouting and hugging and crying. Alice thought the whole thing was a miracle.
“You know when you see people at a concert cry, and you’re like, ‘I would never do that’?” asks costume designer Mitchell Travers. “That’s what I did.” He thinks it’s the most sheer human energy he has ever been close to.
Anthony Ramos, in the middle of the crowd, launched into a speech. He can’t remember his exact words. He hadn’t planned what he was going to say—he hadn’t planned to speak at all. He just felt that something needed to be said.
“I might have said, today we made history,” he recalls. “This was for our ancestors who didn’t get the opportunity to do this—who were fighting to have a chance to do what we just did. It was for love of the culture. It was for our kids, who look like us, to be able to see themselves on the big screen, to see us singing about our pride. Some shit like that.”
Somewhere in the crowd stood Dascha Polanco, cheering with the rest. She was sweaty, tired, tear-streaked—and beginning to feel the spirit move.
“I looked down and saw that concrete floor,” she says, “and I saw those fire escapes up there, and I was like, ‘New York.’ ”
She began a chant. It was slow and pitched low: “N-e-e-e-e-w York, N-e-e-e-e-w York.” In seconds, the whole crowd took it up. “N-e-e-e-e-w York! N-e-e-e-e-w York!”
They were pointing to the sky. They were dancing.
“N-e-e-e-e-w York! N-e-e-e-e-w York!”
“It wasn’t like chanting, ‘Oh, I love New York,’ ” Anthony says later—meaning it wasn’t a casual thing someone would casually say. “It was”—he drops his voice an octave and leans in—“I motherf---ing love New York. I’m proud to be from New York. I’m proud to be Latino from New York. That was the chant.”
Lin, on his fire escape, was overwhelmed. Quiara, in the courtyard, guessed that people could hear them all chanting for blocks around. “It was the sound of joy and survival,” she says. “And the sound of people who were really proud to be artists in community together—all our stories braided and interwoven at that one moment.”
The long months of preparation had yielded the thing that movie people dream of creating: the burst of real emotion, the flash of genuine spontaneity. Some of it infuses what you see in the finished version of the song, but some of it can’t be recovered now. It’s an experience only for the people who got to be part of that impromptu celebration, the carnaval that followed “Carnaval.”
That long day and its joyous finale capture, in miniature form, a lot of the Heights experience—what’s powerful about it, what’s rare. Instead of expecting little from the actors it featured, Heights demanded everything—not just what they could do, but who they were and where they came from. By fusing them with dozens of other artists making the same commitment, it gave them the feeling that Lin had wanted so badly for himself when he started writing the show: a sense of belonging, of being part of a group of people working toward a goal they all hold dear. That’s why Anthony, looking back on filming “Carnaval,” says, “That was one of the greatest days of my life. Period. If I never do another movie again, I did this.”
“Something that arises in ‘Carnaval’ is a feeling of, ‘There’s a place for us,’ ” says Quiara. “But the place is not one that says, ‘Oh, I definitely fit in’ or ‘I definitely don’t.’ It holds those questions. It allows those questions to exist.”
Those questions, she has come to see, are universal.
“People are like, ‘What is my place in the world?’ That question is actually part of your place in the world,” she says. “There’s something about In the Heights. It takes such a burden off to hear, ‘Yeah, there’s a place for you. Here it is.’ ”
The spontaneous chant after "Carnaval del Barrio."
1
DANIELA: Hey…Hey…
What’s this tontería that I’m seeing on the street?
I never thought I’d see the day…
Since when are Latin people scared of heat?
When I was a little girl
Growing up in the hills of Vega Alta
My favorite time of year was Christmastime! 2
Ask me why!
CARLA: Why?
DANIELA: There wasn’t an ounce of snow
But oh, the coquito would flow. 3
As we sang the aguinaldo,
The carnaval would begin to grow!
Business is closed, and we’re about to go…
Let’s have a carnaval del barrio!
PIRAGUA GUY: Wepa!
(PIRAGUA GUY begins to scrape a slow beat. DANIELA begins slowly.)
DANIELA: ¡Carnaval del barrio!
¡Carnaval del barrio!
Carnaval…
(SONNY joins her effort.)
PIRAGUA GUY: ¡Carnaval!
DANIELA: Del barrio…
PIRAGUA GUY: ¡Barrio!
DANIELA: Carnaval…
SONNY, PIRAGUA GUY: ¡Carnaval!
DANIELA: Del barrio…
SONNY, PIRAGUA GUY: ¡Barrio!
DANIELA: We don’t need electricidad!
Get off your butt, avanza!
Saca la maraca, bring your tambourine,
Come and join the parranda!
PIRAGUA GUY: Wepa!
(The community gets into it.)
DANIELA, MEN, WOMAN:
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
SONNY, MAN, WOMAN:
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio! 4
DANIELA, MEN, WOMEN,
PIRAGUA GUY:
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
SONNY, MEN, WOMEN:
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio!
SONNY, PIRAGUA GUY, MEN,
DANIELA, CARLA, WOMEN:
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
MEN, GRAFFITI
PETE, WOMEN:
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio!
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio!
CARLA: Ooh, me me me, Dani, I have a question.
I don’t know what you’re cantando.
DANIELA: Just make it up as you go
We are improvisando. 5
Lai le lo lai lo le lo lai
You can sing anything.
Carla, whatever pops into your head
Just so long as you sing.
CARLA: My mom is Dominican-Cuban, my dad is from Chile and P.R., which means:
I’m Chile-Domini-Curican, but I always say I’m from Queens! 6
PIRAGUA GUY: Wepaaa!
SONNY, PIRAGUA GUY, MEN,
DANIELA, CARLA, WOMEN:
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
Carnaval…
Del barrio…
MEN, GRAFFITI
PETE, WOMEN:
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio!
¡Carnaval!
¡Barrio!
(VANESSA takes center stage.)
VANESSA: Yo! Why is everyone so happy? 7
We’re sweating and we have no power!
