Keeping Up With Lin-Manuel Miranda

I'm still very active!

I still keep up, I just stopped posting about it!

If you notice when I stopped, you might get an inkling of why (same reason LMM himself left Twitter). Certain corners of the internet have been very unkind to him and it was increasingly rough to put myself through that firehose of spite daily for this blog.

Lin_Manuel: February 10, 2020. Ensemble vocal session for #InTheHeightsMovie.

Forever grateful that Doreen Montalvo got to see her moment, cheered on & surrounded by the women who loved her so much.

Grateful to @LacketyLac for having the presence of mind to capture it.

“I love how sensitive and caring Lin-Manuel is,” Luis says of his son. “He must have gotten that from his mom.” His son marvels at the productivity of his father. “I have a fraction of his work ethic,” Lin-Manuel says. “I still get a lot of s–t done with just that fraction, and I can’t imagine if I had the whole thing.”

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Some swearing aside, Lin-Manuel admits he was never much of a troublemaker (“I watched my sister fight my parents, with limited success”) and had zero interest in pursuing his father’s cutthroat world of politics. Instead, he threw himself into writing and composing. When he was accepted into Wesleyan University in Connecticut, he felt the responsibility to overachieve and aimed to treat his experience as an intense four-year residency.

“I watched my parents struggle to pay for my sister’s education and was keenly aware that my dad suddenly had three new jobs when I entered school,” he says. “She was studying to be an engineer. I’m a f—ing writer! So I remember thinking that I really had to leave with more than a degree.” Luis nods, recalling, “When my daughter told us that she wanted to take another class, my wife and I burst out crying. We had to save every month to make all my kids’ tuition payments.”

The extra effort was worth it: As a sophomore, Lin-Manuel wrote the first draft of In the Heights—which includes a close-to-home plotline involving a father trying to pay for his daughter’s Stanford University education—and continued to fine-tune it after graduation. “I saw it as an opportunity to create my dream show,” he says, “because there was nothing in the musical cannon with an all-Latino cast. It’s as simple and as complicated as writing what you know.”

An important change is the decision to make the character of Nina, the elite student played by Leslie Grace, an Afro-Latina woman. She even refers to herself as a trigueña, which implies this was more than just a random casting choice.

HUDES One thing I’ve learned is if you want to make a nontraditional or strong casting choice, you actually have to write it into the dialogue or else it’s so easy for the production to get away from that. So a word like trigueña gets put in there for that reason. I wanted to consciously make Nina Afro-Latina in this version of “In the Heights.” Since we opened the show on Broadway, this national conversation has happened around microaggressions and really interesting stuff that I feel like would be applicable to Nina’s situation.

Was there a number that any of you felt was a deal-breaker and needed to stay?

HUDES At some point, for various artistic or budget reasons, many of the numbers were up for being potentially cut. You really had to make a strong argument for why the film needed them. Because the piragüero [who sells the Puerto Rican-style shaved-ice dessert] is a peripheral character, at one point the “Piragua” song was up for cutting. I tried to talk to Lin gently about this. He was really heartbroken and I was like, “I have one idea for how the studio would let us keep that song.” So I pitched him on playing [him]. That’s how that one stayed.

Lin, why did you feel that the piragüero was so significant to the story?

MIRANDA That song is maybe the fastest song I ever wrote. Although, I don’t know that I wrote it. I think I just caught it. The metaphor of the entire musical is inside that song. Piragüero is every character in this movie. They’re doing their best against impossible odds. They take a breath, then they keep scraping by. It’s a minute-and-45-second song, but somehow the DNA of the entire show is in that minute and 45 seconds. I was very proud that that kernel got to stay. My performance was a testament to my grandfather. He passed away the week after “In the Heights” opened on Broadway. He’s the one member of my family who did not get to see everything that came after that opening night. So I have his espejuelos [reading glasses] around my neck. I have his [Marcial Lafuente] Estefanía cowboy novels in my pocket. I’m wearing my socks up to my tabs and the same kind of shirt he had to wear. I’m really cosplaying as my abuelo.

Quiara, how did you come into the role of producer and why did you decide to take on that responsibility?

HUDES It was a lot of little things that happened organically. When we went to Warner Bros. and Jon came on board, they weren’t saying, “Where are the pages?” They were saying, “What do the pages mean?” I loved having those conversations and saying, “I don’t want to see stiletto heels on any of the salon workers. They’re women on their feet for eight or nine hours a day. Put them in tennis shoes.” Then Jon started asking me, “What would the food look like?” And I was like, “Can we also talk about the pots?” Then I started talking to the choreographer Chris Scott about the dance casting call. I don’t know much about dance, but I did know that at Abuela’s house and out on the street, you’re going to see elderly people dancing and they are going to be schooling the young’uns. At some point I said, “I want to be a producer on this. I’m not just writing words on a page.”

The choice of shooting on location is really compelling, especially when some locations would have been much easier to conceive on a soundstage. Tell me about shooting in Washington Heights and what that adds to the experience.

MIRANDA On paper it’s risky, right? It’s expensive to shoot in New York. It’s hard to shoot on location. It’s harder to shoot in Washington Heights in the summer when we all live outside for a few months a year. But the advantage is you get a million authenticity checks every day because your neighborhood is rolling up with folding chairs to watch this movie you’re going to make about them. Your characters better be dressed like the folks who are on the side, your food better be right. Everything you’re putting in the frame should be an honest reflection of the surrounding everything that’s outside of the frame. I give Jon so much credit for leaning in and listening and finding these corners of the neighborhood that have additional layers of meaning for those of us like Quiara and myself, who still live in the neighborhood.

The concept of the dream, or sueñito, is different for each character. The musical seems to say that you can attain your aspirations without losing who you are to assimilation. That’s a profound notion for immigrants and their children.

