In the Heights, page 24
When they said their goodbyes that day, the vibe was not the one that prevails at many other reunions—the see-you-in-five-years farewell. These people see one another all the time. Whatever strange adhesive power Heights has, it doesn’t wear off quickly. It seems not to wear off at all.
When Doreen got married, Lin was her DJ; when Joshua got married, Luis and Eliseo were his groomsmen. Andréa went a step further for Kurt Crowley, the music director on the national tour and the conductor of this recording session. (“We are going for Washing-tone, not Washing-tun,” he said at one point. He is a Lac protégé.) When he married Carlos Gonzalez, whom he’d met when they worked together on the show, Andréa officiated—she even sang a little of “Breathe” as a final a cappella blessing.
They have remained close enough to be involved with one another’s children: Bill Sherman was at the hospital to meet both of Chris Jackson’s kids; Janet is a de facto godmother to Andréa’s son. They are even close enough to talk shit. “They all became my family. Any one of them can call me. Except Chris Jackson,” says Karen Olivo.
They bonded in joy but also in heartache—all the perennial theatrical complaints: the disagreements over visibility, money, and credit; the showmances that went bust. “We had to live through that,” Lin says. “But it all stayed family.” That is why, in spite of the gigantic success of Hamilton and how much he loves many members of that company, no show can rival the affection he feels for Heights or the people who made it.
“Hamilton is like, we were on this wave together and we survived it. But it’s not family,” he says. “I still call Heights people the way I call my family—my for-real family.”
Chris Jackson feels the same way. In late 2019, after filming a brief featured role in the movie, he said, “People always ask me what my favorite show is. Hamilton is a different thing. We know very well what that experience represented to a lot of different people. But I always say this, and believe it to my bones: Heights is my favorite show, because it gave me my artistic life. If Doreen Montalvo called me up tomorrow and said, ‘Chris, I need a kidney,’ I’m going to the hospital. I’m going to do whatever I need to do to help my sister.”
Nobody has needed a transplant, but since closing night on Broadway, they have seen one another through nearly every other affliction that life can throw in your path: career setbacks, the loss of loved ones, divorce—and, more recently, sickness.
A few weeks before this recording day, Mandy Gonzalez had arranged a get-together for the “Core 4 +1,” the group of friends who had grown inseparable at 37 Arts: Mandy, Karen, Andréa, Janet, and Eliseo, who is the “+1.” They had met at the restaurant that used to be Café Edison, their favorite place until it was pushed out by a fancier spot. She wanted to tell them in person, and all at once, that she had breast cancer.
They all cried. And then—“as the Core 4 +1 always do,” she says—they got to work.
When Mandy went in for surgery, they visited. When she spoke out publicly about her diagnosis, to draw attention to the fight, they supported her—and the rest of the show’s familia did, too. Two Heights friends who were working with her on Hamilton, where she was playing Angelica, promised to support her in every way they could. Tommy Kail and stage manager Amber White were as good as their word.
When it came time for chemotherapy, Priscilla Lopez—who inspired Mandy, then played her mother and became her friend—brought arroz con gandules.
1
NINA: In this album there’s a picture
Of the ladies at Daniela’s.
You can tell it’s from the eighties
By the volume of their hair.
There you are, you’re just a baby
Eighty-seven, Halloween!
If it happened on this block, Abuela was there.
Every afternoon I came
She’d make sure I did my homework.
She could barely write her name 2
But even so…
She would stare at the paper and tell me,
“Bueno, let’s review,
Why don’t you tell me everything you know.”
In this album there’s a picture
Of Abuela in Havana.
She is holding a rag doll, unsmiling,
Black and white.
And I wonder what she’s thinking
Does she know that she’ll be leaving
For the city on a cold, dark night? 3
And on the day they ran, did she dream of endless summer?
Did her mother have a plan?
Or did they just go?
Did somebody sit her down and say,
“Claudia, get ready to leave behind everything you know”?
Everything I know
What do I know?
In this folder there’s a picture
From my high school graduation
With the program, mint condition,
And a star beside my name.
Here’s a picture of my parents
As I left for California.
She saved everything we gave her
Every little scrap of paper.
And our lives are in these boxes 4
While the woman who held us is gone.
But we go on, we grow, so…
Hold tight, Abuela, if you’re up there
I’ll make you proud of everything I know!
Thank you, for everything I know.
Skip Notes
1. I distinctly remember writing this song at the back of the theater at 37 Arts.
I remember thinking, Okay, Lin, here’s the moment where Nina reflects on everything that’s happened to her and makes her big decision. You’ve been writing this show for seven years; time to use everything you know. And then the record in my head scratched on “everything I know” as a perfect title, and I got to writing. The right title will get you most of the way there: specific, but pliable to the twists and turns the song needs to take as it will apply to a) Nina’s schoolwork, b) Abuela’s life in her homeland, c) Nina’s relationship to her parents.
