In the Heights, page 6
If it isn’t the loveliest girl in the place.
(She wipes his cheek.)
VANESSA: You got some schmutz on your face.
SONNY: Good morning!
SONNY, USNAVI: Good morning!
(VANESSA kisses SONNY on the cheek. She grabs SONNY to dance.)
USNAVI: Vanessa…
SONNY: Vanessa…
USNAVI, SONNY: Vanessa…
DANIELA (Screaming from the salon):
VANESSSSSAAAAAA! I’m thirsty, coño!
VANESSA: Can I get a Pepsi and some packing tape?
SONNY: Uh, my cousin over there with his tongue hanging out has been meaning to ask you…
VANESSA: Yes?
SONNY: What a lady such as yourself might be doing tonight?
VANESSA: Does your cousin dance?
SONNY: Like a drunk Chita Rivera. 3
VANESSA: Okay…After Nina’s dinner, we can hit a few clubs and check out the fireworks…
(USNAVI awkwardly hands her a bag. She exits.)
USNAVI: Oh snap! Who’s that? Don’t touch me I’m too hot! Yes!
¿Qué pasó? Here I go! So dope! ¡Y tú lo sabes!
¡No pare,
SONNY, USNAVI: Sigue, sigue!
USNAVI: Did you see me?
SONNY, USNAVI: Freaky freakit!
USNAVI: What a way to begin the weekend, Sonny, anything you want is free, man!
And my dearly beloved Dominican Republic
I haven’t forgotten
SONNY, USNAVI: You!
USNAVI: Gonna see this honey, make a little money,
And one day I’ll hop
SONNY, USNAVI: Jet Blue!
USNAVI: But until that fateful day, I’m grateful
I got a destination.
I’m runnin’ to make it home, and home’s what Vanessa’s runnin’ away
From! 4
I’m runnin’ to make it home, and home’s what Vanessa’s runnin’ away
From…
(USNAVI is at the bodega door, VANESSA at the salon door. She sings to him.)
VANESSA: The neighborhood salon is the place I am working for the moment.
As I cut their hair, ladies talk and share—
Every day, who’s doing who and why.
The neighborhood salon doesn’t pay me what I wanna be making
But I don’t mind.
As I sweep the curb, I can hear those turbo engines
Blazing a trail through the sky.
I look up and think about the years gone by.
But one day—I’m walkin’ to JFK and I’m gonna fly!
It won’t be long now!
Any day.
(They exit.)
Skip Notes
1. Truth be told, there are no elevated trains in Washington Heights proper: The 1 emerges from underground at 200th Street, which is technically Inwood. But this was my stop growing up, and while writing Heights, I lived a block from these train tracks. What I’m saying is this technically means Vanessa lives just uptown from the block in our show and commutes twenty blocks.
2. Our first day of filming the movie was downtown at the Astor Place subway stop. I used to do an after-school theater program in high school right next to that stop, and spent countless hours sitting on the floor in the humor section of the now-extinct Astor Place Barnes & Noble. Suddenly, here we were with a movie crew, shutting down foot traffic and filling Astor Square with dancers. It’s amazing how many versions of your life can unfold on the same few blocks.
We’d come to Astor Place to shoot a story line that was new for the movie version: Vanessa dreams of being a fashion designer and fights to break into the field. The dialogue in the next part of the song plays very differently in the two versions, though in both cases, she finds her way back to the bodega—and to Usnavi.
3. Quiara and I got the text from our company manager, Brig Berney: “Chita Rivera and her daughter are at tonight’s performance.” I was no longer performing in the show, so we raced over to the Richard Rodgers and hid in the balcony to watch her reaction. Her jaw dropped, and she and her daughter just started elbowing each other and grinning. So did Quiara and I.
4. There’s a great anecdote about the making of Fiddler on the Roof. Bock and Harnick were turning out song after song, but they were still without an opening number, and Jerome Robbins finally pinned them down with Joe Stein and said, “What’s this show about? In one word?”
“Tradition.”
“That’s your opening number.”
Well, for Heights, that word is “Home,” in all its permutations. Usnavi defines home as a place he barely remembers, and Vanessa defines it as something to escape.
This is one of many lessons we would learn from Fiddler. Keep reading.
All sorts of movies and plays influenced In the Heights, but Lin describes only one of them as the show’s “blueprint”: Fiddler on the Roof. The circumstances of the two musicals vary in notable ways—there are no marauding Cossacks in Washington Heights, as there were in the shtetl that Bock and Harnick put onstage. Still, both shows depict life in a community under pressure from forces both within and without. Lin, Quiara, and Tommy paid repeat visits to a Broadway revival of Fiddler while working on Heights. Afterward, more than one of their creative disagreements were settled by somebody citing what Fiddler had done.
(Broadway is a compact enough village that when Fiddler’s librettist, Joseph Stein, came to see In the Heights, Lin got to tell him how grateful they were—and how much they stole. Fortunately, Stein had liked the show. “You’re welcome,” he replied.)
