Episode 759 - Lin-Manuel Miranda
Marc:all right let's do this how are you what the fuckers what the fuck buddies what the fucking ears what the fuck nicks what the fucking east is what's happening i'm mark maron this is my show wtf welcome to it happy you're here hope you're holding up
Marc:I should tell you that my guest today is the creator of the musical Hamilton.
Marc:He wrote and performed in it an amazing piece of work.
Marc:Lin-Manuel Miranda is here today.
Marc:Talk to him in a little bit.
Marc:What's happening?
Marc:I will be in Nashville at the James K. Polk Theater this Saturday, the 19th.
Marc:You can go to WTFPod.com for tickets.
Marc:I'm also going to be in Chicago.
Marc:Chicago is on December 3rd.
Marc:Two shows at the Vic, a 730 and a 10, I believe.
Marc:Again, WTFPod.com slash tour.
Marc:You get the information for tickets, links to tickets.
Marc:come on out let's hang out and talk let's hang out and talk i did a very um courageous and uh somewhat uh scary thing today uh i i did you know i did something i i didn't think i would do i didn't think i had it in me to do it um but maybe uh some of you can do it too i don't know i maybe it's not right for you maybe it's too much but uh i'm pretty proud of myself i'm proud to be american
Marc:And I'm also proud that that I took Twitter off my phone.
Marc:Fucking gone.
Marc:Hit the little X, watched it go away and felt a relief.
Marc:I felt a freedom from the bondage of self-induced post-traumatic stress disorder.
Marc:of feeling the need to connect and react to a never-ending stream of garbage from the internet cesspool.
Marc:I'm not saying that about my friends.
Marc:You can all fight the good fight how you're going to fight it, but I needed to collect my thoughts.
Marc:I needed to look around me.
Marc:I needed to be in my car and not risking my life to react angrily to a tweet.
Marc:I haven't really tweeted much in a couple of days because the energy is being misused.
Marc:There's no way to let love in and figure out what the next right thing to do is if you're constantly consumed and jacking your goddamn endorphins and jacking your cortisol levels to skyrocketing survival heights just by engaging with eggs and hostile avatars of different sorts.
Marc:The fronts of cowards and just people that want to annoy you.
Marc:Fuck it.
Marc:I got it off my phone.
Marc:And now I can walk in.
Marc:It's weird.
Marc:You get this.
Marc:It's almost like a phantom limb thing where I reach for my phone.
Marc:I'm like, oh, it's not there.
Marc:A little bit of panic.
Marc:Hey, wait a minute.
Marc:Say hi to that guy.
Marc:How's it going, man?
Marc:I'm all right.
Marc:What?
Marc:That's a sample of dog food?
Marc:I don't have dogs.
Marc:I have cats.
Marc:Clearly an odd reference, but it just happened down at the pet food store.
Marc:So look, I'm trying to get on with my life and process my feelings, but it does hang over you like some sort of chronic diagnosis, you know?
Marc:That was a pretty good omelet.
Marc:Oh, God.
Marc:That's happening.
Marc:I think I'm going to go see a movie.
Marc:That was a good movie.
Marc:That was great.
Marc:It was a sci-fi movie, kind of a fantasy that was sort of uplifting, alien save the world kind of thing.
Marc:Yeah, I just went and saw Arrival.
Marc:Yeah, I enjoyed that.
Marc:I'm going to think about it a little bit.
Marc:Oh, my God.
Marc:That's still happening.
Marc:It still happened.
Marc:So that, you know, that that's going to be the way it is for those of us who feel that way.
Marc:And yet there's there's two sides to everything.
Marc:But look, you know, I went out and did some comedy, started to really kind of parse, you know, what it means to be a comic to stand up and be heard and be funny.
Marc:And not to be too strident, but try to figure it out from a human point of view.
Marc:That's the problem right now with the vulnerability element is that we have to maintain vulnerability and we have to move through the world with courage and a certain shamelessness of who we are and what we do and what we contribute to the world.
Marc:Now things that were once comfortable are uncomfortable and that could just mean going to the fucking store for some people.
Marc:But we are all Americans.
Marc:And, you know, some of us got to push back.
Marc:Some of us got to fight.
Marc:Some of us got to resist.
Marc:Do whatever you need to do to make your life mean something and to help other people.
Marc:To help other people.
Marc:And the cats got to help the cats.
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was good to get out and do some comedy.
Marc:See the see the the other comedians at the store, how they're doing it.
Marc:What's happening.
Marc:Communing with the folks who come out with the audiences.
Marc:Speaking your truth.
Marc:Can't stop that.
Marc:It was good, man.
Marc:It was good.
Marc:When things get hairy and things get scary, I didn't plan out that rhyming, the intensity of life in front of you vibrates with an immediacy.
Marc:You know, it's a time now, if you're feeling vulnerable, to lean on people that you love.
Marc:Get closer to people.
Marc:Go out in the world.
Marc:Say hi to people.
Marc:Make sure people are, you know, being nice.
Marc:Maybe saying hello to the clearly sad person.
Marc:Help people that need help.
Marc:Leonard Cohen passed away, 82.
Marc:Great run.
Marc:Left some amazing work, which is the best you can really hope to do in this life.
Marc:And I spent the other night, the night that he passed away, or the night that I heard he passed away, spinning some of those albums.
Marc:Songs from a Room, I think, is the one I listened to.
Marc:And I was a late comer to Leonard Cohen.
Marc:I tried and I tried and I always knew he was great and I knew it was good, but it was not connecting with me.
Marc:And I guess it's maybe just for me...
Marc:It was as I got older.
Marc:I could deal with it.
Marc:And I'm a poetry guy.
Marc:There's no doubt about that.
Marc:I'm not necessarily a lyrics guy, but I'm definitely a poetry guy.
Marc:And just some of it got so much deeper for me as I got older and I guess as he got older.
Marc:But I went back way back.
Marc:And listen to 12 songs.
Marc:And I'm so grateful to have the work that that guy did.
Marc:A real Zen master.
Marc:A real Buddha of the song.
Marc:He will be missed.
Marc:But we have his stuff.
Marc:We have his stuff.
Marc:That's the beautiful thing about music.
Marc:You have the stuff.
Marc:And this other very wonderful thing happened.
Marc:And I don't really use the word wonderful that much.
Marc:Because I don't love it.
Marc:I don't love the word.
Marc:But someone reached out to me, a fan of the show.
Marc:And she she just said that, you know, she had all these records that she wanted to give to me.
Marc:And, you know, I don't know who she is and she doesn't know if the Twitter accounts really me.
Marc:So I, you know, I message her.
Marc:I go, is this for real?
Marc:Of course, I'd love to.
Marc:To take some records off your hands.
Marc:And she goes, yes.
Marc:And, you know, we met at my office and she brought over like 600 records, vinyl records that I find out were her late father's collection.
Marc:And.
Marc:And it almost felt like this, you know, I could tell that it was a heavy thing.
Marc:This is a loaded shipment that I'm getting, but she needed to let go of it.
Marc:And I offered her money.
Marc:She didn't want money.
Marc:She just wanted them to be appreciated.
Marc:And I had no idea what was in those boxes.
Marc:She said he took very good care of them.
Marc:And that she couldn't move around.
Marc:Every time she moved, she had to show up these boxes.
Marc:And it felt heavy to me.
Marc:But then I felt like, not only do I love records, and of course I want records, but I will appreciate them.
Marc:I can be...
Marc:the custodian you know obviously not entirely emotionally but of these records and and you know and and accept the responsibility i know some of you thinking like some responsibility getting a bunch of free records but i thought it was a lovely gesture and i didn't take it lightly
Marc:And there are some great records in there.
Marc:Things I never heard before.
Marc:Things that I avoided.
Marc:Some prog rock that I just never really paid attention to.
Marc:There's some records in there that I think that maybe this gift is something I don't even understand yet.
Marc:That somewhere in her father's collection might be a record that changes my fucking life.
Marc:And so I hope she knows that that could happen.
Marc:That could happen.
Marc:I'll let her know.
Marc:Her name's Kristen.
Marc:And it's lovely to meet her.
Marc:And I feel the weight of the records.
Marc:And I'm going to listen to them.
Marc:I'm going to listen to new things.
Marc:And I'm going to honor your late old man.
Marc:So thank you for those.
Marc:All right.
Marc:So what's the point?
Marc:Right?
Marc:What's the point?
Marc:Well.
Marc:i think the point is you gotta find the courage to be who you are look there's a lot of people out there left right people dealing with addiction exclusion you know broken hearts grief angry angry hope reluctant hope complete defeat but fuck it man
Marc:You know, we got to be who we are and you got to believe who you are as a good person.
Marc:And and you got to act on that now.
Marc:And you got to be aware and vigilant of people that that need some support.
Marc:We got to get each other's backs.
Marc:All people.
Marc:Seriously.
Marc:I'm a reluctant optimist, but I'm not going to surrender to PTSD of the onslaught of social media platforms or anything else.
Marc:You know, sometimes in this life, it requires courage just to go out in the morning.
Marc:You know, sometimes for people that the courage has that every day they got to deal with that.
Marc:For years.
Marc:That's just the way it is.
Marc:But I'm wary, but I feel good.
Marc:My guest today is Lin-Manuel Miranda, who...
Marc:created the musical Hamilton, which I saw in New York, and it was phenomenal.
Marc:And it was a beautiful, there's nothing better than people collaborating to do something amazing and proactive.
Marc:That I can tell you.
Marc:And in the arts, that's certainly something that enriches life.
Marc:Don't forget that if you're in the arts, because Hamilton was a real transcendent experience for a lot of reasons that I was able to talk to Lynn about.
Marc:And maybe if you don't listen to the show all the time, I told you about how when I was there, he knew I was sitting.
Marc:And as they were doing their curtain call, he looked over at me and he mouthed, Boomer lives.
Marc:That was pretty nice.
Marc:Pretty nice moment.
Marc:And it was amazing to sit here and talk to him.
Marc:He co-wrote the music and performed some of the songs for the new Disney movie, Moana.
Marc:Lynn and I do a little singing.
Marc:I will tell you that.
Marc:I'll tell you that right now.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:It's true.
Marc:This is me talking to Lynn Manuel Miranda here in the garage.
Marc:You want cans?
Guest:Sure.
Marc:Have you heard me ask that before, Lin-Manuel?
Guest:Oh, please pronounce it Manuel.
Guest:Manuel?
Guest:Lin-Manuel?
Marc:Yeah, that's much better.
Marc:Lin-Manuel I can do.
Marc:I can do it.
Guest:You can also just do Lin, that's fine.
Marc:Is it?
Marc:Yeah, yeah.
Marc:I was told by people that you absolutely will walk out if I say Lin.
Guest:They're very sweet to protect me, but it's actually what I've been called all my life.
Marc:Lin-Manuel.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I can do it, man.
Marc:I grew up in New Mexico.
Marc:I can make the right sounds.
Guest:All righty.
Marc:So how often do you come out here?
Marc:This is a new world for you.
Guest:I've only ever been out here for work.
Guest:I had a really surreal, my first show in the Heights played the Pantages.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I lived, my first experience living in LA was living in the W on Hollywood and Vine.
Guest:The worst.
Guest:I mean, the Boulevard of Broken Dreams, for real.
Guest:So you had to walk across that sad street with guys in costumes.
Guest:Guys in costumes.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And also like, but also like homeless teens coming out of the train that no one takes.
Guest:And next to like this hotel where Drake is upstairs.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So it's the dream and the dream deferred on the same corner.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And how long were you here?
Guest:I was here for five weeks doing, acting in that show.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That was the first musical you wrote and directed and produced.
Guest:I didn't direct.
Guest:No, no.
