In the Heights, page 28
Chris had never worked with perpendicular dancers before. Though he needed to choreograph fifteen songs for the movie, each presenting its own challenge—from the watery spectacle of “96,000” to the single-take intimacy of “Champagne”—this one inspired him the most. He started working on it before he moved to New York, turning tables and chairs sideways on the floor of his L.A. studio to reorient his brain.
If they were going to put Benny and Nina on the side of a building, which building should it be? Nelson searched the neighborhood for the perfect spot. Near J. Hood Wright Park, on the south side of a street, he saw a building that seemed to offer the right arrangement of wall, sun, and bridge. The visual effects team used LiDAR technology to create a 3D version of that block. But the building that stood on the perfect spot didn’t strike Nelson as the perfect building. So he took elements from three different buildings around the neighborhood—all designed by the same architect, a very Nelson touch—and combined them to get what he needed.
Next came a motion-capture phase, a long Saturday on which Jon and Alice watched dancers in special suits perform Chris’s choreography. Jon used a sophisticated rig—like a camera without a lens—to record their movement, feeding the images to a computer that placed them in the 3D landscape already populated with the scanned block and Nelson’s composite building. As Emilio Dosal and Melanie Moore moved, Jon trailed them with the rig, a third dancer in their duet. (As part of Jon’s training to be an all-American kid, he took twelve years of tap dance.)
The test got the production team excited about the idea: “It was thrilling,” says Quiara. “Just when you think there’s no more tricks to pull out in the movie.” Myron loved it, too. He decided he wouldn’t do much cutting in this song. The more restraint he used, the more astonishing it would be. It also taught Jon a more immediate lesson: “We were finding out how much we could get away with without needing to tilt the building.”
But they would still need to tilt the building.
This is where the song gets more complicated, more expensive, and more dangerous. At Marcy Armory, the crew built a real-world version of one wall of Nelson’s building. Half of it was flat on the ground; the other half—twenty-four feet high by twenty feet wide—stood straight up in the air. It was like any other wall, except there was no building behind it and it was bolted to a row of enormously powerful hydraulic hinges that could tilt it all the way to the ground in five seconds. The only way to sell the number, they had found, was for the wall to move under the actors while they danced.
Ah yes, the actors.
During rehearsals, Leslie got a text from someone on Jon’s staff asking if she was afraid of heights. She said she wasn’t. A couple of minutes later, Jon called—he wanted to be sure. “Yeah, bro, whatever you need,” she told him.
This is how Leslie and Corey ended up spending weeks of rehearsal figuring out how to dance a duet while surfing a twenty-four-foot metal wall with no harness. It was difficult to figure out the choreography in the studio and difficult all over again in the few days they got to spend on the wall itself. Each of them needed strength and balance, and both of them needed trust—in Chris, in Jon, and in each other. They didn’t need anybody to spell out why this song was the last dancing they were scheduled to do: If they got hurt, it wouldn’t hamper the rest of the shoot. Corey says it’s the most challenging thing he’s done in his film career. Leslie says it is the most challenging thing she has done, period.
The song’s late placement in the production calendar created an opening for one final flourish. Shortly before they filmed it, Jon shared a rough assembly of “When You’re Home” with Chris. He realized too late that they had missed their best chance in the whole movie to have Benny and Nina kiss.
Chris suggested they try it in “When the Sun Goes Down.” He hadn’t choreographed a kiss, but he could try to work it in.
Jon said go ahead.
Leslie and Corey spent parts of three days on the wall. That’s how long it took to synchronize the actors, the building, the camera (mounted at the end of a robotic arm, rotating in sync with the building), the sun (really an arc light on a crane with a two-foot-diameter lens), and Lin’s song. Even the costumes required precision engineering. Mitchell had to make sure that no piece of clothing or jewelry would sway in the wrong direction and spoil the effect. So Leslie wore her hair in braids, and ear cuffs instead of earrings; Corey’s shirt looks loose, but it was stitched to a tank top so it wouldn’t move. Their shoelaces were sewn tight.
