In the Heights, page 4
NINA: They’re not worried about me. 4
CARLA, WOMEN, DANIELA, PIRAGUA GUY, MEN: Mira, allí está nuestra estrella.
NINA:
They are all counting
on me to
Succeed,
I am the one who
made it out!
The one who always
made the
Grade
But maybe I should
have just
Stayed home…
ENSEMBLE:
Ella sí da la talla…
Ah! Ah, aah
Mira Nina
NINA: When I was a child I stayed wide awake, climbed to the highest place
On every fire escape, restless to climb. 5
ENSEMBLE: Respira…
NINA:
I got every scholarship,
Saved every dollar,
The first to go to
college,
How do I tell them why
I’m coming back home,
With my eyes on
the horizon
ENSEMBLE:
Respira…
Ahh
NINA: Just me and the GWB asking, “Gee, Nina, what’ll you be?” 6 7
Straighten the spine.
Smile for the neighbors.
Everything’s fine.
Everything’s cool.
The standard reply:
“Lots of tests, lots of papers.”
Smile, wave goodbye,
And pray to the sky, oh God…
And what will my parents say? 8
ENSEMBLE: Nina…
NINA: Can I go in there and say,
ENSEMBLE: Nina…
NINA: “I know that I’m letting you down…”
(ABUELA CLAUDIA appears at the stoop.)
ABUELA CLAUDIA: Nina…
NINA: Just breathe…
(She exits into ABUELA CLAUDIA’s apartment.)
Skip Notes
1. One of the most fun things to do while writing this score was the “standards”—songs that don’t exist but needed to feel like they’ve existed forever. I always imagined the “sigue andando” hook as an old bolero that Nina’s heard a hundred times and is riffing on to express this new moment. Another one is the song “Siempre,” an imagined bolero to which I only ever wrote one verse and chorus, which you can hear in the dinner scene and the finale. I can’t tell you how many people have come up to me swearing up and down, “My grandparents used to listen to ‘Siempre’!” No, they didn’t. I made it up! But it means I did my job.
2. My parents show up on screen at this point in the movie. Howls of inappropriate laughter from our family at this moment every time.
3. I was so moved by the way Jon Chu approached this song in the movie. Nina sees younger versions of herself on these blocks. As someone who has logged forty years in the same neighborhood, I find it incredibly powerful and true.
4. Maybe some of the most sophisticated rhyming occurs in this bridge as Nina is simultaneously translating what her neighbors are singing and matching their vowels—estrella/they are, talla/I am. This section was created between Off-Broadway and Broadway and makes all the difference in the world, amping up the pressure from the neighborhood and adding a multilingual twist.
5. I remember writing this line on a beach, singing the words to myself over and over until the internal assonance had that cascading rhythm just right.
6. My first memory of the George Washington Bridge was walking with my Abuela Mundi to my piano lessons. We’d emerge from the train station, and it somehow loomed over the street despite us being at the highest point in Manhattan. I now live across the street from where I took those lessons, and the perspective of the bridge that loomed over them—and over our set in Anna Louizos’s beautiful design—is outside our window. My kids call it their bridge. It is one of the few constants in an inconstant life.
7. My wife, Vanessa Nadal: “When I saw the set for the first time, I gasped! I was floored. It’s my view! My uptown, off the map view!”
8. Translating the stage musical to the screen led us to make changes big and small. As you’ll read later in the book, Nina’s family is different in the movie, so I had to rewrite this lyric. And I’m grateful for the chance, because it gave me another way to define Nina. So in the movie, she sings:
And how do I dare to say?
Chris Jackson had plans to see a friend. It was an afternoon in fall 2002.
When he arrived at the little deli in Midtown, that friend, Jené Hernandez, was saying goodbye to somebody Chris didn’t know. White dude, curly hair.
Chris didn’t feel too chatty that day, so he brushed the guy off: a chin nod, “ ’Sup.” He didn’t think much about it.
Chris wanted to see Jené to learn more about a new project she’d described. Coming off four years in The Lion King on Broadway, Chris was skeptical of auditioning for people he’d never heard of, especially in the basement of a bookstore. But he was also unemployed. A show that was supposed to keep him working until the end of the year had just closed without warning.
He’d been dealing with injuries. He was disillusioned with acting. He felt isolated from the whole profession. “Like somebody who had been through a bad relationship,” he recalls.
A day or two later, he walked his skeptical feet down the stairs of the Drama Book Shop, a place he never even knew existed. He turned right, opened the door, and introduced himself to the three people waiting for him: Lin, Bill, and the curly-haired dude, who was Tommy Kail.
Asked many years later how he felt in that moment, he says, “Ohhhhh!”—a one-syllable mix of shock, shame, and determination to laugh in spite of it all.