Guest:Tommy Kail, who directed Hamilton.
Marc:The same guy you've been with forever.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:He's my dude.
Marc:Like I feel bad.
Marc:I have not seen In the Heights.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:that's all right no it's not all right i i feel terrible because i know it was the first one it was it was i mean and nothing will ever be that like i went from broke substitute teacher to broadway composer when that opened and you you were broke substitute teacher but you weren't acting you were i mean you were doing things i was trying to act the only role i'd gotten was i was a bellhop on the last season of the sopranos i'm trying i just watched it which episode
Guest:It was, they're going to get rid of something or check on a body.
Guest:They're trying to find the Haven Air Hotel.
Guest:Oh, right, right, oh, right.
Guest:So, yeah.
Guest:So I'm just like this tranked out bellhop who they ask where the Haven Air, and my lines were, I don't know.
Guest:I don't know.
Guest:And ride off.
Marc:I remember.
Marc:I just watched it.
Marc:You were out in front of the hotel and they were asking where the old hotel was and you were just sort of like dead eyed and they were like, what the fuck?
Guest:And I'm so fucking green as an actor.
Guest:You can actually see me look down for my mark.
Guest:Oh yeah.
Guest:i i look down to see where i'm supposed to stop that's a tricky thing the marks yeah yeah especially when they make them small because they're getting them on camera so then you only have a dot and you're like how the fuck is that gonna help me yeah and you know it was an amazing first experience one because gandolfini really was as kind and sweet as everyone like stayed and did his scene even though my side was second like didn't have to be there for a bit player that's
Guest:But he stayed and did the other side of the scene with me.
Guest:And it was late at night in the middle of New Jersey.
Guest:And then the other actor, oh my God, his name's escaping me.
Guest:Paulie, while I'm getting in makeup, he turns to me and he goes, hey kid,
Guest:when you do the line, do it with like a real like fucking really thick accent, you know, so it's funny.
Guest:So he's pitching me doing like a Latino accent and the makeup artist just waits for him to walk away and he goes, he tries to direct everyone.
Marc:Yeah, Pauli Galtieri was the character, Tony Sirico.
Guest:Tony Sirico, who's a very sweet guy, but kid, when you do it, do it with like a real fucking accent.
Guest:He's really that guy.
Guest:Yeah, it was amazing.
Guest:I was like, oh, that's that guy.
Marc:So, you know, I obviously, I saw Hamilton and I was very, I almost started crying, not just because of the show, but you're walking off, you look right at me and say, Boomer lives.
Guest:Boomer lives, baby.
Guest:I'm a big fan of the show.
Guest:You're so sweet.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And it was, you know, you really look like yourself.
Guest:So, and it's the logo of your podcast.
Guest:So it's weird to see the logo of this podcast in the 10th row.
Guest:But you knew exactly where I was.
Guest:You seated me.
Marc:You knew the seats.
Guest:But no, not that.
Guest:It was like spotting Waldo.
Guest:I was just like, oh, shit.
Guest:That's the cover of that podcast.
Marc:I'm Waldo.
Marc:You found the glasses.
Marc:I did.
Marc:Some of the things I found, and I don't want to have the same conversation you've probably had a million times about Hamilton, outside of the success, but the one thing that knocked me out about it, and I kept thinking about it, there were two things, because I talked to you quickly...
Marc:backstage with the other actor.
Marc:I don't know everyone's name.
Marc:Oh, with Chris, probably.
Marc:Yeah, sweet.
Marc:And that was the original cast I saw, right?
Marc:It was the last few weeks of the original cast.
Marc:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:But the thing that was great about it, outside of many things, was I knew the streets.
Marc:It was New York.
Marc:So it was set in New York, and you're talking about these streets.
Marc:I've been to Gansevoort Street.
Marc:And not only the fact that they've all been there that long, but that history that we forget is New York history.
Marc:Totally.
Marc:You never think of the founders in New York.
Guest:Right, but New York was the place.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was one of the colonies.
Guest:Yeah, and he's the New Yorker of the founders.
Guest:I mean, that's the guy who never left Manhattan.
Guest:Was that one of the reasons why you found a portal in this story?
Guest:Totally.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, it was...
Guest:I knew what most people know when I picked up that book really at random.
Guest:Which must be not much.
Marc:Like he's on the $10 bill.
Guest:I knew it was a 10.
Guest:I knew he was like not a president but on our money.
Guest:And I knew that he got shot.
Guest:And I also knew that his son died in a duel because I wrote a paper on that in 11th grade.
Guest:You did?
Guest:yeah you know i think and i think i i wrote about that because you know i was like emo goth teenager i was like oh man his son died and then he died in the same way it was before he got his son yeah his son died in a duel three years before he did and it was like pretty much the same spot in weehawken like in the same area um and i just thought that was really weehawken
Guest:That's fucking, that's New Jersey, isn't it?
Guest:That's New Jersey.
Guest:Yeah, it's across the river.
Marc:It's like, and we're just talking about Sopranos.
Marc:It's so weird, the time travel necessary that, you know, and I think that places it historically, especially for people who live in New York who have spent time in New York because our ideas of what these places are are so detached from history.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So the story sort of roots itself.
Marc:It's time traveling, but it's also the geography is the same and it makes it, it humanizes it just from the geography.
Marc:Totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so to walk around and say, I can't believe we're in New York, which is what the Schuyler sisters do, is how everyone feels when they get here.
Guest:And so you telescope time and suddenly you relate to these characters.
Guest:It's not this other century in this other period of dress.
Guest:It's like, oh, I'm in New York.
Guest:Oh, I'm downtown.
Guest:Oh, I'm like watching the energy here.
Guest:And the meatpacking district is nice now.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And that's where a lot of it was, I think.
Marc:A lot of those streets were down there.
Guest:Five points.
Guest:Yeah, is uptown.
Guest:I mean, they were all down in the battery, too.
Marc:And also the thing about that is that somehow or another, and this is part of the brilliance of the conception of it, is that you can have a multi-ethnic cast playing founding fathers and people of that time, which are not historically accurate, but it doesn't matter because it's New York.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It's true.
Guest:New York.
Guest:That's exactly true.
Guest:Yeah, it's New York and everyone lives here.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that's that's one of the things.
Marc:And outside of the money, you know, if you're not talking about, you know, Malcolm X or Martin Luther King, where people are looking at it going, that doesn't look like him.
Marc:No one gives a shit.
Marc:And that this is a human story.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:It actually, yeah.
Guest:And it's an immigrant story.
Guest:It takes them off the money.
Guest:Right.
Guest:It takes them off the money to cast it that way.
Guest:And honestly, that came out of the sound of what I was writing.
Guest:It was like, well, this is a hip hop R&B show.
Guest:We need people who can pull that shit off.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And that was really sort of, and then Tommy, in his direction of it, elevated that to a principle.
Guest:All right, well, then this is going to look like our country.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So you get obsessed.
Marc:So you write this story in 11th grade, but whatever triggered
Marc:The Hamilton thing, that book by, what's his name?
Marc:Ron Chernow.
Marc:I didn't read it.
Marc:It's a big book.
Marc:And I don't seem to have the attention span to read a lot of books.
Marc:But when you pick that up, I mean, what was the motivating force?
Marc:So we said, you know, he's on the money.
Marc:You had a vague idea of who he was.
Marc:You knew he's from New York.
Marc:But then you see this book.
Marc:The book was everywhere.
Marc:Was it one of those things where it's like, I'm going to read that book?
Guest:I was just in the biography section at Borders.
Guest:I was just looking for a big book to read on vacation.
Guest:When there were big bookstores.
Guest:Yeah, when there were big bookstores.
Guest:It was the one in the Time Warner Center.
Guest:So you're walking around.
Guest:It's Forever 21 now, I think.
Guest:Yeah, yeah.
Guest:And yeah, I was walking around and I knew I was going on vacation.
Guest:Where were you going?
Guest:I went to Mexico.
Guest:I had a week off from In the Heights.
Guest:It was my first vacation from that show.
Guest:How long did that run?
Guest:That ran just shy of three years.
Marc:And that was also a story about immigrants in New York.
Marc:But you've been a New York kid the whole time.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:You grew up there.
Guest:I was born in Roosevelt Hospital.
Guest:Grew up.
Marc:Where's Roosevelt Hospital?
Guest:That's actually not far from that borders.
Guest:It's on like 59th and 10th.
Guest:My son was born there two years ago.
Guest:Same hospital.
Guest:Yeah, it's just west of Columbus Circle.
Marc:And your parents grew up.
Marc:What part of the city were you in?
Guest:We moved my parents met at NYU grad school.
Guest:They were both born in Puerto Rico.
Guest:My mom grew up here.
Guest:My dad came here for NYU.
Guest:He sort of from Puerto Rico from Puerto Rico got a full ride.
Guest:He's like the prodigy like graduated college in Puerto Rico at 18.
Marc:Uh-huh.
Guest:He's the doogie of Puerto Rico and then he came here to get his education He was always gonna go back and he met my mom and stayed and so when we when I was born My parents and my sister and I lived in the NYU grad housing.
Guest:We lived in silver towers What streets?
Guest:That's like on Third Street.
Guest:That's like right near McDougall and all.
Guest:Not far from Hamilton.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:That's totally.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then we moved uptown to Inwood just north of Washington Heights in like 1981.
Guest:It's pretty up there.
Guest:It's like by Grant's Tomb around there.
Guest:Grant's Tomb is way downtown.
Guest:No, it's like north of the Cloisters.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Just north of the Cloisters.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, yeah, I mean, and because I think those neighborhoods were in such rough shape, I had the rare sort of New York existence, grew up across from a park, you know, grew up in a house with a driveway in Manhattan.
Marc:Right, because that's where the houses are.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, not brownstones, like a house.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And it was, you know, my dad tells the story.
Guest:We bought the place and there was an uptown Irish tenant.
Guest:And my mom's the one who interviewed and got the house.
Guest:My mom's last name is Towns, which is a pretty ethnically indifferent last.
Guest:How is that?
Guest:Um, she's, uh, well, I mean, that's a whole other story, but my mom's half Mexican, half Puerto Rican towns is the Mexican side.
Guest:Uh, if you go back far enough, it's actually, um, someone actually wrote an article.
Guest:I found out about this on the internet because someone did my genealogy sort of for free.
Guest:And you had no idea.
Guest:I had some idea.
Guest:I'd heard some stories, but someone really went and laid it out.
Guest:You know, Townes is a result of this guy.
Guest:His family owned slaves.
Guest:He married his... He married his mother's slave and ran away.
Guest:Where was this?
Guest:This is in way the fuck out west.
Guest:And they basically, this couple, this interracial couple, basically kept moving the Townes family, David Townes and his wife...
Guest:They kept moving and then they would change the law and it would be illegal for them to live together and they moved further south until they got to Mexico and then sort of grew up in Mexico.
Guest:And that's why Towns is a Mexican last name for our branch of the family.
Marc:No kidding.
Marc:So he started in the south.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah, he started in the South.
Marc:And then kept moving because of his love.
Marc:It's a passion story.
Marc:Yeah, it's a passion story.
Marc:They had kids and they just kind of kept moving.
Marc:And he didn't want to hide his love anymore, I guess.
Marc:So he'd rather honor the love and keep moving to finally find a place where he could live and have his family.
Marc:Right.
Marc:Is this the next musical?
Marc:Are we talking about the next musical?
I don't know.
Guest:That's a hell of a story to read about yourself, though, online.
Marc:It's a hell of a story in general, because it seems to speak directly towards themes that you enjoy.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:And it's also, you know, you think, oh, my parents are both from Puerto Rico.
Guest:But no, there's no one in this country that doesn't have isn't tied to our fucking complicated racial history and the legacy of slavery.