Thanks to Jeffrey and Kevin’s involvement in Heights, the show had a useful point of reference much nearer at hand. Avenue Q, another McCollum/Seller production, was like a “big sibling” to Heights, according to Lin. It featured irreverent puppets, a lively score, and one of the funniest scripts in years. On their way to winning a Tony Award for Best Musical (Jeffrey and Kevin’s second, after the one for Rent), that show’s creators had spent a vital couple of weeks in Waterford, Connecticut, at the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center. Since 1964, the O’Neill has given composers and playwrights a chance to develop projects away from the distractions of summer in the city.
With the example of Avenue Q before him, Lin had applied to the O’Neill in 2003. He’d been rejected. After Quiara joined him, they tried again and got in—one of three musicals accepted out of three hundred applicants that year. Twelve actors and the show’s creative team would spend two weeks there in July 2005 trying to solve the problems that remained to be solved.
By then, Jeffrey had seen a presentation of Heights and decided “I’m in” before the opening number even ended. He always looks for shows that sound new: Rent before this, Hamilton after. Lin’s juxtaposition of rap and traditional Broadway songs more than qualified. “When the ensemble came in behind Lin singing ‘In the Heights,’ I just got chills all over my body,” he says.
With Jeffrey, Kevin, and Jill all backing the project, the creative team had reason to hope that the O’Neill would be the last step before a full-fledged Broadway-bound production. It was an ambitious plan, but it wasn’t crazy. “Everything had been crescendo up till then,” recalls Bill Sherman.
Lin hoped so, and not just for the obvious reasons. “I had my employment worked out exactly through summer, and that was it,” he says. No production, no job.
fter three years in a windowless underground box, the O’Neill offered a startling change of scene: the eleven grassy acres, the huge blue sky, the hill rolling down to the Long Island Sound. It was like summer camp for grown-ups, or a college where everybody majors in putting on shows with your friends.
“We were working our asses off,” recalls Javier Muñoz, who played Usnavi so Lin could focus on writing. “But it was an absolute joy.”
By day, they would rehearse in a converted barn and eat meals together in the cafeteria. By night, they would walk down to the water and watch the shooting stars. After the freestyle rapping on the beach came the salsa dancing in the barn. Lin would plug in his iPod and play DJ. The other two hundred people on the campus were welcome to join those parties, and many of them did. According to Preston Whiteway, who worked at the O’Neill that summer and later became its CEO, nobody had done anything like those parties before, but every summer since, the staff has tried to recapture their joy and their camaraderie—“that sense of an O’Neill family, that we’re all in this together.”
Tommy Kail and Lin-Manuel Miranda at the O’Neill
The actors could relish the experience in part because they were there to serve the writers. Which was lovely for them—but it put more pressure on those writers.
Quiara had been writing the libretto for nearly a year at that point, a time she recalls as “a lot of play, a lot of exploration, a lot of discovery.” She and Lin were integrating their styles, figuring out which parts of the story should be spoken and which ought to be sung. From her first listen to the demo CD, she had sensed that the density of Lin’s lyrics meant that her book scenes needed to be short. But, paradoxically, fewer lines meant a bigger challenge—each scene still needed to feel satisfying. “That was something I struggled with, with so little real estate,” she recalls.
She recognized that the O’Neill offered them an opportunity that would not be coming again: “It was definitely like, ‘This is a turning point, but we don’t know to what.’ ” So she used every second of it. She never slept more than four hours at a stretch. She would wake in the middle of the night to write when nobody was around—well, almost nobody. One night, a well-dressed woman walked through the room and smiled hello; Quiara smiled back. Then she remembered that every door in the room was locked. A sleep-deprived hallucination, she thought—until somebody told her about the nice lady ghost known to haunt the grounds.
Lin was equally stressed, though he didn’t get a ghost story out of it. He wrote song after song—“Blackout,” “Alabanza,” multiple songs for Nina—trying everything he could to get the balance of Lincoln’s and Nina’s stories right. By that point in the show’s development, Lincoln had shed his secret love for Benny. Now his major conflict was with his father, who wanted him to take over the family car service despite his dreams of becoming a songwriter. A lifetime of finishing projects late at night had taught Lin that he could wake himself up by taking a shower. It didn’t work at the O’Neill. He spent two weeks “just tired and wet.”
Lin’s home-movie footage captures another sign of the pressure they were feeling: the rare sight of Tommy Kail looking tense. “It was really the first time that Jill and Jeffrey and Kevin were focused on us, so that was a new experience for me,” he recalls. “It just felt like the stakes and the temperature both got raised.”
It helped that they had another set of shoulders to carry the weight. A few months earlier, Alex Lacamoire had joined Bill as co-orchestrator and music director. Lin, inveterate fan of cartoons, was reminded of another five-person team of heroes who come together to do great things. “We’re Voltron!” he declared.
Before the cast and creative team presented the revised show, they gathered for a big class photo. Look closely at the spot between Lin and Tommy in the photo on page 44: It’s Voltron.
he crowd streamed into the barn; the actors stepped up to music stands; the new and improved show began.
