Was it good?Was it bad?What was it like working with him?Working with her?You'll hear all the tales you wish you knew Every aspect of the theater, too Feel your love of Broadway anew On Backstage Babble!
Hi, this is Charles Kirsch, and welcome to Backstage Babble.Backstage Babble is a podcast interviewing professionals in the theater industry about themselves, their careers, and the people they've worked with along the way.
And today I am incredibly thrilled to welcome a guest who I've dreamed of talking to since I started this podcast, a legend who needs no introduction, and the man who single-handedly brought Broadway back to the consciousness of the American public.
All that, and I am currently attending his alma mater, Hunter High School.I can't believe I get to say these words, but here is my conversation with Lin-Manuel Miranda.
So I'd love to start off by asking you about The Warriors, which is such a fantastic album.And what made you decide that that was the story you wanted to tell in this particular moment?
I saw that movie when I was way too young to see it, unsupervised, on a friend's older brother's VHS cassette. And I just kept going back to it.
My grandfather owned a video store in Puerto Rico, so in the summers when it was just me and my grandparents, I had my run of the place and would watch that movie again and again.It really formed my mental map of New York City.
And in 2009, a college classmate of mine named Phil Westgren emailed me, in the Heights had just started, or just opened, it was 2009.And he said, hey, I'm working for this producer named Larry Gordon.He produced a movie called The Warriors.
I know you're a fan.Do you think it would make a good musical?And I wrote him back all the reasons I thought it could never work. Mainly having to do with action sequences.I think that I like action movies for the same reason I like musicals.
There's a moment where the emotion reaches a fever pitch, and in an action movie that becomes a fight sequence or a chase sequence, and in a musical that becomes a song or a dance sequence.They're actually really similar structurally.
And so I just thought they'd be fighting for the same real estate.It'll never work, good luck. keep me posted on what happens with it.
And then, you know, life went on, and I was working on Hamilton, and the whole Hamilton phenomenon happened, and then when I was on the other side of Hamilton for the first time, and I had, I wasn't in the show anymore, I'd finished writing Moana, which I was doing at the same time I was in Hamilton, and it was sort of my first time coming up for air.
And I thought, what do I want to do next?And as the kids say, Warriors was my Roman Empire.It was taking up all of this outsized real estate in my brain.And that suggestion from Phil had kind of grown.
And I thought, I think I can attack it as a concept album, because then I'm just worrying about the musical storytelling.Don't worry about the action for now.
hopefully take care of itself at some point, but how do we tell the story purely through music?It took another couple years to get the rights from Paramount and the underlying rights to the Saul Urich novel the movie was based on.
And then I called Isa Davis. Isa and I were friends and became friends in 2007 when she was in Passing Strange and I was in In the Heights and our casts were very close.
We were like the black and brown shows on Broadway, off Broadway and on Broadway in those seasons, and so we remained friends.
And, you know, when it comes to really amazing practitioners of bringing hip-hop to theater, Issa is, to me, is at the top of a pretty incredible list, and was making, you know, she'd written Angela's mixtape years before I was working on Heights, so she felt like a dream collaborator, and she was.
Yeah, yeah.And what was the process like of figuring out what sort of musical styles would best fit these characters in each individual game?
I think that was... sort of the most fun to unlock.One of the things I realized very quickly is Issa had never seen the movie.
And I'd seen the movie more than any other movie, so I knew what we would make would be a really interesting clash or harmony of those sensibilities.And we both loved the aesthetic and the grit of the film.The film was released in 1979.
It was filmed in the summer of 1978.
And that's a really interesting time for New York and for a lot of different subcultures in New York and not just, you know, the late 70s in general, but there's a lot of different musical genres bubbling up at that time.
In the Latin music world, you have Fania Records, which started in New York but really revolutionized salsa music all over the world, and Ruben Blades, and Willy Cologne, and Hector Lavo, who was played in the biopic about Hector Lavo by Marc Anthony, is a whole genre unto itself.
Hip-hop is born in 1973 and is emerging as a major force coming out of New York by 78, 79.
The ballroom queer subculture is bubbling up and was you know immortalized in the movie Paris is burning and you know effects miniseries pose But that is its own, you know, so I think the fun of writing Things said in New York is that there are so many New York's inside, New York And we really decided to treat New York as this musical playground and as
the warriors make their way from the Bronx back down to Coney Island, traversing three of the five boroughs, we can go to all these different musical landscapes.And Issa and I really began our collaboration by just making each other mixes.
You know, Spotify playlists where I think it sounds like this, I think these are the kinds of sounds in it, and our lists were very diverse, but when I look back at the playlist, there's
There's elements and vibes from those playlists that I think survived in our compositions.
Yeah.And having now finished the album and released it, do you sort of envision how it could look as a stage production?Is that something you do while you write, or?
No, you know, it's interesting.When I write, I really think very filmically.You know, when I was writing The Battle of Yorktown, I was picturing the Battle of Yorktown.I wasn't picturing how dancers were gonna move across the stage.
That is a very specific gift that choreographers and directors have.I really think filmically, I think it's also why I have gravitated towards, whenever I do direct, it's for film and not theater.I really, it's,
For me, the fun of collaborating on a musical is being responsible for my department and bringing in that ingredient for the pie that is going to be all these different art forms smashed together.
I bring the music, you bring the staging, and we figure it out.So, you know, it's actually amazing how little I've pictured this.