2. My Abuela Mundi, who helped raise me, managed to help me with my homework every night, despite having very little formal education. Her presence and her persistence carried me through.
3. As Nina reckons with Abuela’s extraordinary journey, the first leg of which was entirely involuntary as a child, it forces her to contemplate her own.
4. In our basement, there are folders with, like, thousands of mementos. And this lyric is really for my mother, who has saved everything my sister and I have ever committed to paper.
It’s not always clear what people want. On a Friday night in October 2019, members of the Warner Bros. staff moved briskly to manage a crowd that had turned out in larger numbers than anybody anticipated. The 150-seat screening room that was being asked to accommodate somewhat more than 150 people was in the new Hudson Yards complex, twenty-two stories above what had been, relatively recently, a bunch of train tracks. (Developers had thought that what people wanted was another dozen blocks of the amenities that defined Manhattan real estate in the 2010s: first-class office space, high-end retail.)
When all the seats had filled, Jon Chu stepped to the front, mic in hand. He offered a quick welcome, then handed the mic to Lin, who couldn’t stay. (He was due onstage at Freestyle Love Supreme and traffic was bad. He would end up running.)
“What do I want to say? What I want to say is that we have a rough draft of the movie, and you’re the first people on earth to see it,” Lin said. “It’s been a long road to get here, one that I share with the amazing Quiara, our screenwriter.”
Halfway up the bank of seats, Quiara smiled; everybody applauded.
Then Lin was gone and Jon was back. He offered a couple of disclaimers: They were only seven weeks into postproduction, which meant some of the visual effects and the music were still temporary; some sequences hadn’t even been shot yet. Still, he hoped that everybody would have a good time. Then he leaned close to the mic and said, very dramatically, “In the Heights, ladies and gentlemen.”
And then the first-ever screening of the movie began.
few minutes after leaving the theater, Lin returned. Now he was larger than life, bearded, and pushing a piragua cart across the screen.
It wasn’t always the plan that Lin would play Piragua Guy—or be in the cast at all. By the time the movie had traveled far enough along its torturous path to assemble a cast, he thought he was too old to play Usnavi and too wounded by all the false starts to want to play anybody else. I don’t want to get heartbroken again if we don’t get to a green light, he remembers thinking.
Then he saw the work that Jon and his team had begun to do. He saw the sequences that were starting to emerge. And he started to change his mind.
“I went from feeling, ‘Go forth with my blessing, I’m so proud of you,’ to ‘I’ll kick myself forever if I’m not in this movie,’ ” he says.
Having a filmmaker appear briefly onscreen is a cinematic tradition, in the best Hollywood style. Lin had alluded to it before the screening began. While waiting for everyone to get seated, he had circled the room, chatting up the folks. At one point, he had leaned across a row to greet a famous movie actor.
“Are you in it?” the actor had asked, shaking Lin’s hand.
“For a minute,” Lin had replied. “I’m Hitchcock.”
hen the movie ended nearly two and a half hours later, everybody cheered. Then staffers streamed down the aisles, handing out surveys and pens. As people answered the questions, Jon did a brave thing.
He walked to the front of the theater, looked up at the 150-plus moviegoers looking down at him, and asked them what they thought of his movie. It was the opposite of fishing for a compliment: It was pointing to your chin and inviting people to punch it.
Jon wasn’t worried that they would say mean stuff. If the audiences at screenings see a problem, he says later, “I’d much rather know. This is the point where we can actually change things.” His only fear was that the attendees of this screening, which was reserved for friends and family, would be too nice. So Jon drew them out.
“Are there too many subtitles, or too few?” “How do you feel about the balance of the Nina and Vanessa stories?” “Do you want to see more about Sonny?” He pushed one question more than the rest: “Could you feel the reason for it to be onscreen?”
People gave long answers and short ones, thoughtful opinions and quick takes, many of which contradicted each other. But when everybody stood up to go home, Jon was pleased. He thought he had gotten what he needed.
So did Lin, who had been listening in the back. (He made a speedy return after he got offstage at Freestyle.) “The best feeling I came away with was, ‘We have a good movie, full stop.’ Because we do,” he recalls. “Now it’s: ‘How do we take this from good to great?’ ”
Lin has spent most of his life asking that question about In the Heights, ever since the show consisted of two songs for Benny and Lincoln and he was nineteen years old. This last phase of postproduction, trying to make the film the best possible version of itself in the time remaining, would mark a culmination. He’s not finished with Heights—the show is sure to be back one day—but it will never again be a new story that he and his collaborators need to figure out how to tell.
The world premiere was eight months away, but a crucial date would arrive much sooner than that. In six weeks, they would screen the movie again. No friends and family this time: A carefully assembled audience would assign the movie numerical scores. And those scores would go a long way to determining how, and to what extent, the movie would get marketed and what, if anything, they could do to make it better.
The kind words from friends and family were encouraging, but nobody was inclined to relax. The upcoming test audience might react in any number of ways, from rapture to the kind of response that didn’t bear thinking about.
