TICK, TICK … BOOM!

Netflix

In a musical such as Lin-Manuel Miranda’s directorial debut, a key goal for a sound team is to create songs — and go back and forth between songs and dialogue — in a way that doesn’t draw attention to itself. “You want to make it not be apparent to the audience. And as much as you can do that, that’s where the emotional experience is for the audience. It’s seamless,” explains supervising sound editor Paul Hsu. “Hopefully, they don’t even feel the difference.” The team artfully combined live on-set recordings with prerecorded versions of the film’s songs. “There are songs that we actually [recorded] live that they go back and use — parts of it from live, parts of it from playback — and go in and out of it, and that’s Paul’s magic,” says production sound mixer Tod A. Maitland (who is cited twice on this year’s shortlist, having also worked on West Side Story). He adds that other songs in the film are fully live, including “Why,” which Andrew Garfield as Jonathan Larson performed on the stage at the open-air Delacorte Theater in New York’s Central Park. “When Andrew got to that scene, he had run through the park, he went through all of this emotional upheaval as he approaches the Delacorte Theater, and when he gets to the theater, he pulls the drape off the piano and he starts to play [in the rain]. At that point, his emotion was so much further than where it was when he did the vocal prerecords three months earlier, so that we decided to do the thing 100 percent live so that we could capture where he was at that moment, because his emotional energy was tremendously different from the prerecord. That’s not uncommon.”

From left: Adam Pascal, Daphne Rubin-Vega and Wilson Jermaine Heredia, original castmembers of Jonathan Larson’s Rent, make cameos in Tick, Tick … Boom!; Andrew Garfield as Larson and Alexandra Shipp as Susan.