I really just, when I'm writing it, when Issa and I were writing this, we were adapting this film in our heads and really kind of picturing the journey through New York City.
To bring it to the stage is a totally different challenge, and I think one that we're up for eventually.I don't want to be coy about that.Issa and I are both theater artists.
We love creating for the theater, but I think it was really important for us to be liberated from Okay, but they need a costume change here.So let's add 16 bars, or okay, you know, there's a lot of parts, which parts are going to double?
Like, we didn't have to think about that making an album, we really got to just prioritize who's the best artist to sing in this style?How do we come at this moment?Most honestly?
Yeah. And of course, New York, New York was an exploration of a very different kind of New York, as you were saying, and what was that process like of approaching a very different era?
Yeah, I kind of was the last to the party and hung on as tight as I could.God bless.I remember getting a call from John Kander, who's a very close friend.He and I had written a song for something called sort of the Hamildrops.
They were kind of songs that were inspired by
and or uh... inspired uh... hamilton most of them were really just us going out to our favorite artists and being like if any of hamilton inspires you please make something and we'll release it together whether that is a punk cover of helpless or uh... which we did with uh... with uh... an incredible band uh... the regrets uh... or it's uh...
you know uh... asking sarah burless to sing this cut song uh... called that you know if you don't agree is uh... now because canada such a close friend he'd been sort of mentoring me through the writing uh... of hamilton and i i sort of called him and said you know there's a moment that tom and i both circled in the book that we didn't have time to dramatize and it's the moment after the war when hamilton comes back to new york and it's really the only time he is
Treated as a hero, because he's this returning veteran to New York City and there was a parade for him and it was sort of Hamilton day and like kind of a ticker tape parade like when when you know when a New York sports team wins and.
You know, we're rushing past it too fast in the actual writing of Hamilton.I think we cover about 10 years at the end of it.But it's a nice moment.It's actually like a rare win, a rare unambiguous win for Hamilton.
And I said, would you want to write that with me?And I'll just write the words and you write the music.It was just sort of an excuse to write with my friend.And we had so much fun writing it. And we wrote it up at his place in upstate New York.
And then fast forward to a few years later, and Kander is sheepishly calling me saying, I'm working on an adaptation of New York, New York, which is a movie he and Eb had contributed songs to, actually not far from Warrior's era, like 70s.
And we'd like to use cheering for me now, which is the song we wrote together as the opening number, is that okay?And I was like, is that okay?It's a show tune in search of a show.I would be honored.Please do it.
And so that was sort of his pandemic project, working on that with Sharon and Tommy Thompson and Susan Stroman.And they invited me to a workshop when they were pretty far along.And I was just so moved by it.
I was so moved by what the show was trying to do. And I said, listen, if you need any more lyrics, I'm here.And so I kind of fell in with that sentence.But the show was really like three quarters done.
And then I just came in and just worked with candor on whatever needed doing.I felt sort of like a fix-it guy.
Like I just sort of, if there was a song that needed writing, if there was a moment that needed clearing that the lyrics could help, I just kind of went and
and worked on whatever needed fixing and supporting John's vision, and that was a whole lot of fun.
And you mentioned your sort of mentor relationships with Sondheim and John Kander, and how did you first come to meet both of them?
Well, I first met Stephen Sondheim in room 215 of Hunter College High School.I was directing the senior musical at Hunter, which is called Musical Repertory, and the stroke of good luck I had
was that John Wideman's daughter, Laura Wideman, was a sophomore at the time.She was in 10th grade, I was in 12th grade.She was nice enough to bring her dad to come speak to our cast.
Back then, I don't know if it's still the case at Hunter, but back then, every club, even clubs that were based around a specific activity, had to have weekly meetings to have their charter as a club.
And so he came and talked to our cast, and I sheepishly asked him if he would invite Sondheim to speak to us, since we were doing West Side Story.And so one day, on a lunch break, in comes Stephen Sondheim to talk to my West Side Story cast.
We all sat on the floor, like literally at his feet.I asked the first question, which my friend David Davidson, who's now a history teacher at Dalton, just down the street, and he said that I asked the first question.
I don't remember this, but I asked the first question, and the first question was, what was it like? I mean, it was not like your podcast, Charles.It was just sort of like, what was it like?How does it work?How can I be here?
And which is why I like your podcast so much.It reminds me so much of me as a senior at Hunter.And so I asked him, what was it like?And he went, what do you mean?What was it like?And I said, what was it like writing West Side Story?
And he kind of looked at me with his head sideways on a swivel, and then proceeded to tell us a story about writing lyrics for the opening number of West Side Story.He wrote lyrics for the Jets.
Riff was named Riff because he came in blowing a bugle, and that was his jazz riff.He sang lyrics none of us had ever heard before. about the jets coming in and what they were going to do.He sang us Sharks lyrics.
And then the punchline of the story was, and we worked on that for a month, and we presented it all to Jerry Robbins, and he said, yeah, I'm going to dance all that.
And all their work went out the window, and we have the immortal ballet prologue to West Side Story that we now have.
And for me, it was this watershed moment of, what do you mean West Side Story didn't come down from God himself on two stone tablets?What do you mean there was trial and error in creating that immortal prologue in one of the, I think, great,
musicals of all time, he really told us stories about the mistakes he made and the detours along the way.And if I have anything to point to as like what
gave me permission and encouraged me to have a life in theater, it was that afternoon in room 215.
