In the Heights, page 29
A still more painful disruption occurred in Egypt, where students at the Modern English School Cairo had been rehearsing In the Heights. Jonathan Todd, the director, had noticed that they were connecting to the show’s themes—the importance of family, the promise and danger of leaving home—more fully than they had connected to any other show they’d done. In particular, the characters’ mourning for Abuela Claudia resonated in an Islamic context. “To hold something up to God for blessing is an act that’s very familiar to the students,” he says. The pandemic closed their school—and their show—before opening night.
Cairo
With a killer virus circling the globe, the fate of a movie wasn’t anybody’s chief worry. But it was still a worry. Once the basic safety of their families was assured, Warner Bros. executives and the Heights creative team reckoned with how COVID-19 would affect their plans. It was hard to imagine that audiences would brave a pandemic to go to the movies, and even less likely that the crisis would be under control in three months’ time. Should they stick to the original release date but stream the movie on HBO Max? Or should they preserve the theatrical release, but push back the date? Since Toby Emmerich, chairman of the Warner Bros. Pictures Group, felt that Heights was a summer movie, a delay would last a full year.
At first, Lin didn’t want to wait. “My heart sank,” he says. He felt like he was back at the O’Neill, when he and the rest of Voltron thought they were Broadway bound, only to have the producers say the show still didn’t work. He wanted people to see the movie as soon as it was ready, no matter where or how they saw it.
Quiara was inclined to delay. More people would feel comfortable venturing out to see the movie if they waited. And though it brought her no joy to say it, she felt sure that the themes of Heights—particularly its concern with immigrants and the fate of the undocumented—would remain just as relevant in 2021. Above all, she believed in the work they had done: “I’ve been making this shit for so long, I was like, I’ll wait a year.”
Jon favored waiting, too. His experience with Crazy Rich Asians taught him that beyond raising the profile of the movie itself, a theatrical release would activate a global marketing machine that could turn the actors into stars. “If the movie becomes a big hit, they go off and carry other movies. I’ve seen it happen,” he says. “A whole new lane gets created. And that has even more longevity than the movie.”
That argument persuaded Lin, even if it didn’t cheer him up. “I get that it’s better to wait, but I don’t want that to be the right answer,” he says. “My heart, which just wants to share the movie with the world, doesn’t want that to be the case.”
After the delay became official, the actors would be haunted by the ghost of their original plan. Calendar apps would ping, reminding them it was time for some interview or screening or photo shoot, long since canceled. On June 26, Leslie Grace used the cast’s group text to point out that they were supposed to be at the United Palace that night. “We would have been dancing in the aisles,” she says. “Anthony, Melissa, Corey, and I would have been crying the whole night in disbelief.”
The heartache of pushing back the movie did yield one slender benefit: more time to get it right. Before lockdown, Lin had felt that they were rushing to complete the soundtrack. Now they had a chance to finish it properly. In particular, they could include more Latin superstars. (Yes, that is Rubén Blades you’re hearing at the top of “Breathe.”)
It also meant more time to fine-tune the movie itself. Jon persuaded Warner Bros. to install an Avid editing system in Myron Kerstein’s living room. This is not, to say the least, standard studio protocol. But it was the only option, since the virus kept Myron from going to a proper editing suite. Working remotely, he and Jon explored ways to speed up a section late in the film the film by intercutting scenes. They also fielded a proposal from Lin to remove a crucial few lines in Usnavi and Vanessa’s final conversation. Myron was initially against the idea: Vanessa’s lines about becoming an artist seemed vital to drive home one of the movie’s themes. But Lin compared the spare new version to the ending of Hamilton, when the music drops away and Alexander delivers his final soliloquy a cappella.
Myron laughs as he recalls what he told Jon: “If it’s good enough for Hamilton, it’s good enough for us.” He made the cut. He’s certain it never would have happened if the movie had stuck to the original release plan.