“You never know until you show it. You never really know,” says Anthony Bregman.
n most days during the next six weeks, Jon worked a desk job. He showed up in the morning at Company 3, a postproduction facility near Union Square in Manhattan. Down a long hallway, then a shorter hallway, behind the last door on the left, he could often be found in the office of the film’s editor, Myron Kerstein. It was nice, as editorial offices go. There were windows.
Jon and Myron spent days and nights poring over the first audience’s responses: every comment in the Q&A, every answer on the survey, all the body language they observed. “They’re like surgeons in terms of criticism,” says Anthony. The prospect of making big changes didn’t scare them. On the contrary. When they first worked together, on Crazy Rich Asians, Jon discovered that Myron could edit footage to deliver a scene exactly as scripted, but he also liked to try new things—which is the way that Jon approaches editing, too. “That’s where we get to make the meal,” he says.
The first page of Jon Chu’s script, signed by Lin
Myron’s approach to Heights was informed by a lifelong love of musicals. As a kid his taste ran to what he calls “maybe probably the dorky side of things,” like The Music Man. Later came All That Jazz and Purple Rain. But when he revisited those inspirations while piecing together Heights, he found that they didn’t have much to teach him. “There aren’t many musicals that are really grounded in reality the way our film is,” he says. “I feel like oftentimes, they cue in the band, and a number begins, and you lose the story. In this film, they’re one and the same. You have to take the story through the numbers.”
Consider “Paciencia y Fe.” In the stage version of Heights, the song played a clear role in the story: to reveal that Abuela Claudia won the lottery. But it didn’t play that role onscreen, which is one reason why it hadn’t entirely worked in the friends-and-family screening. “People loved it—and didn’t know what it was doing in the movie,” Quiara says. Armed with that response, Jon and Myron shifted the song to a different place in the movie. Now it once again played a role in the story, though not the same role it played onstage.
Would it work this way? They thought it would. But then, they’d thought it would work before.
In November, in offices all around the suite (the visual effects team to Myron’s left, the sound editors to his right), the tempo quickened. To a theater person, the sensation was familiar. It felt like tech, the phase when the pursuit of greatness means long days in dark rooms, lavishing untold hours on microscopic details, a ticking clock warning you that the audience is on its way. There’s a lesson here, maybe—another way that the mystique of show business departs from the lived reality. Be prepared to travel through the valley of the shadow, for weeks or months at a time, before your work gets to see the light.
Jon had been making movies long enough to know how urgent this phase of postproduction could feel and how important it was to keep his perspective. “Experience is getting to the point where you trust the process,” he says. Except that throughout this process, a question had been nagging at him—one that nothing in his experience could answer.
He had never made a movie as long as In the Heights. He had never crafted a film in which so much real estate is taken up by musical numbers. Could he hold the interest of an audience for nearly two and a half hours? He imagined a nightmare version of how he and Myron might spend the next six months: suspecting that the movie was too long, but not being sure, so cutting things they loved in order to get the movie under some imagined maximum length. “We keep trimming, trimming, trimming, without taking out the heart.”
With the test screening fast approaching, Jon got an idea—a way to know for sure whether time was a factor. He told Myron that they needed to make “a slash-and-burn cut,” a second version of the movie that was only two hours and a couple of minutes long. It would focus on Usnavi and Vanessa’s relationship and the tale Usnavi shares with their daughter, and it would omit everything that didn’t directly serve that story.
Myron made the enormous cuts necessary to create that version, dropping huge sections of the score, devising new ways to tell the story even more concisely. They showed it to the producers. It worked—sort of. The general view, Jon says, was, “We can make this movie, we can release this movie, but it’s not special.” It would lack emotional punch, the details that make the characters vivid, specific, and true. In other words, the things that make In the Heights what it is.
Still, nobody was likely to say it was too long. So Jon proposed a new plan for the screening: They would test both versions. If the long version, the one that Jon preferred, turned out to be more movie than an audience cared to watch, they’d find out on the same day if the slash-and-burn version could work instead.
Myron Kerstein and Jon Chu
When Lin heard about Jon’s plan, he was confused, as you would be. With “Sunrise,” “Enough,” “Inútil,” and “Everything I Know” having already disappeared from his score, he now stood to lose “No Me Diga,” “Benny’s Dispatch,” “Paciencia y Fe,” and “Alabanza,” too. He wondered why they were screening this version, especially if Jon himself wasn’t all that enthusiastic.
“I need to know if time is an issue,” Jon told him. “If it isn’t an issue, it clears the pathway for us.”
Lin agreed—and so did Quiara. She was the person whom Jon consulted the most about the details of this world. All through postproduction, she pushed for clear storytelling, honest emotion, moments that resonate. The night before the test screening, she managed only three hours of sleep. She says it was a function of “a stew of happiness, giddiness, excitement, anxiety, nerves, terror, and art-love.”