And as a testament to how sharp Stephen Sondheim's kind of mind was, when I met him many years later in 2009, I was hired to write Spanish translations for a bilingual production that was coming to Broadway by Arthur Lawrence himself.
He said, I've met you before.And he remembered that day. And he remembered talking to our class.This is one Friday in 1998.But he remembered talking to us because John Weidman had never heard those lyrics before, the discarded lyrics before.
And he remembered that very vividly because it was like a big moment with him and his longtime collaborator.
And you've worked with so many of these great older musical theater figures.
And as the person who sort of brought musical theater back to the public consciousness in the last few decades, what was sort of their reaction to seeing a new kind of musical theater and sort of working to blend their world and your world?
What I find so inspiring about, I mean, I could list a bunch of people here.First of all, I think,
One of the things I feel really great about as a theater composer is that what we do is so specific and personal that I don't feel a lot of competition with my fellow music writers.
Like, you could give me, and Tom Kitt, and Janine Tesori, and Jason Robert Brown the same assignment, and it would come out totally differently.Like, you just don't hire us to write the same shows.We have, uh,
we have what we bring to it, which is ourselves and our craft.And so I feel very lucky to count these other writers as close friends.
And I think one thing you learn when you work with, you know, when you get to know folks like Steve and John, and Sheldon Harnick was like this too, they're still curious.
The first question John Kander asked me after he saw In the Heights was, how did you do that? It wasn't let me tell you stories.It was I want to know how you do that Do you ever feel like it's not working.
Do you ever feel like you don't know what you're doing like immediate vulnerability and so As a result you just talked about craft You know I remember sharing You know, when I finally got to work with Steve in 2009, he really encouraged me.
He said, don't be shy and keep me posted on what you're working on.He was really intrigued by what was then the Alexander Hamilton idea. And I would send him drafts.
I took him at his word, and I would send him, when I finished Act I, I sent him all the songs in Act I, and he would... I don't know how he found the time, because I know he did this with a lot of artists.
I am one of many, many, many, many, many, many people he encouraged.But he would write me back long notes, and really...
thoughtful notes i mean his big note with me with hamilton and it was precisely because of the kind of music i was writing was variety variety variety the thing with hip-hop now quoting him thing with hip-hop is that there is a percussive quality that makes us not our heads and then we stop listening to the lyrics change it up every eight bars change something do a cut out change the change the harmonic underpinning but like always keep our ear engaged so that we keep listening to the lyrics
uh... you can't just have to be let the beat ride for sixty four bars even though sometimes that's what hip-hop beats do and honestly the great hip-hop producers already know this and there's always kind of little cutouts and surprises in their music and so that was his big advice and he kind of kept hitting variety variety variety uh... which uh... i really took to heart and i think is really reflected in that score uh...
And he also gave notes on sort of where he thought we were going, gave me notes on the ending.
And I remember one of the notes that moved me the most, and it's hard not to get emotional thinking about it, was he sent me a long email with lots of thoughts.And some were encouraging, and some were harsh.
And at the end, he said, I hope you'll forgive such big talk, but this is a really important work you're writing. It deserves it deserves this it deserves this level of critique and and and thought And I'll never forget opening night.
He wrote me an opening night email And he said he said I'm excited for you, but I'm also really excited for the future of musical theater and and that meant the world to me and and and I
Encouragement from him and John Kander in equal measure Really kept me going when I was drowning in research because a lot of Hamilton was just me versus research I was not in a history student as a kid.I did not study history.I did not
I got solid B's, B plus in social studies in high school.And so I really had to, I think the secret sauce of the show is I'm learning it a chapter ahead of digitizing it and synthesizing it and then musicalizing it for the audience.
And I think that excitement in discovering this story, it comes through in the writing.
Yeah, definitely.And with the show like Hamilton or In the Heights, what was the process like of deciding how to introduce those shows to New York audiences, not with a concept album but sort of where to premiere them or?
It's an interesting question because I think that the luck I had within the Heights with being able to get my work in front of Kevin McCollum and Jeffrey Seller, who are two of the few producers who take chances on young writers, and I knew that already.
I knew that because I saw Rent for my 17th birthday, and I memorized the names of the people who produced that show.
Years later, they produced a show called Avenue Q, and it was the work of another Hunter alum, Bobby Lopez, who was five years older than me.I was in a talent show with him in elementary school.
His little brother was in my first Brick Prison musical.Brick Prison was the name of the student written, student-directed theater group at Hunter.So it was like someone I knew had actually made contact with these great producers.
And it was thanks to a woman named Jill Furman who saw a reading of Heights in the basement of the drama bookshop.And then we got it in front of Kevin.
And after a couple more years of writing and revising, sort of got the support of all three of them.But your question was about introducing it to New York.
I knew that they were better than anyone else in the world at finding theater goers and letting them know about what they're doing.
I mean, they've done it time and time again with Rent and, you know, not even original shows when they did La Boheme with Baz Luhrmann.What I was concerned with personally as the co-writer with Chiara was, will Latinos even know that the show exists?
Because Latino theater attendance was pretty low at the time.Just the Venn diagram of Latinos and what they do in the evening.And Broadway, there's some overlap, but not a ton of overlap.
And I think part of that is just how little representation we've had in those fields. And so I took it upon myself and just started making YouTube videos.This is the early day of YouTubes.
And so I would make these videos with my friend Shockwave, who's a beatboxer, and I'd rap about the show and I'd post about them.And I kind of was a YouTuber before YouTuber was a job and before people were compensated for it.