Guest:There's no one it doesn't touch.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, I never thought about it in those terms as a kid.
Guest:I was like, well, both my parents were Puerto Rico.
Guest:They grew up on an island and generations and generations.
Guest:But no, it's it touches everyone.
Marc:I think I think that's true.
Marc:You know, but not it's weird because I'm thinking about my own family and that my you know, I go back and made two, three generations back to, you know, first generation immigrants from Europe.
Marc:Right.
Marc:So like my American history is a little shorter.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:But that American history is much longer.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, so all right.
Marc:So you find this out when after you wrote Hamilton?
Guest:Yeah, this was like nine months into the run.
Marc:So what does that propel you to think about?
Marc:Do you think about like who are the other?
Marc:Do you have family that you're curious about that you might know?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, towns is a pretty, you know, if you meet most towns, if they're not members of the Mexican side of the family, they're African-American.
Guest:And so that split happened at some point.
Guest:And at some point, some of those people in our family said, well, we can pass.
Marc:right you know we can pass and we're mexican and we're light-skinned enough to pass on this side of the line and so there's this amnesia whenever that split happened uh but it did it had to have well that well that reminds me those of the of the jews that were expelled from spain during the inquisition ended up in mexico and sort of moved up in mexico to new they found like sabbath candles in some catholic churches that have been going on for hundreds of years and they didn't know why
Marc:But it was a leftover tradition from the original Jews that were expelled that were now, you know, Mexicans.
Marc:Isn't that incredible?
Marc:It is kind of incredible.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That there are these family histories.
Marc:So tell me more about, like, when you wrote the inspiration for the Heights clearly comes from, you know, the neighborhood you grew up in.
Marc:So how many sisters and brothers do you have?
Marc:I got one older sister.
Guest:That's it?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, she's six years older.
Guest:And, you know, we grew up... I had a sort of...
Guest:I grew up in this, I grew up in a little Latin American country.
Guest:I mean, if you go north of 181st Street, especially in the 80s, I mean, it was all, you know, it's classically Washington Heights and Inwood have always been an immigrant community.
Guest:First Irish and then tons of Jews after World War II and during World War II.
Guest:And then huge wave of Latinos, Cubans and Puerto Ricans, then Dominicans in the 70s.
Guest:So it was really a Dominican neighborhood when I was growing up in the 80s.
Guest:Was there still like... Irish Brigade Pub, Irish Eyes, Liffey 2, they're still there.
Marc:Was there any Jewish butcher shops?
Guest:Oh, yeah.
Guest:Yeshiva University is still there.
Guest:Yeshiva is sort of the cornerstone of that community.
Guest:I got an honorary doctorate from them.
Guest:And but that's also an important part of our community.
Guest:And and so it's always been.
Guest:And and I saw that starting to change.
Guest:And Chiara, my co-writer and I sort of we both live in that neighborhood now.
Guest:And I remember when I was in college, the first Starbucks showing up.
Guest:And, you know, it's that thing you deal with of.
Guest:You know, immigrants live where they can.
Guest:They make the place special.
Guest:And then, you know, and then there's a point where it gets so unaffordable that the people who make the place special can't afford to live there anymore.
Marc:The artisanal colonization begins.
Marc:Correct.
Marc:First the yuppies and now like hipsters who refuse to call themselves yuppies because they don't dress like that.
Yeah.
Marc:The coffee shops are different.
Guest:Yeah, the coffee shops are different.
Guest:And also, but yeah, I was seeing that shift happen and that's hard to dramatize.
Guest:You know, it's hard to, you know, there's a lot of musicals where there's an outside force change.
Marc:Gentrification is hard to dramatize.
Guest:Yeah, in a way that feels compelling and feels high stakes.
Guest:You know, you look at Fiddler on the Roof, like, oh shit, like, you know what the outside threat is in that world.
Guest:It's intolerance and it's a wave of hatred that's coming and it's even going to break the bubble of Anatevka and this place where things have been done the same for hundreds of years.
Marc:When did you first start engaging with musical theater where it took on this life for you, where you could, you know, draw parallels to your life?
Marc:I mean, where did you start thinking?
Marc:Like, when did you first see Fiddler on the Roof?
Guest:I saw Fiddler on the Roof in first grade.
Guest:My parents were obsessed with musicals.
Guest:Really?
Guest:They're of the generation that just had cast albums next to, you know, my dad had Man of La Mancha next to Dionne Warwick, next to Gran Combo and Celia Cruz.
Guest:And that's just the cocktail of music we grew up with.
Marc:And also that's the benefit of living in New York is that not only when you're dealing with the sort of the character of the neighborhood, that is all ethnicities.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Is that, you know, everybody's up in your face.
Marc:There's no way to avoid contact and engagement.
Marc:And there's an acceptance to that because you learn how to sort of say hello to everybody and appreciate everybody.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I'm also grown up uptown as hip-hop is being born.
Marc:And down the street, you can see any fucking musical you want, and you can go see any symphony you want.
Marc:It's sort of a fascinating place that all that stuff is available to you.
Marc:But your dad was... What did he do?
Guest:My dad... Well, he came to New York to study psychology and then didn't have the patience for it.
Guest:You mean literally or...
Guest:Temperamentally.
Guest:Temperamentally.
Guest:Like he would do the practice sessions.
Guest:I shudder at the thought of being my dad's patient because my dad said he'd hear the person complaining.
Guest:He'd go, you said that last week.
Guest:Process it.
Guest:Let's move on to the next thing.
Guest:I only have 10 free sessions with you.
Guest:Whereas my mom stayed a psychologist.
Guest:She's a great psychologist.
Guest:She's still a psychologist.
Guest:She's still a clinical psychologist.
Guest:In Manhattan.
Guest:In Manhattan.
Guest:Yeah, she does a lot of custody cases.
Guest:A lot of child psychology where she'll be sort of the one, you know, she'll interview a family and sort of help make a recommendation where the kids should go.
Guest:And really like heroic work.
Guest:She does and my dad's in politics.
Guest:My dad got really involved in school boards and community organizing uptown.
Guest:Yeah, because my sister was going through school there and he was just sort of fighting for her and then he he kind of fell into politics.
Guest:He it's exactly his skill set.
Guest:He got hired as the mayor
Guest:The mayor Koch's advisor for Hispanic affairs in his last term.
Guest:And he went from railing against the enemy to being like, oh, I'm the Hispanic spokesperson for Mayor Koch.
Guest:And who is the enemy?
Guest:Well, you know, the enemy is underfunded schools and the enemy is redistricting and the enemy is, you know, getting getting the same resources everyone else gets.
Guest:Right.
Guest:Um, and then he, you know, he, he actually really, um, flourished under Koch.
Guest:Koch was a guy, um, really complicated legacy.
Guest:Um, but, but my dad learned a lot about how politics really happens there.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And, um, and so, you know, I'm, I'm the kid who's dragged along to meetings.
Guest:You know, I remember sitting in Koch's office in the back, like coloring while like he, they're fighting about whatever they're fighting about in the corner.
Guest:And Koch was nice to you?
Guest:Yeah, Koch was really nice to me.
Guest:I spoke at my dad's swearing-in ceremony, and that was my first time in front of a microphone.
Guest:I'm seven years old, and me and my sister, like, sort of did little speeches about our dad, and I'm in, like, a little gray suit.
Guest:And so, yeah, Koch was always wonderful to us, and we'd go to Christmas parties at, like, Gracie Mansion, and it was really crazy, and I was, like, a little kid running around while, like, Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson are, like...
Guest:I'm running between their legs.
Guest:They're just hanging out.
Guest:They're around.
Guest:And then he went from there to a lot of different nonprofit jobs.
Guest:And then when I went to college, he quit the nonprofit sector because he couldn't afford to be in nonprofit anymore.
Guest:Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Guest:And he started a private political consulting firm.
Guest:And that's how he paid for my school, my education.
Guest:And he still has it?
Guest:Yeah, he still has it.
Guest:And it's interesting.
Marc:Who are most of his clients?
Marc:How does that work?
Guest:He did a lot.
Guest:It does a lot of New York political clients.
Guest:He ran Freddy Ferrer's mayoral campaigns.
Guest:He just got Adriano Espallat is the first Dominican elected to the House of Representatives.
Guest:He just got him elected.
Guest:That was one of the bright spots.
Guest:On election day.
Guest:But he also will represent, you know, he's fighting against Herbalife because Herbalife is that giant fucking Ponzi scheme.
Guest:It's that family thing, yeah.
Guest:Yeah, that really takes out Latino communities.
Guest:Really?
Guest:It's really sort of entrenched in Puerto Rico.
Marc:In terms of being an entrepreneurial option for people to get out.
Guest:Yes, that doesn't really get anyone out.
Marc:No, you just get the kit.
Marc:You get your friends and your family to buy three things.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And then it just sits in the closet.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So he fights against stuff like that.
Guest:He fight, you know, he's been he was hired to help, you know, get the Yes Network in the Bronx because it was insane that like this cable company wasn't providing the actual Yankees games when the Yankees play in the fucking Bronx.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's it's shit like that.
Guest:Like, that's the kind of stuff.
Marc:Well, that's what's interesting about New York politics, because of the density of the population.
Marc:There's there's always a hands on sort of like fight to be had every morning, every morning.
Marc:And and that, you know, it's all very practical.
Marc:You know, it's not it's not abstract.
Marc:No, no, it needs to happen right here, right now.
Marc:It's not sort of like over there.
Marc:Yeah, it's here.
Marc:So you're growing up with a clinical psychologist, two people trained in clinical psychology, and you're already engaged in the politics of race to a degree.
Guest:Yeah, because the New York politics is not removable from race.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:And also there's the idea of how do you make it in America that's hanging over everything.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:And that was sort of the story of In the Heights, right?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:And it's also... But the other thing with In the Heights, the really sort of, I think, biggest...
Guest:The reason that I started writing that show, because I started writing that show when I was 19 years old, was that I wanted to have a life in musical theater.
Guest:I was a kid who figured out who he was in the school play.
Guest:That was my corner of identification in the hierarchy of high school, because you get friends from different grades.
Guest:So when shit gets real in your grade and someone hates someone or you're the bad guy that day, you can go hang out with someone in a different hallway.
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like who's going to graduate and you're going to be sad.
Guest:But like you have friends outside of the bubble of the life or death stakes that are happening.
Guest:Emotional stakes.
Marc:Emotional stakes.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And that of bullshit sort of status jockeying and bullies and, you know.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Theater existed outside of that.
Guest:Oh, no.
Guest:Theater.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's safe haven.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's total safe haven.
Guest:Even kids who were the bullies would would occasionally audition like no one doesn't want to be in the school.
Marc:Right.
Marc:The guy who's a one note guy, maybe his one note will be the right one.
Marc:I'm the football player.
Marc:You'd be perfect for the guy that's got one line.
Marc:Maybe they'll surprise you and sing well.
Guest:There's a famous alum of my high school named... Well, his rapper name is Immortal Technique.
Guest:He's one of the most sort of politically ideological... He really made sort of an incredible life for himself as a rapper.
Guest:He was our school bully.
Guest:And he terrorized kids.
Guest:He'd throw them in the garbage.
Guest:I got thrown in the garbage by him.
Marc:Isn't that interesting?
Guest:And yeah, he was a really angry kid.
Guest:And it's been wonderful to watch him grow up and find a political outlet for that anger.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And...
Marc:And to know who the enemy is.
Guest:But he was just Felipe and he scared the shit out of us.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But he was in the school play.
Guest:He got a part the senior year and I was like, oh my God, I'm in a fucking play with the dude who scares the shit out of all my friends.
Marc:And were you surprised at that moment by his... Because it's like usually when someone is...