As for the revised plan, it would change one more time before it was done. In December, Warner Bros. announced that it would release Heights and the rest of its 2021 movies simultaneously on the big screen and HBO Max. As this book goes to press, the film's release is scheduled for June 11, and the prevailing vibe of the whole enterprise (guarded optimism amid wild uncertainty) is best stated by Toby Emmerich: “We have to be ready. And we have to hope the world is ready.”
y the time the world is ready, it will have endured a wrenching year. There are ways to tabulate the economic damage and lost lives, but not the toll of isolation on a global scale. Millions of people feared that spending time with their friends, neighbors, or relatives might prove deadly. Social bonds frayed; expressions of community waned.
Throughout the summer of 2020, late in the day, Quiara and her husband would walk around Washington Heights. Less than a year had passed since the movie had filmed there, but the differences were profound. Highbridge Pool, where dozens of actors had danced and swum through “96,000,” never opened. Its dry expanse was home to enormous tents: a COVID testing site. Across the neighborhood, which prided itself on its countless small businesses, restaurants shut down and storefronts went dark, victims of mandatory closures and economic distress. Quiara could feel the desperation in the air—“a sense of loss in the center,” she calls it—even as the streets flared more vividly to life. The music seemed louder, the lights brighter.
Members of the Heights community lent their time, talent, and prominence to organizations that were trying to stave off the worst of the year’s effects. Lin went on The Tonight Show to raise money for Broadway Cares/Equity Fights AIDS. Mandy Gonzalez reunited with Chris Jackson to sing “When You’re Home”—a way of reminding people not to go out and risk spreading the virus if they could help it. (A ray of light in a dark year: Mandy finished her chemotherapy treatment. Her Heights friends weren’t allowed to be with her in person. They joined by video.) Javier Muñoz co-created the Broadway Relief Project, which marshaled the skills of Broadway costume designers to make desperately needed protective equipment for healthcare workers. He did it all without leaving home, since his HIV status made it too risky to go outside. One afternoon, when the coast finally seemed clear, he walked to a park near his apartment, the spot where Leslie Grace and Corey Hawkins sing the movie version of “When You’re Home.” He wept to feel the sun on his face.
While the country fought what often felt like a losing battle with the coronavirus, a second reckoning arrived. The killing of George Floyd on May 25 sparked nationwide protests against racial injustice. Tens of millions of Americans rallied to the cry that Black Lives Matter. Institutions of every kind faced a demand to confront the systems that visit harm on Black and Latino communities.
Shedding light on those systems has long been the mission of Maria Hinojosa, a leading journalist and the founder of Futuro Media. In 2019, her friendship with Lin and Quiara had led to an invitation to appear in the movie. She’d expected a cameo, which would have satisfied her lifelong dream of being an actor. Instead she played a more consequential role: the leader of a protest on behalf of undocumented immigrants. She didn’t find it hard to get into character—“I had been an angry protest leader in college,” she says—though she found that Lin, Quiara, and Jon had something other than anger in mind. They wanted her to lead with an affirmative demand: a forthright chant to “Tell our stories.”
The movie doesn’t just issue that call, it also answers that call, as the stage version did. As Jimmy Smits says, “We’re putting something out there that’s positive, that shows us in all of our beauty, and the diversity within our culture.” Maria thinks that Heights will land with more force after the protests of 2020, because when the movie insists that attention be paid to Latino lives and Latino stories, the claiming of space isn’t just a metaphor: “The film takes over the streets—literally. It takes over the pool—literally. That’s going to resonate.”
At this point, nobody should need more evidence about the life-and-death stakes of the inequities that millions of Americans protested in 2020, but the virus provided it anyway. On almost any metric related to COVID-19, Black and Latino communities suffered a disproportionately heavy toll. (Maria herself contracted the virus, losing a month to a slow and painful recovery.) Here is where the Heights community’s experience of 2020 takes a tragic turn.