I would make these homemade videos in the theater with the cast and riffing on whatever was going on to get folks' attention online outside the bubble of people who are checking for what the new musical is anyway.
And and so that was sort of my extracurricular help to the campaign that existed with Hamilton It was interesting because I had a pretty bad Twitter addiction from 2009 to about 2019 and I found that Back before it became what it is now Twitter was a great way of finding your people who cared about the things you care about and
Back then, it was 140 character limit.And so it kind of was like the haiku opposing muscle group of Hamilton, which is what I was working on.You know, Hamilton required this deep research.And not only do I have to understand like,
stuff like financial plans and debt and credit and be able to articulate different viewpoints on how this country should come to exist.And the histories of these founders, it took a long time to digest and write.
And then Twitter was like an audience in my pocket.So Twitter got all the, for a few years, Twitter just got all the creativity I couldn't put in the show.
It was the runoff energy, and it inadvertently became kind of an online diary of my progress with Hamilton.
Back first when I performed the first song at the White House in 2009, and then I would do periodic updates on what I was working on and how it was going, and you know, 3 a.m.
posts of like, oh man, Lafayette wants to rap in French, I have to learn enough French for him to be able to rap in French. speak any French, and little posts here and there.
And so I think by the time Hamilton was ready to open, there were people who followed me who were just invested in me finishing this thing I'd been yapping about for six years.
Right. And with Hamilton, with it becoming this global phenomenon, what was it like to sort of keep your roles as a writer and an actor while also being a celebrity and sort of the face of Broadway and all of that?
I didn't experience that so much until after I was on the other side of it. What's the quote from Chorus Line?I didn't know what puberty was till I was almost past it.
For me, In the Heights was just, it was really the graduate program I'd never had in so many ways.But most of all, I was a writer who was on stage with my fellow actors.And even then, I very much was very good at keeping the writer part.
separate, you know?It's very hard for an actor to act if they are acting opposite the writer of the piece, and because I never envisioned myself in the piece initially, like, I wasn't in my college production of In the Heights.
I just sort of wrote and put that up.But it became convenient for me to play Usnavi for readings and workshops, and then I kind of fell in the snowball as it rolled down the hill, and I was with actors who had been
through every part of that process, from early readings to the O'Neill Theater Center, where we continue to develop it through readings and workshops.So by the time we were on stage, they already knew that once I was on stage, I was Usnavi.
I was never going to judge or critique them. When I had my costume on, it's not my job.My job is hard enough just being in the story and being their fellow actor and the same was true of of Hamilton.You know, if I have a note.
First of all, it has to survive me just doing my own track and then going off stage and remembering, oh yeah, that thing was weird that happened on stage.
And I would go to the department head, whether it was a costume note or whether it was a music note.I would always just go, if I had a music note, I'd go to Lack.
If I had something about performance, I would go to Tommy and make sure that the notes were never coming from me.That was very important for me to just be their fellow actor on stage.You never wanna,
You know, you just want everyone to do their best work, and no one can do their best work if they're on guard from the writer inside the thing.
And with Hamilton, what has the process been like of keeping it up through replacement casts and tours and sort of figuring out what people will best fit the mold of what was created?
Yeah, well, you know, I think something we did that some productions do but not all, usually once a production is up and it's lucky enough to be a long-running show, usually there's a company manager or stage manager in charge of maintaining those performances and they've worked closely with the directors so they know what the original vision was and what they're after.
We've taken the additional step of having resident directors
of every company who meet regularly with Tommy and meet with Patrick Vassell, who was Tommy's associate throughout the mounting of the original production, and he kind of continues to supervise and check in so that it's not just, you're supposed to say it like this, it's also when things pop up, when, you know, tendencies start creeping in that maybe are behind the intent, you know, stuff can, you know, stuff can just
Sometimes when you do a show for a long time, sometimes you do stuff to entertain yourself, or it can get really far away from what the original intention was.That's true of choreography, that's true of singing, that's true of performance.
So it's great to have resident directors, and it's great for the actors to know, you know, The parents didn't just leave the house.The coach didn't just leave the house.
There's a coach there all the time, and they care about how you're doing, and they care about maintaining the high standards you've set when you auditioned and walked in the door.
And in terms of after Hamilton, after you had left the company, what was the process like of deciding what kind of project you would want to do next, or how to add to what you had done?
I think a big, I think the thing I never anticipated, because who can anticipate it, is the phenomenal success of the show.
It was, it's the first line of my obituary, no matter what I do, and you can see that as terrifying, or you can see that as liberating, like, oh, okay, cool, first line handled, like, now what do I make?And I think for me, I, Did it deep?
You know, I had a lot of conversations with my wife, who is also a Hunter alum, about, okay, we don't have to say yes to anything just to make our rent anymore.Like, we have a certain degree of financial security, so what do we really want to do?
And for me, creatively, I think one of the first things I wanted, my first love was film, even when I was writing shows.
Before that, I was making movies, I was filming movies at my high school with my high school friends, like hour-long movies that I'd scripted.And so I wanted to
kind of have the film program that I never really got to pursue in college, because I was just so busy making theater all the time.So I kind of had a self-created, impromptu film school.And I really was interested in musical films.
I think they're the hardest to get right.There's a lot of bad movie musicals.There's a lot of great ones, too, but I actually think that list is much smaller than the bad ones, even the interesting bad ones.
