In the Heights, page 9
She was struck by the distinctive beauty of the place. While many New York neighborhoods had been remade in glass and steel, the residents of Washington Heights had preserved a remarkably high percentage of its prewar buildings. She marveled at the pediments and keystones, the cornices and quoining—block after block of flourishes in stone and brick. “That’s what gave those buildings character,” she says.
Arrayed onstage at 37 Arts, her set included familiar touches from Washington Heights, but reimagined in all sorts of inventive ways to suit the stylized world of musical theater. By exaggerating the perspective of the buildings, she made the neighborhood feel taller and denser; by using scrim for the upper parts of the walls, she let the audience glimpse people moving inside. The translucent backdrop of the bridge and the horizon completed the effect—at once real and ethereal.
She was also mindful of the people who lived in these buildings—not just today, but in generations past. She created a sign for Rosario’s Car and Limousine. But behind that sign, the audience can glimpse an older one, for O’Hanrahan’s Car and Limousine. It was her way of commemorating the Irish phase of the neighborhood’s life. Above those signs, painted on the brick itself, is a still older sign, for a bakery, to honor the German Jewish immigrants who were the first to call many of these buildings home.
To realize her vision for the neighborhood, Anna had to make clever use of the playing space at 37 Arts. Unlike most comparably sized theaters, this one had only a single way for the actors to get on and off the stage: a staircase leading down from the playing area at stage left. She found a way to incorporate it into the onstage neighborhood, one so true to life it was practically a sight gag: She re-created the entrance to the 181st Street A train stop.
aul Tazewell didn’t need a tour of Washington Heights: He lived there. The characters in the show reminded him of characters in his community—that was his first reaction to the material. His second was: I know exactly where to shop for this.
Because Heights is a contemporary show, and because his budget wasn’t vast, Paul gathered most of the costumes from stores all around town. This being a musical, the clothes had to fulfill very specific functions. They needed to be vibrant, durable, and in colors that would set an emotional tone for each scene. This made them difficult to find. But he let the characters guide his steps. He shopped for the salon ladies’ costumes in stores that Daniela and Carla might really have access to.
A look inside the creative process of ANNA LOUIZOS, Broadway scenic designer
Paul drew inspiration from his neighbors coming and going on 187th Street, but he also learned from the Heights cast. More than any other show Paul had worked on, with the possible exception of Bring in ’Da Noise, Bring in ’Da Funk, the Heights actors lived in the same stylistic world as their characters. He watched what the actors wore to rehearsals, especially the dancers. “They live with their bodies—they know what works best,” he says. Rickey Tripp didn’t move the same way as Michael Balderrama; Nina Lafarga didn’t have the same style as Asmeret Ghebremichael or Rosie Lani Fiedelman. Paul didn’t impose the aesthetic of Washington Heights on the company; he refracted it through each artist who called this version of the neighborhood home.
This approach explains the most distinctive costume element in the show: Usnavi’s Kangol hat. Paul laughs when asked about it. “Lin used to wear that hat to rehearsal all the time.”
ong before the show moved into 37 Arts, Lin could hear its variety and energy in his head: “I want it to sound like walking down Broadway from 185th Street to 175th,” he had told Bill.
Nevin Steinberg had loved that musical kaleidoscope from the first time he’d heard it in the bookstore basement. Now that the show was finally ready for a sound designer, he had to make sure the audience would hear all the nuance in the Latin, pop, hip-hop, and traditional Broadway songs.
This was, he discovered, “an impossible task.”
In many respects, Heights was a traditional musical, a form that usually puts lyrics front and center in the sound mix. But Lin’s score tapped into styles that didn’t lend themselves to exquisite clarity in every syllable. Nevin didn’t come up with some revolutionary solution, he says now: “I just became slightly maniacal about it.” Once technical rehearsals started—that is, once the actors started wearing Paul’s costumes on Anna’s set, in the hectic final days before the first preview—he tuned and re-tuned the sound system, imagining the experience of each of the four hundred audience members.
Paul Tazewell
He also became intensely protective of the show. “I felt like the guardian of something,” he says. As one of the most experienced people in the room, and the one with the longest relationship with the producers, Nevin took it on himself to work with Jason Bassett, the production stage manager, and Casey Hushion, the assistant director, to do everything possible to help the show succeed. Which really meant helping its young director succeed.
Tommy was only a few years into his career. He had never run tech for a show at this scale. “You look for the adult in the room, and you realize it’s you,” he says.
Today, after more than a decade of experience with shows large and small, Tommy doesn’t approach tech all that differently than he did back then. “The big difference is that I’m able to quiet any of the noise around my instincts sooner,” he says. “I trust them more deeply now—and fully, and quickly.”
Whatever audiences might think of the show, no one could say that Tommy hadn’t done his homework. To prepare to direct his first big musical, he had availed himself of the Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center, which maintains a video archive of significant Broadway productions dating back decades.
“I watched every musical that had won the Tony for the last twenty-five years,” Tommy says.