Blanca Camacho, who joined the Heights cast shortly before its move to Broadway, has played many roles in the show over the years, including Abuela Claudia, Daniela, and Camila. Her longtime partner, Felipe Gorostiza, was with her every step of the way—“my plus-one to all our Heights events,” she says. In the pandemic’s early days, when the disease was a terrifying unknown, he began to feel ill. A month later, Felipe—a Cuban immigrant, a person whom Blanca calls “a warm, charming, gregarious, generous soul”—was gone.
For the Heights community, another blow was yet to fall. As Lin points out in a note on page 258, Doreen Montalvo was the first actor to audition for In the Heights in New York. She made her Broadway debut in the show, then played different roles in different productions in later years. She’s also featured in the movie. If any actor is at the heart of the Heights community, it’s her. In September 2020, she fell ill—not COVID-19, but severe all the same. She died a few weeks later, just fifty-six years old.
Her castmates, bewildered and grieving, took to social media to offer tributes. You should know that if you’ve been in a school or regional production of In the Heights, there’s a chance that she has been your castmate, too. Producers who license the show have the option to use a prerecorded bolero: the scratched record whose lyrics run “No te vayas / Si me dejas.” The voice you hear in that bolero is Doreen’s. If you count those recordings and add them to her involvement in the original Broadway run, plus the subsequent productions in which she starred, she holds the distinction, now and probably forever, of appearing in more performances of In the Heights than any other actor.
Doreen loved it when friends realized it was her voice flowing out of their speakers. “They would say, ‘Hey, you’re here with us!’ ” she recalled in an interview in early 2020, laughing at the memory. “I feel like I’m the musical ghost that lives through all the In the Heightses.”
fter the ordeals of 2020, the old saying about tomorrow not being guaranteed feels more banal than usual—and more true. These days, nobody can feel sure about what the future will bring.
One small thing is certain: By the time of the movie’s world premiere, at least twenty-one years will have passed since Lin’s parents gathered a few friends in their living room to hear what their son had written. That’s more than half a lifetime. Looking back over this long story, Lin sees that the musical he started making when he was nineteen has grown up alongside him, and vice versa. “Heights’s journey is indistinguishable from my journey,” he says.
In those twenty-one years (and counting), he has experienced a lot of what he wrote about in college. The son pining for his high school girlfriend is now a husband and father of two; the upstart who wrote about young people chasing their dreams now gets to write movies and to direct them. (He resumed shooting Tick, Tick…Boom! in late 2020. With luck it’ll be out in a year.) He started writing the Wesleyan version of In the Heights while wrestling with a question: How do I get a seat at the table? He’ll watch the world premiere of its film adaptation while pondering a different one, no less vexing: What do you do with that seat once you get it?
One answer is: Save the bookstore.
Planning the new Drama Book Shop
We’ve seen how crucial the Drama Book Shop was in the early days of Heights—and in Lin’s life more generally. That’s where he bonded with Tommy Kail, Alex Lacamoire, Chris Jackson, and other people he still counts among his closest friends and collaborators. (No bookstore, no Heights, no Hamilton.) So when he heard that the place was shutting down, he joined forces with Tommy, Jeffrey Seller, and James L. Nederlander to buy it. The closure it announced in 2019 has turned out to be more of an intermission. Or at least it will be, once the virus allows its new location on West 39th Street to welcome its first customer.
One part of the bookstore won’t open as quickly as the rest. Down a flight of stairs lies a tantalizingly empty space, not so different from the subterranean black box that meant so much to In the Heights. “It was such a seminal incubator and essential safe space for us, and such a foundational part of our community,” says Tommy. “We want this to be a place for people to develop and think and dream—as we did for so many years.”
The reopening of the bookshop is an outward sign of the most remarkable way that Heights has changed Lin’s life. In the early days of the show, he identified most closely with Nina: a young striver stuck between worlds, never feeling entirely at home. He aspired to be more like Usnavi, the storyteller at the center of the action. Today, isn’t that who Lin has become?