And so, when the offer came along to act in a movie directed by Rob Marshall, Mary Poppins Returns, I jumped at the chance because I thought, I think Chicago is one of the great modern movie musical films, and I wanted to watch that guy work.
I wanted to see how he did it and how he managed to create that live theater energy and transmit it to the screen so beautifully.So that was an incredible education.
I produced an adaptation of a Bob Fosse memoir that we called Fosse-Verdon, that Tommy Kail directed.And that was really Tommy's vision.Really the most productive thing I did was hand him the book and say, I think you'd like this.
But he was so transfixed with
particularly how Bob and with the partnership of his wife and muse Gwen Verdon transitioned from theater to film, which is something I wanted to do, and brought his incredible choreographic sensibility into the editing room.
Um, you know, more than being one of the best movie musicals ever made, Cabaret is thrillingly edited.It's a master class in film technique.And how did this kid know how to do that on this, you know, second movie?
If choreography for Sweet Charity counts as the first one.And so, you know, that was an education in Bob Fosse, one of our heroes and wonderkins working on that miniseries.
And then, you know, I think third year of MFA was John Chu's adaptation of In the Heights, and seeing how big his swings were.I mean, we're about to see how big they're gonna be on Wicked, which I'm really excited for.
But he, you know, there were so many people who wanted this, In the Heights, to be this tiny little indie musical, and John, to his eternal credit, held out for more money to film in the neighborhood.
He was like, we have to film in the neighborhood because there is no substituting for the landscape of this neighborhood that I'm speaking to you from.And he said, Lynn, they're everyday people, but their dreams are big.And this deserves the same
big production that the MGM musicals had in their heyday.And so it was very exciting to watch him work.
And so between those three directors, I felt ready to direct my first film, Tick, Tick, Boom, because I learned a lot from three people who were very, very good at this.
And Tick, Tick, and Boom feels so sort of specifically Broadway and also universal at the same time, even down to all the great cameos that are in it.
And what is the process like of sort of balancing some people's expectations of movies being for everyone and also the sort of Broadway niche aspect of things?
Yeah, I mean, again, I say the same thing that Steve Sondheim said, was I write it because if it's interesting to me, I think it'll be interesting to someone else.
For me, Jonathan Larson's work changed the trajectory of my life at two very distinct periods.One, my senior year in high school when I was
I'm a junior year in high school, actually 1997 when I knew I loved musicals, but other people wrote them like it was just like a giant ivory tower.And then along comes this musical written by a guy who tragically died before.
his Broadway debut, who was writing about his neighborhood, and writing about his community, and writing about being an artist, and being scared, and trying to make something great before you die, which is all the things I was worried about on a bone level as a young artist.
And so more than any other show, it's the show that gave me permission to start writing.It's not a coincidence that I see that in January 97, and then I start writing my first musical in like February 1997, like it's a direct link.
And then, Tick Tick Boom was, it received its posthumous off-Broadway debut in 2001, and it's just after the terrorist attacks of September 11th.And I went down with my friend, Aileen Payumo.
We're theater majors, but the world has changed, and we're wondering, What on earth, like, do our talents do to help this weird, dark moment we're in?And I see a brilliant young Raúl Esparza playing Jonathan Larson, and the story of Tick, Tick, Boom!
is a portrait of a young man who spends his 20s writing something, and no one wants to make it. He does not get money, he does not get support, and he has to start again.
And so it forces you as a young artist to ask yourself, am I okay doing this if no one cares?If no one hears my music, would I write it anyway?So, like, Get rid of the notions of fame and fortune.Get to brass tacks.
Do you want to spend your time this way, even if you die before anyone hears a no to your work? And I left with the worst stomachache of my life from that show because I was asking myself that question.
And I pretty quickly came back with, yes, I will do this even if I am a substitute teacher at Hunter forever.And I was a substitute teacher at Hunter for much of my 20s.But I knew, it gave me clarity.
Like, Rent gave me permission and Tick Tick Boom gave me clarity.So when the chance came along to direct that as a film, I really felt uniquely suited to tell that story.
And you mentioned being sort of a scholar of movie musicals, and there are some that are very faithful to their stage versions and some that are not.And as a general rule, is there some sort of balance that you find works best in that way?
I think every musical is a unicorn.I don't just mean an adaptation from stage to screen, I mean from idea to execution, every musical is a unicorn.The thing that might fix Fiddler on the Roof might destroy Hedwig and the Angry Inch.
God, if they gave an I Want song to everyone in a chorus line, we would still be there watching it.That's what I love about it, is each one is its own puzzle to unlock.And I've seen all kinds.
For me, what was exciting about Tick Tick Boom is there is no definitive version of Tick Tick Boom.There's the David Auburn rewrite of Tick Tick Boom.
He took it from a one-person rock monologue that Jonathan used to perform to a three-person show that was produced off-Broadway.
uh... so and i was the person i saw in college and i was in love with those three-part harmonies and that's why john's got to back up singers on stage because i want to preserve as many of steve arenas is beautiful uh... harmonies as i could uh... even though in real life john just had roger barton singing high harmonies for him uh... when you watch that old rock monologue uh... when you watch his performances of the at a piano with the band uh...
But it's interesting, the early versions that John wrote before he was 30 are really young and idealistic.
They're called Boho Days, but he kept performing it until he was like 34 years old, concurrent with Riding Heights, and it got more disillusioned and more bitter as the song 3090 became a song in the past tense for him personally.