(Tommy, for his part, doesn’t recall feeling that Chris had been unfriendly when they were introduced. “I’d met so few actors at that point, I didn’t know any better,” he says.)
It was time to audition. Lin played the piano. Chris sang the song. Tommy and Bill seemed happy.
Chris thanked everybody and got ready to leave, because that’s what you do after an audition. You leave.
Except somehow he didn’t feel like leaving. And somehow neither did they.
“We kicked it,” says Chris. The four of them spent an hour shooting the shit, making one another laugh, generally having fun. “And I hadn’t had fun in the theater in many years.”
By the time Tommy got around to saying something along the lines of, “All right, we’re going to move forward with you,” the audition felt like an afterthought. Chris had found the closest collaborators he’d ever have—his best friends for two decades and counting.
Doreen Montalvo
n 2002 and 2003, more and more actors had an experience like Chris’s: the uncertain walk down the stairs (or up to the mezzanine), the audition, the casual invitation to stick around. Some heard about the peculiar project from their agents; others heard about it from friends. It’s how people like Janet Dacal, Henry Gainza, and Doreen Montalvo first got connected with the show.
Actor by actor, rehearsal by rehearsal, something started to grow in that space. The featureless, windowless black box in the basement started to develop a character. It had a vibe.
Ask the actors about it now—about what they remember all these years later—and they’ll say first that they just enjoyed it. “I couldn’t wait to be in a room with those guys,” says Janet. “We were all so young. We were just making it up as we went. But it was a very safe place to create and try things and make mistakes and figure them out.”
The second thing they’ll say is how different it felt to be performing a story about Latino characters, written by a Latino writer. “We’d sit around a table as new songs were brought in, and every time it would be like, ‘Oh my God—this is about us. I’ve never experienced this before,’ ” says Doreen.
For all the joy that Heights had begun to bring to young artists, this is still a story about show business. That means heartbreak all around. Every time Tommy held auditions, more actors left disappointed than got cast. Nor was getting an offer a guarantee of a long stay. Sometimes an actor got a better job and decided to leave. Other actors seemed like the right fit for a role but turned out not to be and weren’t invited back. A few actors gave beautiful performances in roles that one day ceased to exist. It wasn’t just actors, either. People came and went from all corners of the production in this show’s very long life.
BENNY IN THE ORIGINAL OFF-BROADWAY AND BROADWAY CASTS
I don’t remember exactly when “Benny’s Dispatch” came along—I just remember I always loved singing it. Lin writes songs that he knows I’m going to love. He hears my voice in his head clearer than I hear it in my own. I couldn’t be prouder of that song. It was the first song ever written for me on a Broadway stage.
I kept my dispatch mic. Yeah, I walked out with that one. It reminds me of how much fun we had and how much it meant to me that Lin and Tommy trusted me with “Benny’s Dispatch.” By the time I was singing it on Broadway, a maturation process had culminated for me. I just felt like, “These guys depend on me. They’re my friends. They’re my brothers. I’m not going to let them down.”
Henry Gainza, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Chris Jackson in a photo taken by Anthony Veneziale
nd then there’s Veronica Vazquez.
In early 2003, she auditioned to play Nina. It went so well that she was invited to return for a “chemistry read” to see how she sounded singing a duet with Benny—that is, with Chris Jackson.
Veronica loved Chris’s voice on the demo recording she’d been sent. She had a hunch that their shared background in singing R&B would make for great vocal chemistry. And then she set eyes on him. “Goo-goo eyes,” she calls them.
Chris was astonished by her—how beautiful she was, how she carried herself. And then he heard her sing. “Her voice made my heart beat fast,” he says.
They sang “Did I Wake You?,” an early ballad for Benny and Nina.
She got the part.
Veronica and Chris played it cool, but over the next few months, their castmates could see the mutual attraction. In May 2003, Lin and Tommy wanted to try out material for an audience at Repertorio Español. But Veronica was concerned. She pointed out to Tommy that the script called for Nina and Benny to kiss, but they had never rehearsed it. This was going to be awkward.
“That’s exactly what I want,” Tommy replied.
The presentation started. The moment for the kiss arrived. Chris—“being super a gentleman,” Veronica says—was hanging back. So she grabbed his hand, pulled him close, and they both leaned in.
Chris Jackson and Veronica Vazquez
Their castmates, arrayed in chairs behind them, gasped. Nothing about it was awkward.
The hand-grab is part of the show’s lore now. It’s family lore, too, for Chris and Veronica Jackson, for their son, CJ, for their daughter, Jadelyn.
BENNY: Check one two three. Check one two three.
This is Benny on the dispatch. Yo. 1
Atención, yo, attention,
It’s Benny, and I’d like to mention
I’m on the microphone this mornin’.
Honk ya horn if you want it.
