Miranda hits the heights
In the Heights composer wasn’t typical kid in New York barrio
NEW YORK— It’s a perfect illustration of the cross-cultural magic that In the Heights is all about.
Lin-manuel Miranda, the composer of the Tony Award-winning musical that Dancap is bringing to the Toronto Centre for the Arts on Feb. 7, is having lunch with me at the Garden Café, at the northern end of the huge Hispanic barrio on Manhattan’s west side that serves as the location for his show.
But I’m the one eating a chorizo quesadilla and he’s chowing down on a plate of Buffalo chicken wings.
He laughs at the culinary irony and says, “This show celebrates that we’re all from some specific place, but at a certain point in our journeys, we all have to decide what we take with us and what falls away as we move forward.”
And move forward he certainly has. The 32-year-old actor/singer/ hip-hop artist/composer/lyricist was only 28 in 2008 when In the Heights opened on Broadway, winning a Tony as the Best Musical and giving Miranda the Tony nod for Best Score, as well as grabbing the Grammy that year for Best Musical Show Album.
“Man, I never thought anything like this was going to happen,” he laughs, wiping hot sauce off his fingers. “All I wanted to do was create a snapshot of the neighbourhood I grew up in before it vanished. I thought it was going to be like Rent. You know, you go down to the East Village now and you’d never recognize it, it’s all Pottery Barns and Starbucks.”
But a funny thing happened during the decade it took In the Heights to reach the stage. When Miranda started writing it, he was a college sophomore in 1999 and he thought all of his generation would move away from the ’hood as soon as they could. Only they didn’t. “A whole generation of young Hispanics grew up there, went away for a little while and then came back because they loved the neighbourhood so much.”
The “Heights” in the title stands for Washington Heights, a neighbourhood on the west side of Manhattan that begins at 155th St. and used to stretch north informally for almost 50 more blocks to Dyckman St.
Above that, it used to be known as Inwood, an Irish-catholic enclave known for having the largest numbers of taverns in a concentrated area in New York City.
But as the Irish moved away, the returning Hispanics moved in and now “the Heights” stretches about 15 more blocks to the northern tip of Manhattan island.
“What bugs me is when people call it a ghetto,” says Miranda, “because it’s anything but.” And he’s right. Especially at this northern end, it’s as clean, bright and prosperous-looking a place to live as you’d hope to find.
He was born here in 1980, the son of two Puerto Rican-born school teachers, at a time before the Hispanic Renaissance of 1999, when most New Yorkers’ impressions of Puerto Ricans was still governed by West Side Story.
“That was the greatest blessing and the greatest curse for my people, because it was so successful. It was the first time most people had ever heard of Puerto Rico, so for decades afterwards, most people’s idea of a Puerto Rican was a Greek guy with brown makeup dancing
“A whole generation of young Hispanics grew up there, went away for a little while and then came back because they loved the neighbourhood so much.” LIN-MANUEL MIRANDA ON THE WASHINGTON HEIGHTS NEIGHBOURHOOD
and holding a knife,” he says alluding to George Chakiris’s Oscar-winning performance as Bernardo in the film version.
It’s not that Miranda has anything against West Side Story. In fact, he even provided the Spanish lyrics for the recent Broadway revival and it was a huge part of his growing up.
“Hey, I acted in it in the sixth grade, I directed it in my senior year of high school and I can’t tell you how many times I saw it.” But Miranda wasn’t your typical kid from the Heights. Far from it. He went to Hunter College High School on New York’s Upper East Side, commuting every day. “Yeah, every morning I’d leave the barrio and head out to the richest zip code in the United States. Of course, I felt a kind of a drift between the two places, but I kind of felt at home in both. But I had to leave the neighbourhood to write about it.” And when he went to prestigious Wesleyan University in the fall of 1998, that’s just what happened. “Once I wasn’t living there every day, I started thinking about the people and the place. By my sophomore year, things were ready to burst out. The first song I wrote wasn’t really about the Heights, but one of the people. I remember a friend telling me, ‘My mother once said I should never let a woman play me, I should play her first.’ “I thought about that and wrote a song called ‘Never Give Your Heart Away’ and then it all started pouring out of me.” It was just at that time, 1999, that Hispanic music went crazy. Ricky Martin broke out with “Living la Vida Loca,” Jennifer Lopez had her first hit album On the 6, Marc Anthony crossed over to the English market with “I Need to Know” and suddenly the idea of a kid from the Heights making it big with his music wasn’t so strange anymore. Miranda also created a hip-hop comedy troupe called Freestyle Love Supreme and he firmly believes that the freedom he acquired there fed into the writing of In the Heights. “When you’re rapping, you don’t know what’s coming out of your mouth until you say it and that kind of freedom can be really liberating for a songwriter. Sometimes you worry a melody or a lyric to death, but if you just open your mouth and let fly, amazing things can happen.” By April of 1999, a rough version of In the Heights was presented by the student theatre at Wesleyan and a couple of fellow students approached Miranda and said they felt his show could go to Broadway. One of them was Thomas Kail who stayed with the show from then on and directed the original New York production. There were a lot of stops along the way, including tryouts in Connecticut and off-broadway, but one of the major decisions was to cast Miranda himself in the central role of Usnavi (so called because a U.S. navy ship was the first thing his parents saw after they arrived in America). “I didn’t want to do it, but they twisted my arm and I finally agreed,” he grins. “Of course I loved being in the show, but it took up so much of my time that my writing went to the back burner for a couple of years.”
But he has been making up for that with a vengeance. Besides providing the Spanish lyrics for the revival of West Side Story (“You try sitting down opposite Stephen Sondheim and tell him what you’re going to do with his words!”), he also has been part of the creative team on the Broadway-bound musical version of Bring It On: the Musical, based on the popular film about cheerleaders. “When they first asked me to join in, I said, ‘What do I know about cheerleaders?’ But I realized that all writing is walking in a character’s shoes until you understand them. Writing is just another form of acting.”
Both West Side Story and Bring it On will also be playing in Toronto during 2012, giving Miranda a Hogtown hat-trick no composer except Andrew Lloyd Webber has ever known. But he remains level-headed about it all.
“Ed Koch once said that New York City is where immigrants come to audition for America. That’s what happened to my parents, that’s what happened to me and that’s what happening to thousands of people every day. I’m just glad to have written about a small part of it.”