And so for me and Steven Levinson, our screenwriter, it was like, oh, we actually have a new musical called Tick Tick Boom, because we need to see, we took all the songs from the opera.
we took some of the songs that he used to perform when it was just him, but didn't make it to that version, and we put it all on the table and said, what are the best songs that serve a story on screen?
We added a ticking clock of this is the week before the Superbia rehearsal.So there's a song called Swimming that is this stream of consciousness song of John swimming at his local YMCA until he gets the idea for the song.
I don't know how it could have ever been staged.It works beautifully as a piano piece.It was cut from Off-Broadway because it's so like, red, striped, what do I do?Like it's intentionally stream of consciousness.
And it feels almost written for our film because I can cut at the speed of his lyrics.
And we actually found the pool he used to swim laps in and there are lyrics that only make sense in that pool Because there are these stripes at the bottom of the pool that are made of tile That are red stripe green stripe and their lyrics in the song So that felt like such a gift of like well this belongs
in our movie version, but we really got to kind of create this thing from scratch.Now contrast that with In the Heights, where I'll still be getting letters over killing Daniela until the day I die.
because she's so beloved and such an important part of the stage piece.And, you know, we had, you know, in updating the story for the late 20 aughts, there were different things we wanted to emphasize.And so, you know, we let that.
Character passed away so that we could sort of recalibrate the time we were spending on uncertain stories and so, you know again, like I love all of it because When you know, I love the film version of cabaret and then I'm always thrilled when I get more songs For the other, you know people in cabaret when I see a stage version I love the movie of guys and dolls.
I'm and I love you know, I of the songs that were not in the movie that were written for the stage version.So, you know, for me it's the best of both worlds, but every adaptation is a unicorn.Every musical is a unicorn.
Yeah.And on a project of yours where you are the director or writer or involved in some way, how do you decide whether you want to perform in it as well?
Well, you know, it's interesting.I think that With Heights, I fell in the snowball as it rolled down the hill.With Hamilton, I was just so aware of this is the best thing I've written, and this is a hell of a role.
And I had a great problem, which is that every time I wrote a song, I thought, I want to play this part. which means it's pretty good, it means it's actable.
Every time I wrote a Burr, when I wrote Wait For It, I was like, oh man, I'd kill to play Burr.When I wrote What Did I Miss, I thought, oh man, I'd have so much fun playing Jefferson.
When I wrote Angelica, Satisfied, I thought, I don't know if I'll ever get to sing this in public, but man, is it fun to sing.And it was Tommy who was like, you're very temperamentally close to Hamilton. He sort of took it out of my hands.
I don't know that I'll ever act in a show I write again.You know, I think what Hamilton changed, and again, I don't feel like I've changed at all.
I feel like I still write songs the same way I used to, but in the wake of Hamilton, people are more nervous around me. I didn't notice it until Encanto when we were, you know, Encanto was made during the pandemic.
Almost every session, vocal session, was a Zoom session.And every actor was like, oh man, I'm so nervous to be singing in front of the composer.And that never happened to me. with Hamilton that never happened to me with In the Heights.
And I thought maybe I'll act in other, I kind of am like, I'll act in other people's stuff, but I think I'm too aware of, or other people are too aware of the power dynamic to feel at ease around me being in the thing.
So I'm fine to not be in the stuff.I really began writing because I loved performing and I didn't see a way forward for myself as a Latino actor. I didn't see the roles for me.
You know, there's Don Quixote, Man of La Mancha, there's Zoot Suit, which hardly ever gets done, and there's West Side Story, and that's kinda it.And Paul in Chorus Line.Like, when it comes to Latino dudes in the musical theater canon...
That's all we got, or that's all we had.So, you know, I'm acting in a new Broadway play in January, and it's thrilling to get to act in someone else's show.
It's thrilling when I get to be a part of something like Camelot for Lincoln Center, which I was for a charity event.
But I don't think I'm gonna, I think in the future, I'll write the parts as I'm, I get to play them while I'm writing them, and I love handing them off to incredibly talented people.
And what made you decide to come back to Broadway as a performer with All In?
Two words, Simon Rich and Alex Timbers.Or two people anyway, not two words.Simon is a writer I've been a fan of for a long time.I love his short stories in The New Yorker.I loved the TV spinoff.
of one of the stories called Miracle Workers that starred Dan Radcliffe.I'm just a big fan of his writing and the show is essentially an evening of his short stories with just some of the funniest people you could get into a room.John Mulaney, A.D.
Bryant, Tim Meadows, David Cross, Emily Ashford.So I'm just excited to be in a room with really funny people.And Alex Timbers is someone I've actually known since he was studying at Yale, and I was studying a half hour north at Wesleyan.
We crossed each other as students, and I've never had a chance to work with him before.So I feel like I'm in good hands with him.
And you have a lot of creative artists who you've maintained long collaborations with actors and directors and choreographers.And at what point in the process do you like to sort of get them involved in whatever it is that you're writing?
It's a great question.And particularly germane to Warriors because again, Warriors was a movie I saw so young that to even begin dream casting it was just one of the most fun things Isa and I could have done.
Again, when you're playing with genre and musical genre, a lot of our sort of casting for the smaller parts became these real heavy hitter, excuse me, heavy hitter features.
So if you're writing a salsa song in the style of 70s salsa, you call Mark Anthony because Mark Anthony played Hector LaRue in a biopic of Hector.