Marc:you know strutting like that or a bully like that that you know when they're in a different situation you can sort of see their vulnerability and and yeah he's got to memorize his lines right right it's that's that's a vulnerable place yeah yeah absolutely so all right so you see fiddler when you're in first grade but then do you keep going to musical theater do you do you what do you know that's the thing i mean i think i'm like a lot of kids in that i fell in love with cast albums like
Guest:I've never seen Man of La Mancha.
Guest:I've never seen Camelot, but my parents played them so much.
Guest:I've got this idealized version of them in my head.
Marc:Just the arc of the song.
Guest:The arc of the songs and the way those told the story.
Guest:And I sort of found...
Guest:I always found that I gravitate towards music that tells stories.
Guest:It's, I mean, Leonard Cohen yesterday, like Suzanne, I think of those.
Marc:Gut puncher.
Guest:Gut puncher.
Guest:Leonard Cohen has my favorite quote about songwriting, which is, being a songwriter is like being a nun.
Guest:You're married to a mystery.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:I wonder if the world could handle a musical not unlike Mamma Mia or some of the other ones they've attempted to do.
Marc:It would be a heavy evening.
Marc:It would be a heavy evening.
Guest:Like, all right, here comes the ninth verse.
Guest:But yeah, he's a tower.
Guest:But anyway.
Marc:It took me a long time for me to appreciate him.
Marc:Because I didn't quite register it.
Marc:Because I'm not a lyrics guy.
Marc:And I've talked about this before.
Marc:I'm a melody guy.
Marc:And I'm a fucking rock guy.
Marc:So for me to listen.
Marc:When I watch Hamilton, I was like- You're working hard.
Marc:Well, yeah, because I don't have the reflex of hip hop.
Marc:People who listen to hip hop, it's not an effort to understand what's happening or follow it.
Marc:But for me, just to pay attention to something other than beat and melody, it's sort of like, oh, I've got to work.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:You know, and I felt like an old person at that show.
Marc:Like, I'm sure there's a lot of people my mother's age going like, it was hard to follow because you got to listen and you got to follow the rhythms and they're not ingrained in me.
Marc:I mean, I like hip hop, but it was not what I was brought up with.
Guest:Right.
Guest:No, I feel that way when I go see Shakespeare, even if it's a play of Shakespeare, but even if it's a play I've seen, like I've seen Macbeth maybe 50 times and you go and it starts and you go, oh shit, I forgot how to listen to Shakespeare.
Guest:Like I'm in a panic the first 10 minutes and then your brain clicks into it.
Guest:Like there is a rhythm to the speech and the, the, the pentameter that then you, you go, okay, no, I'm with it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It took me a second to orient myself and I'm with it.
Guest:And I think the same thing happens with Hamilton.
Guest:I think you... No, definitely.
Guest:You go like this and you clench up like, oh, are they going to be talking this fast all night?
Guest:And then you get Leonard Cohen, then she gets you on your wavelength.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And then you walk into the wavelength, but also you're dealing with...
Marc:You know, the interaction there, there are, there are people interacting and talking, you know, in this rhythm.
Marc:So, you know, that engagement where it's not just coming at you, you know, forces you to feel the emotion of it.
Marc:And then that locks you in also on a deeper level that everybody sort of, and the songs are pretty.
Marc:Yes.
Yeah.
Guest:So I also I know I loved.
Guest:So I love musicals.
Guest:But, you know, if you're a Puerto Rican dude, here are your options.
Guest:Bernardo and West Side Story.
Guest:Paul, the Puerto Rican dancer and chorus line who gets one big monologue.
Guest:And that's about it.
Guest:And I didn't dance.
Guest:And so I was just like, I don't see how I can have a life in this.
Guest:But also, what was the reaction on the street?
Guest:What do you mean?
Guest:Oh, in my neighborhood?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Oh, I mean, that was... You know, it's funny.
Guest:I got into my school when I was five.
Guest:So I... Which school?
Guest:I went to Hunter, which is like this magnet school on the Upper East Side.
Guest:You have to take three IQ tests to get in.
Guest:And I got in in kindergarten.
Guest:Right.
Guest:So I had the conversation, are you Lin or Lin-Manuel when I was five years old?
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:I go from speaking Spanish at home to speaking English at school.
Guest:And that...
Guest:In a way, I'm really grateful for it because I sort of learned how to talk to very different types of people at a super young age.
Guest:A lot of kids, when they grow up in my neighborhood and then suddenly they're in college and they go, holy shit, there's no one like me.
Guest:Like, what the fuck am I doing here?
Guest:I had that happen when I was six years old.
Guest:So you were in college at that age?
Guest:I don't understand that.
Guest:or you got in?
Guest:No, the school's called Hunter College Elementary School.
Guest:It's at a CUNY.
Guest:I got it.
Guest:And so it's sort of a, it's a public school, but it's a gifted school.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Quote unquote gifted school.
Marc:And that was something that your parents were like, we're going to try to get them in here.
Guest:yeah i had a really rough time in nursery school they're like we got to get him you know you know we can't afford private school right like he's got to be smart enough to get into this motherfucker all right so you were able to cross that that cultural uh boundary at a very young age and it became adept you became sort of it was second nature to you to deal with the two worlds but like yeah but i had my friends in the neighborhood who went to school locally and then i had my friends who lived on the upper east side did you ever get shit for being a musical guy
Guest:In the neighborhood?
Guest:I got shit from being a musical guy everywhere.
Guest:That's part of it.
Guest:You know, I had the advantage of my great uncle in Puerto Rico was an actor.
Guest:He was a really famous actor on the island, actually.
Guest:He started the, his name is Ernesto Concepcion.
Guest:So my Latino side of the family, they're normally the ones who give you shit, like, what, acting?
Guest:What, acting?
Guest:Right, right.
Guest:They got it because we had a family member who was actually made a living at it.
Guest:So it wasn't quite as stigmatized as it might be in other families.
Guest:Yeah, I made a living in Puerto Rico and his son is still a really talented actor on the island too.
Guest:How much time do you spend in Puerto Rico?
Guest:Every summer.
Guest:So and that was the other thing I got.
Guest:So I'm switching between the Upper East Side and 200th Street.
Guest:And then every summer I get sent to this tiny town, Vega Alta, Puerto Rico, population.
Guest:I think it's like 70,000 now.
Guest:And where my Spanish is so shitty.
Guest:Uh that like kids my age just I'd start to engage and they go like you talk weird we're going over here so all my friends in Puerto Rico were my grandparents friends like I'm like I I'm still close with all the little old ladies who survive uh who are over there yeah and I was hanging out with them and watching He-Man in Spanish and watching fucking Flint Flintstones in Spanish was called Las Pica Piedras
Guest:Which means the stone cutters.
Guest:And so... So you feel very connected to it.
Guest:Yeah, I feel very connected to it because... And I'm grateful for that too because it was... I think a lot of kids whose parents come from somewhere else really feel a disconnect from their ancestral place of origin.
Guest:And I don't.
Guest:I had summers there.
Guest:I ate the food.
Guest:I worked.
Guest:I had a part-time job in Puerto Rico.
Guest:And so that was, you know, that's also a part of... Is your home bilingual now?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:My wife grew up in Washington Heights too.
Guest:And she's an even crazier mix.
Guest:She's Dominican-Austrian.
Guest:Her dad grew up in the city like...
Guest:her, her dad was like, I think of him as like a character in the Bronx tale.
Guest:Like he grew up when it was like black block, Puerto Rican block, like, and it was turf.
Guest:Um, he had a doo-wop group.
Guest:Like it's like that level of that New York in the, you know, in Washington Heights.
Guest:And then, uh, her mom's Austrian, like came here, uh, as a teenager, uh,
Guest:And so she grew up speaking Spanish.
Guest:She got sent to DR every summer.
Guest:She was sent to the Dominican Republic.
Guest:So she also had the weird, like, I have this connection to my island, but I go to Hunter and I live on 184th Street.
Guest:And so when we met,
Guest:We went to the same high school, didn't know each other in high school.
Guest:We were two years apart.
Guest:She's much more logical than me.
Guest:I always say, yeah, she was two years younger than me.
Guest:And she goes, I'm still two years younger than you.
Guest:Stop saying it in the past.
Marc:It's going to be that way for all of it.
Guest:Exactly.
Guest:It's going to stick that way.
Guest:Yeah, but then we remet in our mid-20s and it was one of those like, oh, we had the same experience and didn't know each other while we were living through it.
Guest:And you have one kid or two?
Guest:We have one kid.
Guest:He turned two, yeah.
Guest:And you speak Spanish at home?
Guest:Yeah, he speaks Spanish and English and a smattering of Austrian-German thanks to his oma, his grandma.
Yeah.
Marc:that's wild dude all right so okay so you go to the hunter the hunter school yeah and you as you said earlier at this time uh hip-hop was infusing the the neighborhood and also the you know the culture of of people your age yeah and that was really how you thought and and and enjoyed popular music outside you had this musical uh this weird ingrained in you this musical passion
Guest:Yeah, and I always just loved music that told stories.
Guest:And so genre becomes fluid.
Guest:Yeah, right.
Guest:You know, this sounds crazy, but a huge help in that was fucking Weird Al Yankovic.
Guest:Oh, yeah?
Guest:Yeah, like I was a little kid, and when you listen to Weird Al Yankovic, you realize that genre is just the clothes the artist puts on and the orchestration.
Guest:Like he'll do a polka version of fucking Hot Rocks.
Guest:And you're like, oh, it's the same chord progressions, the same melody.
Guest:It's just played on an accordion.
Guest:And suddenly it's a polka.
Marc:Interesting.
Marc:So through his parody, you are able to sort of deconstruct the structure of any sort of song.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you realize that like, oh, my hip hop friends are alienating my musical friends.
Guest:But like, we just like music that tells stories.
Guest:One of the first rap songs I memorized at a...
Guest:Great bus driver.
Guest:We had to take a separate bus that took us into school because I lived so far from school.
Guest:And our bus driver, I think, wanted to be a rapper.
Guest:It never happened.
Guest:His name was Billy Baker Jr.
Guest:And he would rap to us all the way to school.
Guest:He would do KRS-One raps, and he made us memorize Rapper's Delight.
Guest:And one of the ones he did that he made us memorize, this is in my 40-minute ride to and from school, was called Beef by Boogie Down Productions, a.k.a.
Guest:KRS-One.
Guest:And it was all about being a vegetarian.
Guest:And...
Guest:I never heard the actual song until I was an adult.
Guest:I only heard my bus driver's rendition.
Guest:But it was beef.
Guest:What a relief.
Guest:When will this poisonous product cease?
Guest:This is another public service announcement.
Guest:You can believe it or you can doubt it.
Guest:Let us begin now with the cow.
Guest:The way it gets to your plate and how.
Guest:The cow doesn't grow fast enough for man.
Guest:So he has drugs to make a quicker plan.
Guest:He has drugs to make the cow grow quicker faster.
Guest:Through the stress, the cow gets sicker.
Guest:21 different drugs are pumped into the cow with one big lump.
Guest:Just before it dies, it cries in the slaughterhouse.
Guest:And then he starts going on about Elijah Muhammad.
Guest:We learned this radical don't eat pork, don't eat meat song.
Guest:From your bus driver.
Guest:On our way to third grade.
Marc:You love that guy.
Guest:Love that guy.
Guest:So grateful for that guy.
Marc:What happened to that guy?
Guest:He's still around, Baker's Transportation.
Guest:It still drives around my neighborhood.
Guest:It's still taking kids to school.
Marc:I still live up there.
Marc:Isn't that amazing?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:That like, you know, one guy like that, not even a teacher.
Marc:Not a teacher.