When the music started, the wall would tilt part of the way to the floor. Corey would shift his feet from the fire escape to the wall, then he would help Leslie to join him—the cue for the wall to drop the rest of the way. Then they could dance, expressing what Benny and Nina were feeling—something that Jon and the rest of them were feeling, too. As Corey puts it, “Let’s imagine what it was like when New York was their playground, what it was like at the beginning of that summer, and always let it live in our imaginations.”
As the number drew to a close, the wall tilted up to about forty-five degrees, then stopped. Leslie lay down on it, and Corey lay down next to her. They kissed. According to the plan, the wall would tilt all the way vertical, and they would slide down to the fire escape. But how to get there? Leslie found that if she used her foot as a brake, they got stuck. So they just let go, putting their faith in gravity and each other. As ever, Leslie and Corey were finding their way together.
“I think it’s the best shot in the movie,” says Alice.
on and his team feel they are stewards of the artists who came before them. (And of audiences—Mitchell gave Usnavi a Kangol cap as a way of honoring the Broadway fans.) They admire Tommy Kail and his colleagues, who first brought Lin and Quiara’s story to life onstage. After all, most of the key filmmakers—including Jon—fell in love with Heights while watching the original Broadway production.
So it means a lot to Jon and his team to hear that Andy Blankenbuehler, seeing a glimpse of “When the Sun Goes Down” in the trailer, has said: “Dancing on the side of a building? That’s f---ing money.” It means something, too, when Lin credits Jon with “seeing things we can’t.” A decade ago, they never could have come up with his approach, “but it’s the purest expression of that song.”
As for the rest of us, who will be watching with our popcorn, they’d prefer that we don’t think about them or their web of relationships or the mechanics of the collaboration, at least not on first viewing. If they really did the job, we’ll think: What a kiss.
BENNY: When the sun goes down
You’re gonna need a flashlight
You’re gonna need a candle—
NINA: I think I can handle that.
BENNY: When you leave town
I’m gonna buy you a calling card. 1
BENNY, NINA: Cuz I am falling hard for you. 2
NINA: I go back on Labor Day.
BENNY: And I will try to make my way
BENNY, NINA: Out west to California.
BENNY: So we’ve got this summer.
NINA: And we’ve got each other
Perhaps even longer. 3
BENNY: When you’re on your own
And suddenly without me,
Will you forget about me?
NINA: I couldn’t if I tried.
BENNY: When I’m all alone
And I close my eyes
BENNY, NINA: That’s when I’ll see your face again. 4
BENNY: And when you’re gone,
You know that I’ll be waiting when you’re gone.
NINA: But you’re here with me right now…
BENNY: We’ll be working hard, but
If we should drift apart
NINA: Benny—
BENNY: Lemme take this moment just to say—
NINA: No, no—
BENNY: You are gonna change the world someday—
NINA: I’ll be thinking of home— 5
BENNY, NINA: And I’ll think of you every night
At the same time—
BENNY: When the sun goes down.
NINA: When the sun goes down.
BENNY: When the sun goes down. 6
Skip Notes
1. I know that calling cards are not as omnipresent as they once were, but as long as bodegas still sell ’em, I’m keeping this calling card/falling hard lyric.
2. This song has never quite fit in the time line the way we needed it to: In the stage version, it’s been an awfully long day if the sun is just setting now. In the film version, the blackout references only make sense with Quiara’s setup dialogue: “Let’s pretend we’re still in the blackout.” BUT THE SONG WILL NOT BE DENIED.
3. When we did student matinees, they couldn’t help but snap along with the snap in this tune. But the 2/4 bar pause before Benny begins the second verse throws ’em off every time.
4. This song, truly one of the last I wrote for the show, brought my journey with In the Heights full circle. Remember way back to Chapter One: The initial impulse and time I had to write this show came from my first girlfriend and first real love leaving to study abroad. We both knew it was time to part ways. We didn’t know how. This song has all the words I didn’t have when I was nineteen.