With kim dracula kim dracula was not a performer that was on my radar that was one where i actually went to atlantic and said i love metal music but like my guys are old like i listen to acdc and metallica and uh disturbed like who's the young metal singer
Freddie Mercury-level, virtuosic singer that I don't know about, but should know about.And Pete Ganbarg at Atlantic Records turned me on to Kim Dracula, and I feel like that's the vocal discovery of the record.
I think everyone who listens to it goes, who is that?Which is pretty exciting.And then an exciting thing that happened, and you asked about my longtime collaborations, was
we hadn't precast the warriors but he said i kind of made a list of our friends who we would invite to sing demos for us uh... and they sang demos not only of the warriors but my friend Anissa Folds who's been in Freestyle Love Supreme with me for a long time she also sang all of the Cyrus stuff before Miss Lauryn Hill contributed her vocals some of the stuff for Shencia uh... they just kind of helped demo all the women's parts
And, but when they came in for the Warriors, something interesting happened, which was I think Issa and I had already been subconsciously casting it, and we kind of cast the hell out of it.Anissa is an amazing Cleon.
Giselle Jimenez, who I'd worked with on Tick Tick Boom, and first saw in my friend Chiara's musical Miss You Like Hell, was an amazing Rembrandt.Amber Gray was someone I'd known a long time and was a huge fan of her work in
Natasha Pierre and Hadestown as Ajax.I think she has a really distinctive voice.And then there's these Hamilton alums.
You've got Pippa Sioux, Jasmine Cephas Jones, Julia Harriman, was a tour Eliza that I performed opposite her in Puerto Rico, but I knew she actually had a secretly great rock Pat Benatar voice, because I saw her in a workshop of this rock jukebox musical, and I was like, oh, I had no idea.
that she could sing like that, in that style so well.
And then Kenita Miller, actually, who was, she, you know, she was nominated for Once on this Island, and sort of famously was nominated, she was in Once on this Island, she was in Color Purple, she's been in so many wonderful things, but she did an early workshop for
Hamilton and I'll never forget it because the first time I wrote that would be enough.
It was with her voice in mind She was the first woman to sing that song for me And so I brought her in and Sasha Hutchings another Hamilton alum who's also just a very close friend So we called our friends to do the demos
And then an interesting chemistry started happening while they were all joking and learning the music and singing together.
And Issa finally turned to me and said, what pop singers are we going to get that are better than what's happening in front of us right now?So they fell in the snowball as it rolled down the hill.
And they just became our warriors, which was great because they had the most musical real estate.And we were able to make that with our friends.Yeah.
That is an amazing thing.And I wonder if there's been a part in any of the many projects you've worked on that you've found especially difficult to find the right person for?
Yes.The first thing that comes to mind, and it's a systemic issue, honestly, was finding older Latino men to play Kevin Rosario in stage productions of In the Heights.
And I really think it's a function of the reason in the Heights exists in the first place, which is the roles just haven't been there for Latino men.
And you're either so good that Hollywood snatches you up, like we're not getting Jimmy Smits to play our dad off Broadway at 37 Arts.He's busy playing Princess Leia's dad.
Or you've just been burnt out by an industry that has told you over and over again it doesn't want you. And so, you know, we were very lucky to get John Herrera off Broadway and Carlos Gomez for Broadway.But it was always really hard.
It was like we'd literally be getting dudes out of retirement because they just quit on the business.They just were like, I don't get opportunities as a Latino man in theater.And so that was always very difficult.
uh... because the parts just weren't there and it's it makes me so happy when i meet a latino actor and they go i've played the people i would die in three different regional productions thank you for you know what i think that's a good deal insurance uh... because more than anything in the heights gets done a lot and it gives a lot of the people selected as roles uh... but yes that was like a huge difficulty and i really think was a systemic
difficulty.That's the first thing that comes to mind.
And a project you've been working on for this whole time continuously is the drama bookshop and revitalizing the drama bookshop.And how did that sort of idea first come to you or that opportunity to revamp it?
Well, listen, I started going to the drama bookshop in high school when we were picking what plays and what musicals we wanted to do the following year.I was an assistant director for Chorus Line.
I remember sitting next to the director, Meredith Somerville, as we read through librettos of musicals back in the old, old address, which was like around 48th and 7th.It was in the middle of Times Square.
And I remember sitting on the floor, there were no seats there.It looked like the Strand, like it was just piles.And then, by the time I graduated college, Tommy Kail and his classmates
Anthony Beniziali, John Buffalo Mailer, and Neil Stewart had converted the basement of the bookshop at 40th and 8th, 40th between 7th and 8th, into a black box theater.
They literally painted the walls black, put in 50 seats, and said, we're the resident company of the drama bookshop theater. And they named it Arthur Seeland after the founder of the drama bookshop itself.And that's where I first met Tommy Kail.
And that's where a lot of In the Heights got written and a lot of first place I met Chris Jackson in 2003, 2002.And a lot of my personal history is tied up in the bookshop and writing in the bookshop.So it's hard for
Any booksellers in this day and age in the in the era of online purchasing is even harder For a bookstore dedicated to selling plays because plays are cheap and even if you sell a lot of them They won't necessarily cover your rent and so when the latest rent hike proved too high for Roseanne who owned the building I
looked at Tommy Kail and we called Jeffrey Seller and Jimmy Niederlander and the four of us partnered on buying the rights to the drama bookshop.We reopened a block south of its old location on 266 West 39th Street.