Owning a small business is only the beginning of the resemblance. The young composer who said he never felt cool with everybody in Washington Heights has become its unelected mayor. (Once Hamilton landed him on magazine covers and TV shows, he started wearing a hoodie and hat to walk around incognito. Now people recognize the hoodie and the hat.) In the finale, Usnavi declares himself the chronicler of the neighborhood, rapping, “I illuminate the stories of the people in the street.” When the movie finally gets its premiere, the whole world will see the stories about Washington Heights that Lin and his colleagues have drawn into the light.
The last and most significant resemblance isn’t confined to the neighborhood. Lin wrote a musical while dreaming of a community where he could feel that all the parts of his life belonged. He succeeded so well that his dream came true. A new community really did emerge. It comprises the people who have been part of In the Heights, or have been affected by it, or who feel connected to one another because of it. Usually that community is far-flung and a little abstract. But one day during the filming of the movie, it came vibrantly alive. “A culmination,” Lin calls it.
In the final scene of the film, Noah Catala, the movie’s Graffiti Pete, spray-paints a wall of the bodega. Usnavi looks at the mural, looks at Vanessa, and understands that his place is here, in Washington Heights. What happens next is suggested by a single line in Quiara’s screenplay: They step out of the bodega and see “neighbors full of life around them.” That’s when everybody sings the part of the finale that even now affects Lin so much: “The hydrants are open / Cool breezes blow.”
Before filming began, Jon hit on an idea for how he wanted to shoot that scene. “I realized how emotional it could be to have people from the original cast there in the crowd to sing ‘The hydrants are open,’ ” he says. “They’re the ones who opened the hydrants in their production. They led the way for the rest of us.”
The producers sent invitations far and wide. On July 9, 2019, people from all corners of the In the Heights community assembled in the actual Heights: Lin’s wife and her family were there, as were Quiara, her sister, her mother, and her stepfather. Members of the Broadway company, people who had worked on the movie, residents of the neighborhood itself—they all came together at 175th and Audubon.
“It was like, Holy s---! We’re here! It’s so beautiful!” recalls Javier Muñoz. Some members of the Broadway cast hadn’t seen one another in years; others had accepted the invitation to bring their parents or children or partners. So there were introductions as well as reunions in the cast holding room, and when a spontaneous rendition of the finale broke out, enthusiastic novices sang along with polished veterans. “It’s family—it’s home. That’s what the day felt like,” Javi continues. “The day felt like home.”
At the center of all of these concentric circles stood the man who had dreamed of such a community, then written it into existence. You do not often find Lin-Manuel Miranda at a loss for words, but when he is asked how that day felt, he says only “It’s just all of the things at once.”
Jon was happy to see that his plan was working, but he was too busy to revel in it. The finishing touches of the scene were supplied by fire hydrants—five of them, spraying actual New York City water high into the air. Jon, Alice, and Nelson Coates tried to calibrate them for maximum visual impact, only to find that the city water supply is not so easily tamed. Every time a nearby resident flushed a toilet, the pressure dropped, spraying water everywhere. With time running short—“the sun was dropping, dropping, dropping,” Jon recalls—he gave up fine-tuning and rolled camera.
“That’s the spirit of In the Heights,” he says. “Whatever happens, you just do it. You go.”
Watching the scene now, with the pandemic dragging on, you see a poignant reminder of the shared public life that the virus has taken from us—the easy association that we’ve been denied for so long. The scene also lets us see, more clearly than before, what In the Heights adds to the tradition of New York musicals. West Side Story remains the supreme fantasy of escape, of young lovers looking for a way out. Company offers fleeting encounters amid the crowds that come and go. But In the Heights celebrates the people who choose to stay. It rejoices in the ties that endure among neighbors in the face of gentrification and other, more powerful erasers.