5. This song is a bit of a Rorschach test: For Quiara, who married her high school sweetheart, Benny and Nina survive as a couple. For me (see earlier note), it’s a breakup song. We wrote the thing, and we see it differently. It allows space for all of it.
6. Me, a romantic: This notion of thinking of each other at a certain time of day was inspired by Philip Pullman’s incredible His Dark Materials series, concerning two characters who pledge to share a moment on the same park bench in two parallel universes.
You, a scold: But, Lin, the sun would set at different times on the East and West Coast—
Me: Shhhhhhhhhhhh . . .
When reshoots ended, Quiara skipped town. It was time for a much-needed getaway with her family. But even in Puerto Rico, her work on Heights continued.
The world premiere was set for June 26—just four months away. The festivities would take place at the United Palace, the massive gilded movie theater at the heart of the neighborhood. It promised to be the Heights party to end all Heights parties. With the deadline approaching, Jon had begun summoning actors to rerecord dialogue, which sometimes required tweaks to the script: a different word here, an extra syllable there. So Quiara would hike or sightsee with her family during the day, then stay up late to write what Jon needed. “It reminded me of the O’Neill a little bit, except not stressful,” she says. “It was really fun.”
Refreshed and recharged, she flew home to New York in late February. That’s when her husband, Ray, got sick. Very sick.
In any other year, the illness would have been easy to diagnose. Ray seemed to have a bad case of the flu. But since the start of 2020, the world had watched with growing alarm as a mysterious coronavirus had begun to spread. The first reports had come from China. Then from Italy. Then Seattle. Then everywhere.
Could Ray have contracted COVID-19? Nobody knew then; nobody knows now. Whatever the illness might have been, he sequestered himself for two weeks, then got better—a huge relief to family and friends.
Still a sense of dread was spreading, particularly in New York. By early March, the city’s hospitals were overflowing; ambulances screamed day and night. History doesn’t often divide neatly into “before” and “after.” Sweeping changes take time. Except when they don’t.
Consider how members of the Heights community experienced one of the pandemic’s decisive days.
On Thursday, March 12, Andy Blankenbuehler started his morning at the gym, the same one where watching the video for “Thriller” had unlocked “96,000” for him a dozen years earlier. While processing the startling COVID news from the night before—the NBA had canceled its entire season; Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson were sick—Andy noticed that the exercise bike next to him was occupied by a woman wearing a mask and surgical gloves. “I was of course freaked out,” he says.
He crossed the room for some hand sanitizer. The dispenser was empty. It seemed like time to go.
On his way out, he bumped into another Heights alum, Joshua Henry, who had begun stocking up on essential supplies for the widespread shortage that many believed was imminent.
“It felt like the world was ending,” Andy says.
Soon his phone rang: It was Jeffrey Seller calling to discuss Hamilton. (Andy had won his second Tony Award for choreographing the show.) They considered a question that would have seemed preposterous a few weeks earlier: Was it safe to perform that night? Jeffrey didn’t think so. He was headed to an emergency meeting at The Broadway League, the organization of leading commercial producers. Crowded into a conference room—“That in and of itself could have been a superspreader event,” Jeffrey would say later—they tried to coordinate a response with New York’s elected officials.
As Jeffrey, Kevin McCollum, and other producers strategized, Andréa Burns arrived at her voice doctor for a checkup. She was glad to hear that everything looked good, since she was due in San Diego in two weeks to work on a new musical. “That’s not going to happen,” her doctor told her—not with this virus looming. On her way home, she got a call from her son, Hudson, who was no longer the young mascot of the Heights company, but a sixteen-year-old high school junior thinking about colleges. He broke the news that Broadway—all of Broadway—had just shut down.