And I think the only, in addition to a beautiful redesign by our Hamilton set designer, David Korins, it's a really beautiful inviting space with a lot more places to sit.No one's sitting on the floor at our drama bookshop.
We sell coffee, which is, you know, again, the other fuel I have relied on as a writer.So I do a lot of writing still in the basement of the drama bookshop.
And if I'm ever stuck, I go upstairs and open any of the greatest plays and musicals our art form has to offer.It's like a great well of endless inspiration in there.
That is so wonderful.Well, I'd love to ask you two sort of concluding questions.
One of them being, what was your experience like of both being in the pandemic and now kind of coming out of it and seeing the changes that have been made in terms of audiences and what's being produced and all of that?
Sure.You know, I was eight days into filming Tick Tick Boom when the world shut down.And My wife is a lawyer now, but she studied chemical engineering. scientist at heart.
And she was like Cassandra in December of 2019 being like, this is not going to be a short thing.This is going to be a big thing, because she could just see the stats and the tail of the disease and how it hid while it was infecting.
And it was just like, this is going to be a much bigger deal than anyone is thinking.And so I think I had a similar pandemic to everyone else.I think we all did our best to keep our kids somewhat entertained and educated.
It coincided with a very busy year in my life.We had to push the In the Heights film a year.We had finished filming it, but we realized audiences were not gonna be back by the summer of 2020, so we pushed it a year.We moved up.
We had sold the theatrical rights to our live capture of Hamilton,
And we pivoted to make that available to everyone on July 4th 2020 Because I was so one I was so frustrated in the Heights wasn't coming out and I was so excited for it and to it just felt like we all needed as much entertainment as possible because we were all kind of going crazy and
Tick tick boom was one of the first productions back up when, you know, COVID was still very much a reality before we had a vaccine.So it was filmed under the strictest COVID protocols and
There was kind of this amazing moment when I'm filming Andrew Garfield in the actual New York Theatre Workshop, where he performed Boho Days as a rock monologue, and there's, you know, we have our masks on and we have divisions between all our things in between takes, but when I yell action, everyone gets to take their masks off.
And Jonathan Larson is alive and playing the New York Theatre Workshop, and we were keenly aware we're probably the only people making theatre anywhere in the United States right now just for this movie.
And so I remember feeling very moved when Broadway reopened about a year after that in the fall of 21, and just really wanting to never take the fact of the audience, the live audience, for granted ever again.
Even when I go see a show now, I try not to get mad if someone's crinkling their paper.I try not, you know, like, all the annoyances that being with other people brings, like, there was a time when we never thought we'd come back.
There was a time we never thought we'd be back in community again.And I think we are so resilient.And I think more risks are being taken in terms of what gets produced.I'm really kind of glad to see much more diversity, both.
We have a long way to go, but more diversity on stage and backstage. And so I hope that some of the lessons and hard questions we asked ourselves during the pandemic about those inequities, we're still pushing to make good on.
And my last question would be, I think Hamilton for so many people sort of defines musical theater, especially in the current day.
And I wonder for you, what have been some of the trends that you've seen or changes that you've seen since when you started seeing shows, whether you think that's impacted by Hamilton or not?
again you have no control who lives who dies who tells your story so with the caveat that i really have no idea uh... i do know that other directors have come to me and used hamilton as sort of a shorthand for
a kind of diversity on stage that would have been unimaginable prior.
I think because Hamilton was wildly diverse on stage, as diverse as Rent was when I saw it in 1997, like to me that was always sort of the gold standard I want our shows to look like the world we live in.
And I think the success of Hamilton has led to much more diversity on stage and less literal casting, you know.I'm so happy when I go see The Notebook and
You know, the older version of this character is played by an amazing white actress named Georgia Plunkett, and the younger version is played by an amazing black actress named Joy Woods, and like, it's not a big deal. Like, it's theater.
You're here to suspend your disbelief.And like, they're both incredible, and they can play the same person at different points in time.And so, that's thrilling.
It's thrilling to see that that has been, and I always say that, you know, that is a legacy of Hamilton, because other directors have been specific in telling me that.I would never claim that.
And, you know, I think, you know, the other, I think, again, it'll be interesting to see because I've always seen history as fair game for musicals.
Some of my favorite musicals from, you know, Jesus Christ Superstar to, you know, Les Miserables play with history as their backdrop.
But, you know, it's really exciting to just see what can be... Again, for me, the health of musicals is intrinsically tied to how unlikely the idea is for the musical.
Whether that is King Henry's Six Wives, or whether that is Anne Hathaway rewriting the ending. to Romeo and Juliet, or to the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice.
All of that being fair game, anything being fair game, my heroes always push the boundaries of what could be a musical, whether it is Presidential assassins are cats.
Your mileage may vary, but musical is not a genre, it is a medium for telling stories.
And as long as that medium continues to cast really far afield, whether it's a forgotten founder, or it's a gang trying to get from the Bronx to Coney Island, a new story is always exciting to me.
That is a wonderful thing.Well, thank you so much for doing this.It's been such an honor to talk to you.Thank you.I'm a fan of your podcast and I'm happy to be on.Thank you so much.Listeners, thank you for tuning in.
If you liked what you heard, please leave a rating and review wherever you listen.You can also tune in again next week when I will be joined by 10-time Tony-nominated director and choreographer Graciela Daniel.
Until then, thank you so much for listening.
Sign in