Marc:The guy driving the bus was, they're sometimes the coolest people.
Marc:You got to see him every day.
Marc:He's got limited time with you, but he can put on his own show.
Guest:He puts on his own show.
Guest:And we learned mind playing tricks.
Guest:I mean, I really got a hip hop.
Guest:Did he get the whole bus singing?
Guest:Yeah, he'd get us all singing.
Guest:I mean, can you imagine?
Guest:Thank God for that guy.
Guest:Thank God for that guy.
Guest:So hip hop and storytelling is coming in on the bus.
Guest:I'm listening to musicals at home.
Guest:I'm getting cast in the school play.
Guest:And then...
Marc:Did you do any stuff at school?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:What'd you do?
Guest:I did my, you know, this is the musical theater version of who are your guys?
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Who are your guys?
Guest:Who are you guys?
Guest:Eighth grade.
Guest:I played the pirate King in pirates of Penzance.
Guest:Oh no.
Guest:I'm sorry.
Guest:That's ninth grade.
Guest:And that's a big deal to get a big role when you're a freshman, uh,
Guest:That's like everything, right?
Guest:So that was, I'd arrived.
Guest:And then 10th grade, I was Judas and Godspell.
Guest:11th grade, I was the assistant director for Chorus Line.
Guest:My girlfriend was the director.
Guest:And then senior year, I directed West Side Story.
Marc:Really?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:did you now we're at that time so this is high school yeah and this is a gifted school so yeah i'm one of five puerto ricans in the school right but also are you learning like i imagine you're learning you know the necessity of of of lights of choreography yeah and it was also yeah the other blessing was it was a student-run show it wasn't like a faculty directed show so you had to sort of get into that the the collaborative nature of theater
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you learn.
Guest:I mean, I think the life skills you learn on that you take with you the rest of your life because you can't hire or fire anyone.
Guest:You have no sway over your fellow students other than get them excited about making something.
Guest:You know, there's no grade for this.
Guest:It's extracurricular, but there's no tangible benefit.
Guest:So you just have to learn how to inspire other people and work with other people.
Guest:And, you know, that was immeasurably like...
Guest:And you're a kid.
Guest:And you're a kid.
Guest:And you're a kid.
Guest:And you're like, we're going to have a secret rehearsal on spring break.
Guest:Because we need it.
Guest:We have to.
Guest:Because we have to.
Guest:Even though it's not one of our mandated rehearsals.
Guest:And you learn how to just... And then there's the kid who's like, no, I'm going on vacation.
Guest:You go, well...
Guest:And you can't fire them.
Guest:You can't say, fuck you.
Marc:We'll make do without you.
Guest:Yeah, we'll figure it out.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And so you really learn a lot of how to get people inspired and get people going without anything other than the idea itself.
Marc:But let me ask you, I mean, like, you know, a collaboration is a collaboration.
Marc:You may acknowledge, you know, differences and uniquenesses and different backgrounds and stuff.
Marc:But did you ever feel the weight of it?
Guest:of being one of five Puerto Ricans in that school yeah you feel the weight of it I mean that's the uh and it's and I didn't even realize I felt because I got there at such a young age yeah I didn't realize it until I went to college and made friends with other Latino kids who had that experience yeah you know I lived in a house uh a Latino program house my sophomore year at West Lane it was called La Casa
Guest:You had to write an essay to get in.
Guest:And suddenly my friends also are first generation and I didn't realize how much of myself I was leaving at home when I went to high school.
Guest:I loved being in theater and my friends from high school I'm still in touch with and I'm still close with.
Guest:But then I got to school and I was like, oh, I can share jokes with these guys that I never would have brought to school.
Guest:It's an entirely different level.
Guest:And that's when I started writing in the Heights.
Guest:It was when I realized, oh,
Guest:My experience in Puerto Rico, my experience in my neighborhood, that's fair game for me to write about.
Guest:And when you bring all of yourself into a room, not just the part that is useful for the person you're talking to, which is something I learned to do very well in school, unconsciously.
Guest:Unconsciously, you go, no, just call me Lynn, because I can't deal with manual.
Marc:What I did, just to call back the beginning of the show.
Marc:Marc Maron said Lin Manuel.
Marc:Manuel.
Marc:Manuel.
Guest:Manuel.
Marc:Manuel.
Guest:But we, you know, I learned at a very young age how to just make people comfortable.
Guest:And I learned to adapt at such a young age that I didn't realize the power of bringing all of myself into a room until much later.
Marc:But that's interesting, though, because adapting is the beginning of collaborating on some level.
Marc:Absolutely.
Marc:In terms of your creative growth.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:that you know you knew who you were you weren't ashamed of it but you innately adapted to the the cultural yeah i talked about the things that we can talk about right what was on tv last night and then at some point you realize like i can celebrate the things that are different yeah and i can bring you something you maybe don't know about there you go you know that's that's what in the heights was the beginning of it was oh i'm gonna take the latin music i grew up with and i'm gonna play with that in these songs because i was writing musicals already in high school and there's no fuck you to that there's celebration to that correct yeah it's correct
Marc:Yeah, and there's no way to interpret it as fuck you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Unless you're sick.
Guest:Yeah, unless you're sick.
Marc:Unless you literally see something different as a threat.
Marc:Right.
Marc:But so now, what other stuff?
Marc:When did you start?
Marc:You started conceiving in high school.
Marc:In college.
Marc:In college.
Marc:But in high school, did you do any original work?
Guest:Yeah, I started, I wrote one act musicals in high school.
Guest:I wrote one my junior year.
Guest:Actually, did I tell you this?
Guest:I think I told you this when we first met after the show.
Marc:Backstage, it was all very adrenaline.
Guest:The guy who directed my first musicals, a 15-minute musical called Nightmare in D-Major, Chris Hayes.
Guest:Yeah, Chris Hayes.
Guest:Chris Hayes.
Guest:Political commentator.
Guest:Grew up in the Bronx.
Guest:We took the bus home together.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And we were really good friends.
Guest:He was a year older than me.
Guest:I know.
Marc:I had him in here.
Marc:He has a fantasy of returning to theater, you know.
Guest:Well, he played Zach in a chorus line.
Guest:And he was fucking great.
Guest:And he was a really great dramatic actor.
Guest:He's a sweet guy.
Guest:Sweet guy and directed my first musical.
Guest:My grandmother used to call Chris El Mexicano because he was the only one of my friends who when he would come over would speak Spanish to my grandmother.
Guest:Because he you know he would always work in summer jobs and he spoke Spanish pretty fluently for a white dude.
Guest:And and so she would always say donde esta el mexicano?
Guest:Where's the Mexican?
Guest:And the Mexican was Chris Hayes.
Marc:That's so interesting.
Marc:It's it's it's cute and it's it's it's moving, you know, because there is there was that working class civic minded.
Guest:Yes.
Marc:Family that you both came from.
Guest:Yeah, that's right.
Marc:That that you know that you weren't there wasn't this sort of, you know, gunning for the prize, which I think, you know, we all do innately, but we'd like it to be true to ourselves.
Marc:I think that's somewhat somewhat of what that first musical is about.
Marc:Right.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Well, in the Heights, sure.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Nightmare D Major on the other hand was like about a fetal pig from AP Bio coming back for revenge.
Guest:That's the one he directed?
Guest:That's the one he directed.
Guest:That was a musical?
Marc:That was a musical.
Guest:So was that a little shop of horrors kind of?
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It was like all this weird dream, right?
Guest:Okay.
Guest:So it was, you know, there was a lost love and then there was this fetal pig.
Guest:It was so fucking bad.
Guest:It was like, I'm just a fetal pig.
Guest:I'm not very big.
Guest:So why did you cut me up in bio class?
Guest:And she comes back with a knife and threatens him.
Guest:And then she dredges up all the monsters from his subconscious to fight him.
Guest:Like, here's your alcoholic, Uncle Steve.
Guest:Like, here's your fifth grade nurse.
Guest:You know, it's it was like a really sounds deep, though.
Guest:Yeah, it was I mean for me for 16 it was pretty deep and then my senior year I wrote a musical called seven minutes in heaven because write what you know So I wrote a musical about the first unchaperoned party I went to in seventh grade Where half the kids are like ready to make out and like do all the shit?
Guest:Yeah, and half the kids are like I thought we were watching Disney afternoon and like still kids like you're on that weird Nexus, right and
Guest:And that's like one of the first songs I wrote that I'm really proud of.
Guest:There was this little girl who sings, you know, in sixth grade, everything was very clear.
Guest:You guys go play.
Guest:We're fine right over here.
Guest:But suddenly we're interested in what they have to say.
Guest:They're just as stupid as they were last year.
Guest:Like she's the girl who's like, why are we fucking with boys right now?
Guest:Like we were all fine on our side of the line.
Guest:And now all my friends are obsessed with making out with those idiots that we were just playing with.
Guest:which is kind of how I felt like lurching into middle school.
Guest:Like, whoa, are we doing this?
Guest:Are we like racing to second base and third base?
Guest:And who's gotten to second base already?
Guest:Is that a thing?
Guest:Am I behind the curve?
Guest:And what exactly do you do with third base?
Guest:Yeah, I never understood third base.
Guest:I didn't understand third base until I was past it, to quote chorus line.
Guest:Is that a chorus line line?
Guest:I didn't know what puberty was until I was almost past it.
Guest:Yeah, that's a chorus line line.
Marc:I like the more specific version.
Guest:It's easier to put this in there than to figure out how to work it.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I get Frenching.
Guest:I get getting under the shirt.
Guest:I don't know what happens after that.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:In between third.
Marc:There's fluids involved.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:In between second and home plate.
Marc:There's a world of mystery.
Marc:Well, you got to ask questions.
Marc:You got to ask questions.
Marc:And at that age, you're not going to be asking questions.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:And they're not going to volunteer the information to you quite yet.
Marc:That's right.
Marc:They will eventually.
Marc:Oh, man.
Marc:Did you ever consider doing straight hip-hop?
Marc:I mean, not in terms of musical, but pursuing a career as a rapper or hip-hop artist?
Marc:I mean, you ended up being a hip-hop artist.
Guest:Yeah, but I think if I had been around...
Guest:that more in my day-to-day school life.
Guest:I think that's probably the direction I would have gone in.
Guest:We had one really great hip-hop group in our school, and I sort of worshipped those guys.
Guest:They had a band called Dugis.
Guest:They're still around.
Guest:They were a group.
Guest:They weren't like a troupe.
Guest:Yeah, they were like a Roots-type band.
Guest:They were a band, and they had MCs, and they were great.
Guest:And all I ever wanted to do was I was in...
Guest:Pirates of Penzance with the main MC from his name is Lorne Hammons.
Guest:He's a great guy.
Guest:And I would sheepishly be like, I wrote this rap.
Guest:Do you think it's any good?
Guest:Like, cause he was, he was already a senior and he was such a gift.
Guest:He's such a gifted MC.
Guest:Um, so, but, but then I never got any encouragement in that direction.
Guest:Uh, so I just sort of, you know, it just sort of bled into the, the, the musicals I was writing.
Marc:So when you go to college, you went to Wesleyan?
Guest:Wesleyan.
Marc:Wesleyan.
Guest:Yeah, in Connecticut.
Marc:Connecticut.
Marc:So that's a big shift.
Guest:That's a big shift.
Guest:For a New Yorker, too.
Guest:I passed my driver's test the day before I went to school.
Guest:Because, you know, when you grow up in New York, like, who the fuck needs to drive?
Marc:I know.
Marc:It's a lot of people.
Marc:It's very interesting to me.
Marc:Anyone who grew up in a city with good public transportation, you're like, I don't fucking need to do that.
Guest:Yeah, I need to go to your 20s.