He also watched the shows that didn’t win Best Musical but could have, like Dreamgirls.
He also watched every show that had won Best Play.
“I actually won an award from the library because I watched so many,” he says, smiling at his youthful hyper-diligence. “I won an award.”
voking the actual sights and sounds of Washington Heights got Tommy part of the way toward the realism he wanted. But he also imagined a thrum of activity all around the stage, “like life was happening everywhere.” That’s what New York’s streets are like. That’s why we enjoy them.
Tommy’s partner in setting the show whirling was Andy Blankenbuehler. At the time, he had a string of Broadway credits as a dancer but hadn’t yet made a name for himself as a choreographer. Andy recalls an early meeting—a job interview, essentially—with Lin, Tommy, and Lac. In retrospect, this was a historic moment: the first-ever meeting of the “Cabinet,” the quartet of collaborators who would one day make Hamilton. It did not feel historic at the time.
“All they did was talk about The West Wing,” Andy recalls. He sat there drinking his Starbucks and thinking, I’ve never seen The West Wing. This is not going to go well for me.
It didn’t. They picked somebody else. But when that didn’t work out, they called him.
Andy Blankenbuehler and Lin-Manuel Miranda
You might recall from stories about Hamilton that Andy was a driven, relentless force of creation, bursting with ideas, exacting in the expectations he placed on the cast. That Andy is the mellow, easy-to-please version of the Andy who choreographed Heights.
“It was like working with a mad scientist,” says Stephanie Klemons, who collaborated with him on both shows. “He was legit twenty times more intense.”
Consider the circumstances: He had to prove himself as a choreographer, he had to catch up with Voltron (the shorthand, the in-jokes), he had to recover from knee surgery (bad for anyone, worse for dancers), he had to get by without much money, and on top of everything else, he had to manage his concern for his wife during a very difficult pregnancy (a month of bed rest at the hospital, his nightly visit after tech).
So yes, Andy was in a focused frame of mind. But some of his intensity had nothing to do with his circumstances and everything to do with how he thinks about his craft: that it really is “life or death.”
“It’s not just a show. I mean, it’s a show. But if we’re telling a good story, it really has to change people’s lives. The audience should not have a hard time suspending their disbelief. We have to figure out how to transport them. When I drive myself so hard, it’s because I know when we’re only at an eighty-five or a ninety-two.”
He also knew what he didn’t know. He asked Luis Salgado to assist him on choreographing the Latin dances in the show. (Luis began his dancing life in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico—the Miranda hometown. He used to buy his pencils from Lin’s aunt.) A storytelling vocabulary began to emerge. Reinterpreted forms of hip-hop dance would pervade the show, but the Latin dances would be reserved for situations where characters might really dance salsa or bomba or plena.
For Andy, much like the characters in the show, fitting into a new space didn’t always come easily. He didn’t immediately see how he could situate his expansive dances within the tight quarters of Anna’s set.
“It taught me a huge, great lesson. You have to put parameters in your way to make honest choices,” he says now.
“There is no open football field in Manhattan. There are subway entrances and street corners and rushing taxis. Things like the subway pole to go down the steps—that’s real life. A doorway to go into a bodega is real life. And so that made me stop choreographing dance steps and made me start choreographing honest ideas for those characters.”
It’s another way of recognizing an underappreciated fact of life: We exert ourselves and shape the spaces around us, but all the while they are shaping us right back. Tommy and the team had created something sufficiently like a city to make people behave the way they do in a city: the dodging and weaving, the steady improvisation. Andy didn’t have the reference in mind, but the adjustment he described sounds like a paraphrase of one of the great celebrations ever offered of city living.
To the legendary urbanist Jane Jacobs, the intricacy of a crowded city sidewalk was its own art form, a special kind of dance: not “a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, [but] an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole.”
We came to work and to live and we got a lot in common…
ith the designers, the actors, and Voltron—a sextet now that Andy had joined them—all doing their parts, the stage started to look like a functional distillation of an actual corner in the Heights. But in one case, the realism turned out to be a little too real.
In Act One, the news that somebody has bought a winning lottery ticket brings almost all the characters onstage to fantasize about that unimaginable windfall: $96,000. At 37 Arts, the song faded at the end, and the characters turned and walked offstage. Which is usually what happens when people wrap up a conversation.
To the producers, the song cried out for a big finish, a “button” that would thrill the audience. The creative team didn’t disagree. “It undersold itself,” Quiara says. “It underplayed its hand.” They just couldn’t figure out how to fix it, not in the days left until the first paying customers arrived, not with so many other things they were still learning how to do.
For his opening night gift, Tommy would give Lin a bag of buttons. “Because it felt like none of our numbers ended,” he says.
USNAVI: Ninety-six thousand…1
SONNY, BENNY: Damn…2
USNAVI: Ninety-six thousand…
(Holding a Slurpee, GRAFFITI PETE pokes his head in.)
SONNY: Dollars? Holler.