It was afternoon now; events moved faster. At the Richard Rodgers Theatre, wardrobe assistants for Hamilton waited for the washers and dryers to finish their cycles, lest Paul Tazewell’s costumes rot away before Mandy Gonzalez, Daniel Yearwood, and other Heights alumni in the cast could resume performing. A few blocks away, at the Stephen Sondheim Theatre, Kevin told the company of Mrs. Doubtfire, including Doreen Montalvo, that the show was suspended. They should gather their things and go home. He gave the company of Six the same message, but it was even more painful to deliver. When he arrived at the Brooks Atkinson Theatre, he had to edge past a mountain of presents, flowers, champagne: It was supposed to be opening night.
On opposite coasts, the two Vanessas, Melissa Barrera and Karen Olivo, reacted that afternoon much as their character might have. Melissa, in Los Angeles, felt a Vanessa-like determination to get to work, virus be damned. She planned to fly to New York for a busy weekend of rerecording dialogue, taking part in a photo shoot, and—a particular thrill for a Vanessa—attending the Met Gala, the highlight of the fashion year. She had no intention of letting a pandemic stop her. (“I was in complete denial,” she says now.) She texted her team for updates: When could she fly?
Three thousand miles away, Karen demonstrated a Vanessa-like instinct for survival. “I was out of my apartment within thirty minutes of them shutting down Broadway,” she says. She believed—rightly—that if Broadway had closed, the whole city was soon to follow. She gathered her husband and their dog and headed for LaGuardia. They didn’t even clean out their fridge.
Karen made it home to Wisconsin; Melissa, blocked in her attempt to reach New York, joined her husband in Sonora. Before long, both of the Vanessas would be sick, likely with COVID-19.
Jon had spent the morning on a mixing stage in Manhattan, finessing the sound of the movie. By afternoon, he was watching colleagues scramble. Parents faced the sudden prospect of schools closing: What would they do with the kids? His own wife and children had flown home to Los Angeles a few weeks earlier. In a flash, he realized that he might get stuck in New York, a continent away from them.
Warner Bros. told him it was too risky to fly. “That’s when I knew I had to leave,” he says.
On the cab ride to the hotel—rushing in for his things, rushing out for his flight—he passed by a movie set. The piles of fake snow gave him a hunch about which movie it might be. A text exchange with Alice Brooks, the director of photography, proved him right. Unlikely as it sounds, the set was for Tick, Tick…Boom!, Netflix’s adaptation of Jonathan Larson’s musical. Its director was Lin.
The virus had gotten Lin’s filmmaking career off to a peculiar start: everybody on set staying six feet apart, the city eerily still around them. (“It was beginning to look like Vanilla Sky,” he says.) But he had been dreaming of directing movies even longer than he’d been writing In the Heights, so he was determined to make the most of the chance. He and Alice shot as much as they could before they got the order to stop. It arrived late on Friday the thirteenth. He called “Cut” one last time, then the cast and crew scattered for safety.
Back home in Washington Heights, Lin felt whiplash. How had it happened so fast? One day, frenetic activity; the next, enforced stillness. He worried about his wife and sons and parents and friends. As New York’s lockdown grew more complete, and the ambulances screamed louder, he tried to imagine what might happen next.
One sure sign that a strange new reality had dawned: “I didn’t make anything for a month,” Lin says.
t wasn’t just New Yorkers—or even Americans. Spin the globe: Wherever it stops, you’ll find members of the Heights community whose lives were disrupted that day and in the days that followed.
At the same moment that Kevin was canceling the opening night of Six, Jeff Rosenschein was leading a band through the curtain call music of Chicago, in the same Jerusalem theater where he had conducted In the Heights. Because of newly imposed restrictions on public gatherings, the actors no sooner finished their bows than they began to strike the set, carting it away amid what Jeff calls “tremendous chaos and confusion.” A few hours later, Bobby Garcia arrived at the Manila theater where he’d staged the international premiere of Heights, preparing to celebrate the same milestone for The Band’s Visit. Instead, a nurse recorded the actors’ temperatures as their set was torn down.