Guest:But I had the luxury of my sister had a hand-me-down car that she wasn't using because she lived in the city.
Guest:And they were like, well, you can have a beat-up Saturn if you pass the test.
Guest:So I passed the test the day before.
Guest:I basically learned to drive at school.
Guest:And when you packed up your car, that was your first big trip.
Guest:My first time on the fucking highway.
Guest:Was it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:On 95 fucking hands at 10 and two, shaking.
Marc:It's actually easier.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, in Turkey, you can relax a little bit.
Marc:Yeah, a little bit.
Marc:I used to love driving in the city.
Marc:When I had my car there, when I was running up and down the FDR at one in the morning to do comedy spots, it was exciting.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:To drive in the city to catch that run of lights, where you're like, I'm going all the way downtown on this run of green lights.
Guest:My version of that is catching the 23 at 96th Street and getting like 72nd, 40th.
Guest:It's the closest thing we have to time travel.
Guest:Right.
Right.
Guest:i was like oh i thought it was gonna take a half an hour fuck there's a two train yes boom yep beautiful yeah i i still i i took the subway to carnegie hall the other day it was great how many times you take the subway to to the theater to do hamilton oh i mean all the time all the time it was a bitch at the public yeah because that's you know i live train i live yeah it's the a and then there's no real good way to go east you know in new york math it's harder to go east than it is to go north south
Marc:Right, okay, so you get to college and you start, you were now in the arts program at Wesleyan?
Guest:Yeah, I wanted to be a double major in theater and film.
Guest:And then just like in high school, theater ended up taking up all my time.
Guest:So I did my core requirements for film and then never pursued it.
Guest:And just started, I was writing and acting in shows in equal measure.
Guest:And there's no musical theater major at Wesleyan.
Guest:um it's it's very avant-garde it's very viewpoints it's very what like what was being taught oh well you get taught the canon right you get your tennessee williams and you get your you know three penny opera and and and brecht and and you get all that good foundational stuff but the stuff people are putting up is is very um esoteric it's esoteric it's i was in a
Guest:play by Maria Irene Fornis called Molly's Dream.
Guest:It was the first play I got at Wesleyan and it's like a super out there play where it's I'm a guy who's dressed as a cowboy and five women are all like hanging on to me and I have no idea why.
Guest:I did not understand the symbolism of the play I was in.
Guest:But I'm also trying to make musical theater happen, which is very odd at Wesleyan.
Guest:And no one was putting up musicals?
Guest:They were, but all extracurricular.
Guest:It wasn't a thing that the actual theater department focused on.
Marc:Sort of like in high school.
Marc:Where I went to college, you had a stage troupe that would either do a play or they'd do a musical.
Marc:But you didn't see many musicals from the theater school.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:And so I kind of supplemented that because I knew what I wanted.
Guest:So I would go, you know, I'd take voice lessons and I took piano lessons.
Marc:Outside of school or in school?
Guest:No, within the music department.
Guest:Okay.
Guest:And then found a great professor who saw In the Heights when I put it up at Wesleyan and did a tutorial with me.
Guest:So I got like a semester of credit just doing a private musical theater tutorial.
Marc:He took a
Guest:liking to you and mentored you he said this kid's got something yes you know this is not something we see here but it's valid absolutely and who is that guy a Bill Francisco who is a legend at Wesleyan was one of the legendary super eccentric super brilliant theater directors and we my class got him in it he retired our year so we were sort of got the last of his brilliance and strangeness and in dealing with him I
Guest:I learned to navigate every mood because he had a lot of them.
Guest:And some days it was, you're brilliant and this is wonderful.
Guest:And one day I remember being in a rehearsal and there was a love scene in the show I was writing.
Guest:And he said, are we all sitting here because Lin can't get laid?
Guest:Like, is that what the fuck we're sitting here to watch?
Guest:I can't deal with this and walk out.
Guest:And like it was, I never knew which bill I was going to get from day to day.
Guest:On many levels.
Guest:Again, the adapting kid is put to the test.
Guest:Put to the test by a brilliant but also very moody genius.
Marc:So when you score, you know, because I have musical in me.
Marc:I stuff it down.
Marc:You push it down.
Marc:I push it down.
Marc:But a lot of times I find myself, it's very sort of like nicotine lozenges.
Guest:Yeah, you make up the song.
Guest:I'm here with my thermos again.
Guest:you get beautiful beautiful but that instinct is is is just the instinct that you nurture when you're when you write musicals it's the when do we break into song right but there's like but you can like i don't go to many musicals but i know like that like you know if i go there's my thermos i put why are you singing like that like like that's the thing
Marc:No, I know because I'm not, I didn't take it to the next level.
Marc:That's your job.
Marc:What I'm saying is I know just after that, that I can go like, there's my thermos with coffee in it.
Marc:How will I drink it?
Marc:When am I going to drink it?
Marc:Thermos, thermos.
Marc:You know, like I can feel it.
Marc:Oh, you went to finiculi finucula.
Guest:That works.
Guest:Yeah, it works.
Guest:But it's so funny when you think musical, suddenly it's, I gotta sing like this.
Marc:But there's a little of that in there.
Marc:I don't care if it's hip hop or not.
Guest:There's, of course there is.
Marc:You gotta do that.
Guest:Yeah, but for me, my favorite musicals are where you have that and you have that layer of artifice that we're breaking into song, but then it also feels real.
Guest:It also, you have those moments that feel conversational.
Guest:And those are also my favorite moments in hip hop too.
Marc:But I think that's the tricky thing.
Marc:I mean, to have a story that isn't rendered ridiculous.
Marc:Correct.
Marc:By the nature of the mode.
Guest:Yeah, and the best songwriters...
Guest:can do that.
Guest:They can make heightened speech feel like something we'd say in our real lives.
Guest:Whether it's Sondheim with a little priest from Sweeney Todd with them singing, how about priest?
Guest:Try little priest.
Guest:And it just feels like they're talking, but it's this incredible
Guest:elaborate rhyme scheme.
Marc:And also, just by what you just did there, I realized that with the benefit of song, you can really talk about heavy shit and deliver it in a way that it's like lubricated.
Yeah.
Marc:And all of a sudden you don't realize until it hits your heart what's happened.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:You sneak it in.
Guest:You absolutely sneak in whatever you like.
Guest:One of the biggest showstoppers in Hamilton is this song called The Room Where It Happens, where it's from the perspective of a guy who's not at a meeting, but then the shit he's saying, and you're seeing dancing and you're seeing this incredible...
Guest:stagecraft and incredible orchestrations by alex lackamore but you know the lyrics are the art of the compromise hold your nose and close your eyes you know we we want our leaders to save the day but we don't get a say in what they trade away we dream of a brand new start but we dream in the dark for the most part wow it's so irrelevant
Marc:It's like, you know, you're writing from a historical context, but politics has not changed.
Marc:Not a bit.
Marc:Not a fucking bit.
Marc:It's fucking fascinating.
Marc:So now, okay, so you do this personal story about your neighborhood, you know, that is, you know, it's your first musical and it gets a lot of attention.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And now when you do orchestrations, do you write music?
Yeah.
Guest:Yeah, so the way I work is I play piano.
Guest:I'm a pretty shitty pianist, but I can play just well enough to write my songs.
Marc:And you can read music.
Guest:And I can read music.
Guest:And that becomes part of the process too.
Guest:Like if a melody can survive my chops, then it's catchy enough to survive.
Guest:You know what I mean?
Guest:Like a jingle.
Guest:Yeah, it's got to survive like my...
Guest:fruitlessly getting it wrong until I've got what's in my head down on paper.
Guest:And my way of working, I think the fastest way to work is I'll make a big, you know, Heights was written in GarageBand and Hamilton was written in Logic.
Marc:We're writing, we're in GarageBand now.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Me and you.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:We exist in GarageBand.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:All of In the Heights got written in GarageBand.
Guest:And then I send these files with rudimentary arrangements.
Guest:I played the bass part.
Guest:I played the guitar part.
Guest:I played the piano.
Guest:And I, you know, send it to Alex Lacamoire, who then orchestrates it.
Guest:He assigns, you know, he adds all these colors in the way he assigns the music to different parts.
Guest:And what's his job title?
Guest:He's the music director and he's the orchestrator and arranger for my work.
Marc:And the guy you've worked with forever, Thomas?
Marc:Tommy Kail, yeah.
Marc:You worked with him in college?
Guest:No, we met the week after I graduated college, but he directed In the Heights.
Guest:We went to the same school.
Guest:And who co-wrote In the Heights with you?
Guest:Kiara, Kiara Hudes.
Guest:She came along in 2004.
Guest:When I realized I can't do all three of these jobs and you know, I was I was writing the whole thing then and I didn't want to let go of music or lyrics, but I was happy to let go of sort of libretto duty.
Guest:Yeah, and she was it was like what exactly is the libretto?
Guest:That's the story.
Guest:That's the story, that's the dialogue, that's the structure.
Guest:You know, it's sort of the unsung art form in musicals.
Guest:The running joke is, you know, if a musical succeeds, you don't notice the book writer at all.
Guest:If a musical fails, it's the book writer's fault.
Guest:And Chiara wrote an amazing libretto for us.
Guest:And she grew up in North Philly.
Guest:So she understood sort of that immigrant neighborhood changing in the same visceral way that I did.
Guest:And first in her family to go to college.
Guest:And so she really like got those characters.
Guest:And, you know, she was working from an existing show that I wrote in college.
Guest:And then we sort of ripped it up and wrote it from scratch when she came on board.
Marc:Wow.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:She's incredible.
Marc:And that did well for you?
Guest:Did well.
Guest:Like to me, that was the pinnacle of how well a musical could do.
Guest:Like we won best musical.
Guest:We ran three years.
Guest:We had a touring company.
Guest:And you're acting for the first time.
Guest:And I was acting.
Guest:I was, you know, I got out of the bellhop outfit and got to play a leading role in a musical.
Guest:And I wrote my own sort of opportunity in that way.
Marc:Yeah, I know that.
Marc:I know that feeling.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:But you had not been hitting the boards too long with auditions and stuff.
Marc:I mean, you were always working on the musical, right?
Guest:I was always working on the musical.
Guest:I was substitute teaching to pay my rent.
Marc:But you weren't like going out on auditions every other day, were you?
Guest:No, not really, but I did.
Guest:I mean, I went on voiceover auditions.
Guest:I didn't have an agent for a really long time.
Guest:You got one now, though, right?
Guest:I got one now, yeah.
Guest:But Heights was my calling card in a pretty big way.
Marc:And that solidified you.
Marc:Yeah, your talent and also your world that like, you know, not unlike your father's entrance into politics.
Marc:They were like, all right, we've got a Latino guy that that's that that speaks the language of art and love and music and everything else.
Marc:And he can do it for a mainstream audience.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And I think I think what people recognize in that show, both traditional musical theater fans and people who want something new out of their musicals was these guys love musicals.
Guest:You know, there's a lot of people who sort of try to write shows for Broadway and we go, we hate musicals.
Guest:That's why we wrote one.
Guest:And so, you know, they get met with indifference by the community.
Guest:And In the Heights is such a love letter to the music, to Fiddler, to fucking, I mean, everything I grew up loving in the same way Hamilton is.
Guest:You know, I didn't want to burn it down and start from scratch.
Guest:I wanted to write my version of a musical.
Guest:Right.
Marc:But there was also some precedent.
Marc:I mean, there was, you know, like I remember when I was a kid, you know, going to see the black cast of Guys and Dolls.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:and bringing the funk, bringing the noise, and some of the stuff.
Guest:Yeah, that came out the same year as Rent, and that was a watershed year.
Guest:I mean, that was 1996.
Marc:And Kushner's musical I saw.