USNAVI: Ninety-six thousand…
GRAFFITI PETE: Yo, somebody won!
USNAVI: Ninety-six thousand…
BENNY: Yo.
If I won the Lotto tomorrow
Well I know I wouldn’t bother goin’ on no
Spendin’ spree.
I’d pick a business school and pay the entrance fee!
Then maybe if you’re lucky, you’ll stay friends with me!
I’ll be a businessman, richer than Nina’s daddy!
Tiger Woods 3
And I on the links and he’s my caddie!
My money’s makin’ money, I’m goin’ from po’ to mo’ dough!
Keep the bling, I want the brass ring like Frodo!
USNAVI: Oh no, there goes Mr. Braggadocio.
Next thing you know, he’s lying like Pinocchio— 4
BENNY: Well, if you’re scared of the bull, stay out the rodeo!
GRAFFITI PETE: Yo, I got more hos than a phone book in Tokyo! 5
USNAVI: Ooh, you better stop rappin’, you’re not ready.
It’s gonna get hot and heavy, and you’re already sweaty—
GRAFFITI PETE: Y-y-yo-yo
USNAVI: I’m sorry, is that an answer?
Shut up, go home, and pull ya damn pants up!
As for you, Mr. Frodo of the Shire—
Ninety-six g’s ain’t enough to retire.
BENNY: I’ll have enough to knock your ass off its axis!
USNAVI: You’ll have a knapsack full of jack after taxes! 6
(SONNY runs to ABUELA CLAUDIA.)
SONNY: Ninety-six thousand!
ABUELA CLAUDIA (Crosses herself): ¡Ay, alabanza!
(ABUELA CLAUDIA disappears into her apartment. SONNY runs to the salon.)
SONNY: Ninety-six thousand!
DANIELA: ¡No me diga!
SONNY: Ninety-six thousand!
VANESSA: I never win shit!
SONNY: Ninety-six thousand!
(CARLA and DANIELA come out to the street.)
BENNY: For real, though, imagine how it would feel goin’ real slow,
Down the highway of life with no regrets
And no breakin’ your neck for respect or a paycheck.
For real, though, 7
I’ll take a break from the wheel and we’ll
Throw
The biggest block party, everybody here.
It’s a weekend when we can breathe, take it easy…
WOMEN, MAN: Yo! Ma, it’s me, check my tickets!
CARLA: Check one two three 8
What would you do with ninety-six g’s—
DANIELA: Who, me?
CARLA: I mean if it’s just between you and me—
DANIELA: ¡Esa pregunta es tricky!
CARLA: I know—
DANIELA: With ninety-six g’s
I’d start my life with a brand-new lease,
Atlantic City with a Malibu Breeze—
CARLA: And a brand-new weave—
DANIELA: Or maybe just bleach.
VANESSA: Y’all are freaks.
USNAVI: Yo, I’m just saying it’s silly when we get into these crazy hypotheticals.
You really want some bread, then go ahead, create a set of goals
And cross them off the list as you pursue ’em,
And with those ninety-six I know precisely what I’m doin’. 9
VANESSA: What you doin’?
USNAVI: What’m I doin’? What’m I doin’?
It takes most of that cash just to save my ass from financial ruin.
Sonny can keep the coffee brewin’, and I’ll spend a few on you
Cuz the only room with a view’s a room with you in it.
And I could give Abuela Claudia the rest of it.
Just fly me down to Puerta Plata, I’ll make the best of it.
You really love this business?
SONNY: No.
USNAVI: Tough, Merry Christmas.
You’re now the youngest tycoon in Washington Hiznits.
SONNY: Yo!
With ninety-six thousand, I’d finally fix housin’,
Give the barrio computers and wireless web browsin’.
Your kids are livin’ without a good edumacation,
Change the station, teach ’em about gentrification.
The rent is escalatin’ 10
GRAFFITI PETE: What?
SONNY: The rich are penetratin’
GRAFFITI PETE: What?
SONNY: We pay our corporations when we should be demonstratin’
GRAFFITI PETE: What?
SONNY: What about immigration?
GRAFFITI PETE: What?
SONNY: Politicians be hatin’
GRAFFITI PETE: What?
SONNY: Racism in this nation’s gone from latent to blatant!
GRAFFITI PETE, MEN: Oooooh!
SONNY: I’ll cash my ticket and picket, invest in protest,
Never lose my focus till the city takes notice.
And you know this, man! 11
I’ll never sleep
Because the ghetto has a million promises for me to keep!
(A stunned silence. VANESSA kisses SONNY on the cheek.)
VANESSA: You are so cute!
SONNY: I was just thinking off the top of my head.
USNAVI: Ninety-six K. Go.
VANESSA: If I win the lottery, you’ll never see me again.
USNAVI: Damn, we’re only jokin’, stay broke then.
VANESSA: I’ll be downtown,
Get a nice studio, get out of the barrio.
VANESSA:
If I win the lottery,
You’ll wonder where
I’ve been.