(Car horns blast. NINA exits ABUELA CLAUDIA’s apartment, enters the dispatch.)
BENNY: Okay, we got traffic on the West Side
Get off at Seventy-ninth, and take the left side
Of Riverside Drive, and ya might slide.
West End’s ya best friend if you catch the lights.
And don’t take the Deegan, 2
Manny Ramirez is in town for the weekend. 3
Sorry, Dominicans, take Route Eighty-seven, you ain’t getting back in
Again…
Hold up a minute…
(He puts down the radio.)
NINA: Benny, hey— 4
BENNY: Nina, you’re home today!
NINA: Any sign—
BENNY: Of your folks? They’re on their way!
NINA: Anyway—
BENNY: It’s good to see your face—
NINA: Anytime—
BENNY: Hold up a minute, wait!
You used to run this dispatch, right?
NINA: Once or twice—
BENNY: Well, check the technique! Yo!
(Into the dispatch)
There’s a traffic accident I have to mention
At the intersection of Tenth Avenue and the Jacob Javits Convention Center.
And check it, don’t get stuck in the rubber-neckin’
On a Hundred Ninety-second,
There’s a double-decker bus wreck 5
And listen up, we got a special guest!
BENNY:
Live and direct from
a year out west!
NINA:
Benny…
BENNY:
Welcome her back,
She looks mad stressed!
Nina Rosario, the
barrio’s best!
Honk your horns…
NINA:
Benny…
(We hear a series of syncopated horn blasts, as BENNY continues to sing.)
She’s smiling…Say hello!
(NINA steps to the microphone.)
NINA: Hello…
(We hear the cacophony of the most beautiful horn chart ever written.) 6
Good morning!
(NINA catches herself having fun, abruptly stops.)
I better find my folks.
Thanks for the welcome wagon.
BENNY: Anytime. Anytime, Nina.
(NINA heads for the door. BENNY stops her.)
BENNY: Wait here with me. 7
It’s getting hot outside, turn up the AC.
Stay here with me.
(She sits beside him. BIG BUTTON!) 8
Skip Notes
1. The beat for this song was originally written for an early tune called “The Long Way Around,” wherein Benny picked Nina up from the airport and took her home via a scenic route. Two people sitting in a car is never fun onstage, so I rewrote it as Benny’s first time on the dispatch mic, which felt like a fun way to show his joy in his work, his lyrical cleverness, and his New York knowledge.
2. My bus ride to school took me from Dyckman Street all the way to the Upper East Side, and traffic determined whether to take the West Side (and choose highway traffic or local along Riverside Drive) or cross to the East Side, where one can clearly see the Deegan traffic and Yankee Stadium run parallel to the FDR across the Harlem River. So I know these directions cold.
3. This was always in honor of Washington Heights native Manny Ramirez. For the movie, I updated it to a more recent Dominican hero, Big Pápi Ortiz. Both Dominican phenoms played for non–New York ball clubs, creating friendly arguments for the neighborhood forever.
4. I just really like Nina’s
Benny, hey—
Any sign—
Anyway—
Anytime—
She’s being interrupted by Benny but rhyming in her own world, with herself.
5. There are no double-decker buses this far uptown—we’re too mountainous. So I assumed the existence of one would instantly cause a calamity.
6. I wrote this stage direction as a gauntlet to throw down to Bill Sherman and music director Alex Lacamoire. They came back with a very Beatlesque “Sgt. Pepper”–sounding thing. But then our choreographer, Andy Blankenbuehler, preferred the synth horns I put on the demo. The final product is somewhere in between.
7. The bass line for this last section will grow to full flower in Benny and Nina’s final song, “When the Sun Goes Down.” Here’s the first hint of it.
8. “Button” is the musical theater term for the bump at the end of a song. It lets the audience know when it’s time to applaud.
Other New York anthems are more triumphal—and many are better known—but none rings truer than “Another Hundred People.” It is one of Broadway’s enduring contributions to city anthropology.
In this song from Stephen Sondheim’s Company, a character sings about “a city of strangers.” She doesn’t mean it as a complaint. With wry humor, she describes a place so packed with people that life consists of chance encounters and missed connections. Somebody is always coming and somebody is always going and every now and then you spot a friend.
When young artists arrive in such a place and say they’re looking for their big break, they really mean they’re hoping to find the right person at the right moment amid the city’s whirl. Or that the right person will find them. Because a couple such breaks can make all the difference in the fortunes of a project, a career, even a life—as long as you play them right.
For example.
In the spring of 2003, the actor Andy Gale ran into a friend on Forty-second Street. The friend, Nevin Steinberg, calls it “one of those happy New York bump-intos.” It wasn’t a shock that they would (as Sondheim’s song puts it) “find each other in the crowded streets.” They had worked together years earlier, Nevin doing sound for a show that Andy was acting in.