Marc:Yeah, Carolina Change.
Marc:Which I thought was tremendous.
Marc:Incredible musical.
Marc:And what else?
Marc:Because I just talked to George Wolfe, and when I was there to see Hamilton.
Marc:George Wolfe is amazing.
Marc:He's great.
Marc:And I went to see Shuffle Along.
Marc:Such an incredible show.
Marc:It was a great show, and there are similar themes.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Who gets to tell your story?
Guest:Yeah, and maybe one of the greatest companies we'll ever see.
Guest:In Shuffle Along?
Guest:In Shuffle Along.
Guest:It was astounding.
Guest:It's crazy.
Marc:It's not still running.
Marc:It is a little crazy, isn't it?
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But that's an interesting question because Hamilton is now going to run until your kid can play the roof.
Marc:So most likely it's never going to go away.
Marc:They're going to rename the theater.
Marc:It's like the Lion King did.
Marc:You know what I mean?
Marc:Like this is going to be the Hamilton Theater.
Marc:That's fine.
Marc:Congratulations.
Marc:But the but the interesting thing about Shuffle Along, it's a specifically black experience.
Marc:Yes.
Guest:And it's about a story that isn't told.
Marc:Isn't told and is black history.
Marc:And it's black history that was sort of passed over by the black community and also by the show business community, obviously by the white community.
Marc:And he resurrected something that was a missing chunk of the history of show business and the history of the black experience in America.
Marc:Why isn't that show running?
Guest:I'm genuinely sort of asking myself the question.
Guest:I think what happened with Shuffle Long is a lot in a lot of ways what happened within in the Heights.
Guest:There are things that we just have cultural baggage about.
Guest:Yeah, we can't help but have it.
Guest:Some people will hear hip hop and that is a barrier to entry for them.
Guest:That's not for me.
Guest:I'm not going to spend and Broadway's fucking expensive.
Guest:So they think that's not for me.
Guest:I'm not going, you know.
Guest:in the Heights, won all the things it could win, and yet by the standards of the stuff, the success it had, didn't run very long.
Guest:Because hip hop, Latin musical, that's a lot of cultural barriers for the people who can afford Broadway tickets.
Guest:And I think a similar thing happened
Guest:And with Shuffle Along, it was this African-American history.
Guest:And, you know, there's no barrier to entry there.
Guest:You know, some of the greatest musicals, you think of The Wiz, you think of Porgy and Bess, you think of there's such an incredible history of African-American musicals written by African-Americans, starring African-Americans.
Guest:But for whatever reason, it didn't get out of it.
Guest:Something was a barrier to entry for people.
Guest:And I don't know what that was.
Guest:And that was true of In the Heights, too.
Guest:People being like, yeah, not for me.
Guest:They heard the elevator pitch, and they're like, not for me.
Marc:Yeah, but I think also that working people do get priced out.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:Absolutely.
Guest:It's so fucking expensive to mount the show.
Marc:And how do you sort of like, because I know you guys did take action to sort of make the production more available, didn't you?
Guest:Yeah, I mean, the biggest priority we had was kids have to be able to see the show.
Guest:It's useless to put on Hamilton and not have the kids who are studying this shit not have access to it.
Guest:So we developed a program where 20,000 school kids are seeing Hamilton every week.
Guest:Every year and that's going to continue with the touring productions like in every every city that show will go to we will partner with the chapter title one schools and get the kids who are studying that into the theater.
Guest:You know, we can't solve the problem of supply and demand.
Guest:You know, the magic of theater is that you're in the room with the thing.
Guest:And I don't know how to solve 1,300 people.
Guest:That's how much we have room for.
Marc:Right, but also the soundtrack is available at a reasonable price.
Guest:And the soundtrack is the whole show.
Guest:It's a sung through show.
Guest:So you get the entire plot and everything.
Marc:And then you're giving kids that experience that you had.
Guest:Yeah, exactly.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:I mean, that's how you experience musical theater.
Guest:Yeah.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because we didn't see many shows.
Guest:We just I just fell in love.
Marc:When does this like we're going to get back to you buying that book in a second.
Marc:But when does this like when does it is it available for can high schools do it?
Guest:Not yet.
Guest:Right.
Guest:There's sort of the life of a show is if you're lucky enough to get to Broadway and it does a little well, you do a tour and more people can see that production.
Guest:That's the same footprint and the same everyone's involved.
Guest:Like Tommy and I are putting up those tours.
Guest:We're casting those tours.
Guest:Some shows get the luxury of a U.K.,
Guest:uh production we're getting that with hamilton we didn't get that on in the heights just there was no one interested in mounting that in the heights there's a production there that's doing well now but it's not our production um because that's been freed because that's been free and then yeah to the royalty after those after those run their their their lifespan you go to stock an amateur um and that is that's where you buy the books at who puts out those that's right it's either mti or rnh or tam's whitmark or french's french's yeah yeah
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So those are the big four in stock and amateur land.
Guest:And that's when school productions happen and regional productions happen.
Guest:And you have some level of.
Marc:But that's just part of the arc of the life of a show.
Guest:That's the arc of a life of a show.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:It's like the way TV shows go from first run to rerun to syndication.
Guest:Sure.
Guest:We go Broadway to tour to.
Marc:Now, why are there plans to to to make a movie?
Marc:Of Hamilton?
Guest:Not for a while.
Guest:I'm in no rush.
Guest:I really feel like we work so hard to make a thing that works in the theater.
Guest:I want people to see it in that form first.
Guest:I don't want the movie, which will be an act of translation, if it's brilliant or if it's terrible.
Guest:Well, you did study it a little bit.
Guest:I did study it a little bit.
Marc:It's your next evolution.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:I'd like... There's the musicals that go straight to movie.
Guest:You have your Hairspray or you have... I don't know.
Guest:I'm trying to think of other shows.
Guest:And then you have the musicals that take 30 years.
Guest:Like Chicago...
Guest:open the the movie of chicago which i think is actually better than the show even i thought rob marshall did such an amazing job with that thing um came out like 25 years after that show debuted so what was interesting to me too is that like in that you know five minute conversation when we met backstage with um who's the guy with the shaved head chris jackson who plays george washington
Marc:Right.
Marc:It was great.
Marc:Everyone was great.
Marc:I was honored to see the original cast.
Marc:You know, like very quickly, you know, I'm scrambling to connect with you to adapt to the world of the backstage at the musical of the big musical star.
Marc:But, you know, we locked in on this, the model, which, you know, I said, you know, I was nervous to say it, but I said it was like Jesus Christ Superstar.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you hit the nail on the head, by the way.
Marc:Yeah.
Guest:Because when I was reading that book, I thought, oh, this will be my Jesus Christ Superstar.
Guest:That's really what I thought when I started reading Hamilton's story was I could write songs.
Guest:You know, my skill set of writing hip hop and R&B tunes fits this dude's life perfectly because this is a guy who needs words and needs and sort of never shuts up.
Guest:The kind of music I write will service his life really well.
Guest:And I'm going to make a concept album, which was what Jesus Christ Superstar did.
Guest:It was a concept album first.
Guest:And then they figured out how to stage it later.
Marc:really yeah it was not it was not conceived as a show and that was a record my parents had and that was a record that i listened to as a kid yeah and because there and when i saw the movie i was like what the fuck well yeah i mean that movie too there's lots of yeah they'll get in a bus now to the desert right
Marc:Norman Jewison, all these hippies, they go out in a bus and then it unfolds.
Marc:Right.
Guest:I always think of the Mr. Show spoof of it too, which was- Oh, I don't remember that.
Marc:Oh, it's brilliant.
Marc:But the, I don't know if I saw it, but the thing that really kind of locked it in for me was two components.
Marc:was that you know jesus christ superstar was narrated by judas who was dead and you know and aaron burr who was definitely the under you know the the villain in a way of your show he's the one that comes out and starts the story yeah the one that killed the guy yeah that's exactly right and that's directly inspired by jesus christ and then like you know is it king george is that like the like herod song he's
Marc:which is my favorite song so if you are the christ you're the great jesus christ prove to me that you're no fool walk across my swimming pool just do that for me like i remember that and that was well sung mark thank you so then so then when george comes out and does his bit i'm like this is it this is it yeah he's herring
Guest:Right.
Guest:Yeah, totally.
Guest:Totally.
Guest:And and that was I'm that was the fun of that.
Guest:And and then as you're writing it, you realize.
Guest:So that's your inspiration.
Guest:And then you go, OK, but this isn't actually Jesus Judas because it's not it's not follower who turns into enemy.
Guest:And you but I look to the musical theater sort of predecessors.
Guest:So is this Amadeus?
Guest:Is this Mozart Salieri?
Guest:Kind of.
Guest:There's times when Burr is envious, but this is not a case of someone having genius and someone having not.
Guest:They're both brilliant.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:So it's actually so as you're right, as I was writing, I realized this is a difference of temperament.
Guest:This is a guy who is cautious versus a guy who is reckless.
Marc:Right.
Marc:And cautious in a surviving within this new structure like that.
Marc:He was cautious as a career.
Guest:He was he was a career cautious.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And this guy who, in a lot of ways, is very similar to him, Hamilton, they're both orphaned at a very young age.
Marc:But Hamilton's sort of a bipolar genius in a way.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:Maybe not bipolar.
Marc:I don't want to throw that word around.
Marc:Definitely had mania.
Guest:I don't know about the other side of it, but definitely had moments of mania.
Marc:thinking about these elements had you finished a book or is this happening you you buy this book in borders you're looking for a book to read in mexico and i'm i'm assuming projecting and i can just ask you that you know you picked this book up and you couldn't put it down couldn't put it down couldn't put it down became my vacation was like you know this is 2008 so you know my wife then girlfriend and i were
Guest:We're at like an all-inclusive resort.
Guest:We're drinking margaritas.
Guest:I'm reading the book.
Guest:We're watching season one of Mad Men on DVD.
Guest:And that was the vacation, was just reading that book and being like, oh my God, the song the British sang was The World Turned Upside Down.
Guest:How fucking great.
Guest:It's just me circling shit that I think makes sense in musical form as I'm reading it the first time through.
Marc:You know, what was it like right when you're reading the book where you're like, this is my guy and this is my protagonist?
Guest:When he wrote his way out of the Caribbean, when he literally wrote there's a there's a hurricane that destroys St.
Guest:Croix.
Guest:He's living in St.
Guest:Croix.
Guest:He's a teenager, but he's running this trading company.
Guest:He's doing the books for this trading company.
Guest:And this hurricane destroys the island.
Guest:He writes an essay about it.
Guest:And the essay is so flowery and beautifully written that it gets published in the Danish American Gazette in an effort to get relief efforts for the island.
Guest:And people take up a collection to send him to the colonies to get his education.
Guest:They say, go, go, become a doctor, come back because you're too smart to be here.
Guest:And to me, I was like, well, that's the most hip hop shit I've heard.
Guest:He literally writes his way out of his circumstances.
Guest:Right.
Guest:And I had that notion.
Guest:And then the book sort of kept proving me right.
Guest:The fact that he wrote under a pseudonym when he was writing against the British crown, like, oh, MCs, like writing under pseudonyms, like just like every piece of hip hop culture that I respond to had some reflection within his life in some way or another.
Marc:And at that time, when did the conceptualization to make it
Marc:you know, about New York in a way.
Marc:And then also to honor the idea that these characters, although historical characters, are fluid ethnically.
Guest:Yeah, well, I mean, that came with that initial inspiration.
Guest:So the first time I'm reading the book, I'm not picturing the literal founders anymore.
Guest:I'm picturing, okay, Hamilton's a mix of Big Pun, Biggie, Pac, and Eminem.