Lin and the cast of Heights at the film's premiere in Washington Heights

Lin says some very sweet things about Anthony here.

A sculptural representation of a bookworm — 140 feet of scripts and songbooks, twisted along a steel skeleton — corkscrews across the Drama Book Shop in Manhattan. It starts with ancient Greek texts and, 2,400 volumes later, spills into in a pile that includes “Summer: The Donna Summer Musical.”

This 3,500-pound tribute to theatrical history is the centerpiece of the century-old bookstore’s new location, opening Thursday on West 39th Street.

The shop — like so many bookstores around the country — had brushes with death, caused not only by e-commerce but also by fire and flood, before encountering a rent hike it could not withstand in 2018. The beloved institution, where students, artists, scholars and fans could browse memoirs and bone up for auditions, was in danger of closing.

Then came an unexpected rescue. Four men enriched by Hamilton — the musical’s creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda; its director, Thomas Kail; its lead producer, Jeffrey Seller; and the theater owner, James L Nederlander — bought the store from its longtime owners. Kail has a particularly close relationship with the shop; 20 years ago, just out of college, he formed a small theater company in its basement. After he teamed with Miranda, the two worked on In the Heights there.

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The bookstore is opening the same day that a film adaptation of In the Heights is scheduled to be released in theaters and on HBO Max, and Kail noted the thematic connections.

“Heights is about a different place in Manhattan where rents are going up and businesses are getting forced out,” he said. “There’s an obvious and clear line.”

The Hamilton team closed the store’s previous location on West 40th Street in January 2019 and put its contents in storage, anticipating reopening at a still-to-be-determined location later that year. But New York real estate being what it is, finding that location and renovating it took longer than anticipated. Then the pandemic arrived, closing theaters, disrupting the retail and tourism sectors, and quieting midtown.

Now, the Drama Book Shop is back, just as Broadway gears up for a late summer return.

“As all the theaters are starting to put dates out there, it feels like we’re part of that opening gesture,” Kail said.

Visitors can pick up books about theater (including Andrew Lloyd Webber’s presciently titled memoir, Unmasked) as well as “the play that just won a prize and the play that no one’s heard about,” Kail said. The store will also sell rare books, such as a first edition of Three Tall Women, signed by Edward Albee, and a first-edition script of West Side Story.

Like many bookstores, the owners hope to augment their income with a coffee bar and food. But there’s a personal flourish: Among the coffees sold will be a blend from Puerto Rico, part of Miranda’s effort to support farmers on the island where his parents are from.

How do you get yourself in the headspace to write?

My creative process is something that has come with time. I learned to knock all my quirks out so that I could write anywhere, because there’s inspiration and there’s writing. Inspiration can land anywhere: in the shower, walking your dog, on the train, but writing is something where you need to get it down and get it into a form so someone else can understand it and see it.

How would your teachers have described you as a kid?

Intense. I’ve mellowed out a lot since then. but I was trying to put on shows and trying to make movies when I was a teenager. I was a caricature theatre kid. Just so, so extra.

What’s your favourite moment in In The Heights?

It’s a blink-and-you-miss-it moment with Anthony Ramos where his dream is very close to coming true and he just yells, "Let’s go!" It’s a thing Anthony says all the time to rile up his friends and cast members but in that scene it’s said with a lot of emotion. It’s a very true moment.

What’s the last thing that made you cry?

This is cheesy. We’re editing the first movie I directed, Tick Tick Boom, and our stills photographer sent me a book of pictures from the set and I cried leafing through it. It’s a chronicle of the hardest year any of us have ever had.

What advice would you give your 21-year-old self now if you could?

Jimmy and Lin-Manuel Miranda perform a song about every musical they can’t wait to see when Broadway returns and sing a parody of Hamilton's "You'll Be Back" with the help of special guest Broadway legends Jimmy Smits, Olga Merediz, Phylicia Rashad, Kristin Chenoweth, Christopher Jackson and Laura Benanti.

Lin talks about being Jimmy's first guest on The Tonight Show At-Home Edition, the return of Broadway, the viral Hamilton and Space Jam mashup and his kids getting into Weird Al.

Lin and Quiara talking Heights on the Tamron Hall show

Lin talks In the Heights on Good Morning America

[This interview contains spoilers for cut songs!]

How did looking at this material through the eyes of the older and wiser versions of yourselves impact the changes that you made in the process? Lin: I just think that Quiara and I are better at this than we were when we were in our 20s. Quiara's screenplay is so smart. It updates the script without losing the essence of the 2008 version and it brings other issues to the floor that are really on the front pages of the Latinx community in the United States right now.

Quiara: I wanted to go even deeper into the character of Nina, for instance, and prop her up more. In the time since the stage play, the way financial aid works at colleges has changed. There's less of an emphasis on student loans and more emphasis on scholarships. That said, students still struggle financially, and there is still student-loss because of financial hardship. But that shift gave me an opportunity to look a little more closely at the cultural frictions that she experiences when she gets to Stanford. In some ways, she was raised very sheltered. She was raised around her community and people who understand the songs she sings, and she gets to Stanford and is sitting in that room and she's like, "Is this space made for me?" She is put into a position where she can build a new Stanford, as many first generations do. The opportunity to dig deeper into that cultural story was very exciting.

A really fun, wide-ranging interview with Nerds of Color in which Lin talks about:

- the Linematic Streaming Universe

- Why Heights was pushed back to this year and what Jon said to convince him that it needed a cinematic release

- Nina's dad is Princess Leia's dad

- the Heights screening with the original Broadway cast and crew

- the significance there would've been in releasing Heights in 2020, Dreamers, and lyrics about racism that hit just as hard now as they did in 2008

- Quiara taking charge of the movie

- fun cameos