With Lac (as Alex is known to friends and colleagues) at the piano, the music had never sounded better. With Robin De Jesús playing Sonny, the dialogue got more laughs. With Huey Dunbar lending Lincoln what Lin calls his “gift-from-God voice,” “Alabanza” brought the house down. “It turned that space into a cathedral,” recalls Chris Jackson.
The presentations generated such strong word of mouth that the O’Neill added an extra performance—a nearly unprecedented move. The cast performed five times and got five standing ovations, which was also unusual.
Everybody seemed to love it—except the people who needed to love it most.
A few hours after the final presentation, Voltron (Lin, Quiara, Tommy, Bill, and Lac) and the producers (Jill, Kevin, and Jeffrey) assembled for what several of them, many years later, would independently describe as “the come-to-Jesus meeting.”
They sat at a picnic table in the sun.
The participants’ memories of what happened next don’t line up in every particular, but the thrust of the meeting is clear. Quiara distills the producers’ message this way: “You’ve done your work and it doesn’t work.”
A standing ovation in Waterford was one thing, but Broadway—the only goal worth chasing at that point—was another. Lin, who had gone into the meeting “hoping against hope” for a production, quickly realized he wasn’t going to get one.
Jill might or might not have said out loud what she recalls feeling that day: They had taken “one step forward, two steps back.”
Kevin said that they were still trying to cram too many plots and characters into the show. It wasn’t clear which stories were important to them. Until they figured it out, they weren’t ready to move ahead.
Somebody—most likely Jeffrey—made a comment that, under the circumstances, had more force than a mere suggestion: Lincoln needs to go.
Bill, already stung by what he describes as “the slap of truth in the face,” had trouble understanding what he’d just heard. “I remember thinking, We’ve had Lincoln since college—what are you talking about? In my head, I’m like, Can you kill off one of the main characters?”
All the while, Tommy was processing his feeling of surprise. He’d known there was more work to do, but he hadn’t expected the producers’ dissatisfaction to be so cut-and-dried. Here was a delicate situation. He had four collaborators in confusion and distress and three producers looking for a response. Luckily for all seven of them, Tommy had an intuitive sense, even at that early age, for keeping people steady—a kind of gyroscope for whatever was going on around him.
In distilled form, the response he offered was: “I got it.”
He and the team understood the reaction, they were grateful for it, and there was no question that they would go back to work and make the kind of progress that the producers wanted to see.
It was the perfect response, even though—or, maybe, especially because—none of them knew how they were going to do it.
1
LINCOLN: Run away from home
Ignore your mother’s screams and leave today.
You should have done this years ago.
Why are you still at home
Shoving down all the things you need to say?
Suffering for no reason. A lonely son.
I’ve
Wasted my life
Writing at night
Driving by day
But now it’s clear
Year after year
Long as I’m here
It’s safe to say
I’ll never be
The son that you wanted
Or even the son you accepted
So that’s gonna be how we left it.
You screaming at me and me…walking out.
So I’m out.
Out of ways to make you happy.
I’m running out. Yes, I’m out.
So I know it’s time to go.
And I love you but you’ll never see me the way I see myself
When I’m alone
With a notebook and a microphone. 2
When I write a song
I am somewhere far beyond this place.
Everything feels electric, connected…3
When I write a song
I imagine you 4
Nodding your head in time
List’ning the way you listen to your boleros.
I wanted to cry
When you stood by me
And you handed me your keys:
“Lincoln, take these.”
I couldn’t breathe.
I never cease to let you down.
I’ll never live
Up to your expectations.
So this is the situation:
You’re getting upset and I’m getting out.
I am out.
Out of patience with this family.
I’m running out. Yes, I’m out.
And it’s time, it’s way past time!
After twenty-four years of only hearing you shout
It’s crystal clear you don’t know what I’m about.
So Mami, Nina, sorry, see ya, please no crying allowed.
I’ll be back when I’ve made you proud!
And I’m out! 5
Skip Notes
1. “I’m Out” is an excellent example of a perfectly cromulent song that would be a standout in any musical but didn’t make the cut for In the Heights. It’s dramatically effective; its rhythms are rooted in the same Latin world as the rest of the show, particularly the ending. So why did we drop it? Mainly because it’s sung by Lincoln Rosario, Nina’s brother, who didn’t survive the O’Neill workshop in 2005. That said, I think the character hung around as long as he did because he had excellent songs like this one.
When I look back at this, what jumps out at me is how adolescent the lyrics feel. I don’t mean that in a pejorative way: It’s anguished, it’s Lincoln attempting to bridge a father-son divide and failing, it’s passionate. It also feels particular to my adolescence: You will not find a bigger fan of my work these days than my father, but during my teen years, he was really pushing me toward law and struggling with my mediocre grades in any classes besides English and music, and that feeling of “maybe we will just never understand each other” feels very particular to my teen years. (You’ll get his side of the story in the next chapter.)