Guest:That's who he is in the conception of how he's going to
Guest:rap and how he's going to sing uh you get to george washington and you go okay this guy's all moral authority okay so he's common he's john legend he's those guys who just project this innate goodness and majesty so i'm dream you know i read the name hercules mulligan i go well that's buster rhymes that's the most fucking awesome series of syllables hercules
Guest:Like I heard it in Busta Rhymes' voice when I read it on the page.
Guest:So I was already casting hip hop stars as the founders the first time I'm reading the book.
Guest:And your guy who, what's his name, Daveed?
Marc:Diggs.
Marc:He was, it was interesting that the, I don't know how long the casting process happened.
Marc:Yeah, but it was like, it's a very profound thing.
Marc:especially in a time now where aggressive politics is going to be part of our cultural reaction and language is that you're taking a story about one of the founders and not only integrating it but elevating it through ethnic fluidity, which is a word, I don't know if I made it up, but you understand what I'm saying.
Marc:I do.
Marc:That represents a story that is about all of us.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And, you know, when you were casting that, what what were your what were you looking for?
Marc:Exactly.
Marc:I know you're honoring these these these voices in your head, but, you know, you got to have real song and dance guys.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And you've got to have the ability to sing and dance and rap.
Guest:And they don't teach you how to rap in musical conservatories.
Marc:But was it a thing for you when you when you were casting saying, like, none of these guys are going to be white?
Guest:No, we never put down that dictum.
Guest:It was, we got to find the best people to do this.
Guest:And we got to represent, we have to represent the most sort of beautiful diversity of people we can find.
Guest:And that's- New York.
Guest:New York City.
Guest:Sort of the calling card was, this has got to look like the A train.
Guest:It's got to look like one car on the A train.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:And with all that represents mariachi bands, break dancers, whatever the fuck.
Marc:Right.
Guest:And then you get this amazing story about a guy who's a flawed guy.
Guest:They're all flawed.
Guest:Oh, they're also flawed.
Guest:But yeah, but our main guy is deeply flawed because he's not the one to shut the fuck up.
Guest:And he doesn't keep his dick in his pants.
Guest:He doesn't keep his dick in his pants.
Guest:And he and the thing that is his strength is his undoing.
Guest:You know, he he writes his way off the island.
Guest:He writes his way into Washington's good graces.
Guest:And then when he's presented with the fact that he fucked up and some people know about it, he decides to tell the world.
Guest:Oh, yeah, I fucked this married lady, but I was always honest in my business affairs.
Guest:And he thinks that's going to like save him.
Guest:It was totally used against him.
Guest:And you can also see that as an act of patriotism.
Guest:You know, if the if there's stench around him as being a corrupt public figure as a guy who misuses treasury funds or misuses government funds in any way.
Guest:You know the country's five fucking years old that that could be the end of it.
Guest:So he instead blows up his personal spot You know, I got to I got friend.
Guest:I was friends with Mike Nichols before he passed you were and Yeah, I got cast in a reading That he did shortly after in the Heights sort of a reading of a play that nothing ever really happened with it But we went to dinner and this was before I'd written any of Hamilton I said I think I'm writing some about Hamilton and he said that's the greatest that's the last honest American
Guest:he was a big hamilton buff and he always pointed to that moment of that guy ruined his life to save the republic um and and his wife like taking the ultimate affront of blowing up his personal life and his infidelity and stuck by him like he thinks those are the two of the most courageous americans who ever lived and he was at our last workshop before we opened at the public that was the last time i saw him
Marc:How often did you counsel with him through the process of creating it?
Guest:Not so much on this, just sort of checking in and I would tell him, you know, I'm done.
Guest:And we invited him to that last workshop and I was so thrilled to have him there.
Guest:Tommy Kail, you know, there's a great quote where if Tommy Kail had to make his Mount Rushmore of directors, he would say Mike Nichols and Hal Prince twice.
Yeah.
Guest:you know those are the guys um and so so you know i think the fact that he he always respected hamilton the historical hamilton he was very uh he was very happy that the show uh was gonna have a kind of a life um and he was he was a wonderful guy the last email i had from him was just after my son was born um just saying like oh it's it's all different now yeah you you're you're gonna find all new stuff
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And also, like, you know, with Hamilton, you know, you were able to deal with class.
Marc:You were able to deal with not only just an immigrant story, but also a story about politics, about love, about, you know, desire to transcend your class and all the stuff that, you know, that are conflicts and parts of the American experience now, obviously.
Marc:Absolutely.
Guest:Now, they're coming for me.
Guest:I've said too much.
Marc:I thought that was just your ride.
Marc:I thought you were at that level now.
Guest:No, not yet.
Marc:They're going to chopper you out.
Marc:No.
Marc:gotta go ladder drops into the garage but now like you know dealing with you as we were talking when you came in that you said you were on in route in route from from London on election night and you you landed in this yeah and we talked a little bit about your political consciousness you know you're a young man and bless you for saying so oh come on I'm 36 yes yes you're a young man thank you that's very sweet
Marc:And, you know, you, you know, your creative life evolved in, you know, a fairly, you know, restrictive political environment, you know, being the Bush years and everything else in that.
Marc:And your political life, I guess, started then as well.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:I mean, I mean, that's it's funny.
Guest:I got I got to my hotel after flying on Election Day and I jumped immediately into a big Skype session with the same group of friends that I've spent the last four elections with.
Guest:It's my Wesleyan.
Guest:So two Bush and one Obama, two Bush and one Obama, two Obama's.
Guest:got very stoned in 2000, waiting for a president to emerge.
Guest:And, you know, Wesleyan's a pretty left-leaning place.
Guest:I fell asleep, but my friends all went to False Hill and wailed and howled at the moon and just sort of wailed, like, how is this happening?
Guest:2004 we're at my friend's house in the village and no matter how many times we played Eminem's anti-bush song it didn't break our way and just remembering getting very sort of sourly drunk and then 2008 we were in the same apartment and danced in the streets and dance in Union Square do you remember like were you in New York City when 9-11 happened
Guest:Yeah, I was on my way there because it was primary day.
Guest:That was a voting day.
Guest:And my dad was running Freddie's mayoral campaign.
Guest:So I was gonna drive down, vote, and come back.
Guest:And it was also the day Bob Dylan's Time Out of Mind album came out.
Guest:So the first thing I did in the morning was, I knew I was driving to the city.
Guest:I went to the record store in Middletown, Connecticut, Colony Records, to buy the new Bob Dylan.
Guest:And the very stoned, sleepy guy who runs that shop was like, hey, man, someone tried to blow up the World Trade Center.
Guest:And I said to him, yeah, that happened like eight years ago.
Guest:Because I was thinking about the first time.
Guest:The guy in the van.
Guest:The guy in the van.
Guest:And I was like, this guy's really out of it.
Guest:And he said, no, man.
Guest:And then got very clear-eyed and said, it's a really good day to buy a Bob Dylan record.
Guest:And I popped it in my car.
Guest:And then when I drove back home, I turned on the TV and the second plane was flying into the tower.
Guest:I remember just sort of people coming over to our house and serving drinks and calling family members because I was supposed to drive.
Guest:And then we heard that Manhattan was sealed and I wasn't able to go down because there was no one getting in or out.
Guest:Were you able to get home?
Guest:I got home a few days later.
Guest:Wow.
Guest:um and uh my dad was downtown he saw it he was running a campaign um and you know in his mind he says freddie ferrer would be mayor if that hadn't happened because they suspended the election um and then the other guy you know there was no hiring a latino mayor after that happened it was like we're not we're not with that we're not with the system we need to right
Marc:And that defined political discourse for another eight years.
Marc:Yes.
Marc:And the element of immigrants and terrorism defines it again now.
Marc:And it has always sort of like trying to find a way forward that would honor all people, which is also what Hamilton does.
Marc:And I've talked about this a little bit because it's just happened.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:But obviously...
Marc:you know, a lot of people in this country, you know, made a decision for whatever reason, you know, some better than others, but they are people.
Marc:But, you know, the progressive fight of, you know, racial lines and immigration, which is so much of what Hamilton speaks about, you know, as an artist, you know, how do you impulsively or, you know, now two, three days after, what do you feel going forward?
Marc:What has been invigorated in you?
Guest:Well, you know, there's the initial despair that your candidate didn't win and values that you believe in.
Guest:And that's normal.
Guest:And and then I don't know.
Guest:I woke up with an enormous sense of moral clarity, which, as you know, for progressives is always hard.
Guest:Yeah.
Guest:Clarity is never something that's close to in the conversation.
Guest:It's like, well, what about this?
Guest:But what about this?
Guest:But have you considered this perspective?
Guest:Right.
Guest:You know, we consider so many perspectives that sometimes we're paralyzed.
Guest:Right.
Guest:But in the face of this, it was like, well, this was a campaign.
Guest:The campaign that won was run on the alienation of others.
Guest:It was in the first speech.
Guest:Mexicans are sending over rapists and criminals.
Guest:Mm hmm.
Guest:In the next speech, it was we're going to ban all the Muslims.
Guest:And so my first thought was, OK, our job is to make the Americans he's alienating feel safe.
Guest:Like that's my job through my art and that's my job through my work.
Guest:And and, you know, if Hamilton's anything, it's a reminder that as complicated as those founders were, we live in their country and great shit has happened in this country, too.
Guest:And it's our country, too.
Guest:And so I sort of woke up being like, okay, well, we need to hold the line on the things we believe in and not slide backwards.
Marc:Yeah.
Marc:And not be pushed out.
Guest:And not be pushed out.
Guest:And not be silenced by the things we believe in.
Guest:That's right.
Guest:People will protest.
Guest:People protested Obama forever, and I didn't agree with those protesters, but, you know, let them do it.
Guest:That's why we get to live here.
Guest:And now the pendulum is swung the other way, and we can't shut up, and we got to continue to fight for our values.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:Thank you.
Marc:And this movie, like I watched a couple of clips of the animated movie.
Marc:Yeah, Moana.
Marc:Oh, what a dream.
Marc:It's good, though.
Marc:It's so great.
Marc:The small clips I saw, it's like, you know, I don't, again, I'm, you know, a little closeted musical fan.
Marc:Oh, you're straight out the closet.
Guest:We heard you sing Herod.
Yeah.
Guest:Welcome.
Guest:We welcome you with open arms.
Guest:You're safe here, Mark.
Guest:But I don't watch a lot of animated, but I watched two clips of Moana, it's called, and I was like, oh, this is- I don't want to put politics on Disney, but I'm just so grateful that it's a movie with a kick-ass female character saving the world.
Guest:And she doesn't have a love interest.
Guest:She doesn't have a boyfriend.
Guest:She sails into the sea and saves the fucking world.
Guest:And I'm really proud to be a part of it and have contributed music to it.
Guest:Well, I'm proud of you.
Marc:Thanks.
Marc:And, you know, it's an honor to have you here.
Marc:And I'm really humbled by the fact that you love the show so much.
Marc:And that night that you did that on stage was very moving for me.
Guest:Thanks for all the interviews.
Guest:And thanks for getting so much honesty out of so many people we love.
Guest:You know, I think of so many of your interviews and be like, I never...
Guest:um i never saw that person in that way before right you know if the beginning of art is empathy is walking like you give us a master class in it every time you get someone in this crazy garage of yours yeah so so thank you for that yeah and i had to learn that i you know i was a pretty selfish guy for a long time but i you know like i needed to talk to you today yeah yeah because i'm i'm a little shook up yeah we all are okay thanks man
Marc:That's it.
Marc:What a lovely man.
Marc:What a great show, great artist.
Marc:I was honored to have him over.
Marc:I believe I will play guitar.
Marc:I believe I have not planned anything, but that hasn't stopped me before.
Marc:Boomer lives!