More thoughts on musicals, and a few thoughts on keeping an audience's attention
MELISANDE update! The Queen's song is final-first-drafted, which is to say that all of the musical elements except the performers are in place, and I have begun the King's song, which is to say that I've figured out how to navigate the sixteen-year-time-jump in a way that satisfies me both musically and dramaturgically.
Much of my solution came from listening to IN THE HEIGHTS (2008 Original Broadway Cast album) and IN THE HEIGHTS (2021 movie soundtrack) and asking myself how the music had changed over thirteen years. The thoughts behind the music had also changed, of course, and that was part of my analysis – and in many ways it was exactly the example I was looking for, since I wanted a pairing or comparison in which there was clear technical growth but the characters themselves didn't change much.
These characters have more information but they make many of the same choices, in other words – and I keep rewriting and republishing this paragraph trying to find the right words to explain what I mean, especially in regards to what I want an audience to understand about the King, so I'm going to ask you to forgive the edits.
I'm also going to ask you to forgive what you may want to call my arrogance, since I'm about to explain what I got wrong about the opening to IN THE HEIGHTS the other day.
The part that you may call arrogance – and believe me, I've been thinking about this – is the part where I presume to understand another person's work.
It's also the part where I assume that I can do better.
I mean, why shouldn't I be able to do better, if I am careful about what I pay attention to? I live in a world in which IN THE HEIGHTS exists, therefore I can build on what I learn from it. I can take what it does well and figure out how to do well in similar ways, and I can take what I believe doesn't work – arrogance, there it is – and create what I believe are improvements in my own work, and even if I'm wrong about why something doesn't work I'm probably not wrong that it doesn't work (this idea is stolen from Neil Gaiman, thank you Neil Gaiman), and so I can try to improve it regardless.
Which means that every time I get something wrong, I am delighted rather than discouraged. I missed something! How fascinating, as Benjamin Zander might say! Let me try to be right about as many things as possible so I can be wrong faster and learn more quickly!
(This also applies to both playing and teaching piano, by the way.)
With that in mind, here are some of the things I got wrong about IN THE HEIGHTS, most of which were corrected by reading In the Heights: Finding Home by Lin-Manuel Miranda, Jeremy McCarter, and Quiara Alegría Hudes (extremely recommended, go read it, I got my copy at the library and so can you).
First of all, Miranda didn't get a lot of faculty support when he staged his musical as an undergraduate. In fact, he got even less support than I did (at least I got a classroom) and mounted the entire production with his friends and without permission. This makes me believe that colleges don't really want their students to write musicals, which makes me sad – and that could be another 1,500-word blog post on its own, so maybe you'll get it later.
Second of all, Miranda spent the next twenty years workshopping IN THE HEIGHTS, and in his book he stresses the emphasis of both revision and collaboration. There is only one element that sustained from his original college production to the version that played on Broadway, and it's the three-word motive "en Washington Heights" that he almost homaged in Hamilton when Eliza sings about the orphanage –
CHORUS: The orphanage
ELIZA: I established the first private orphanage in New York City
CHORUS: En Washington Heights
And, in my opinion, he should have.
But third of all – and here is where the point of this blog post comes into play – I was wrong about the opening lyrics, and I think I know why.
Lights up on Washington Heights upon the break of day
And I wake up, and there's this little punk I've got to chase away
Pop the grate at the crack of dawn
Sing as I wipe down the awning
Hey, y'all, good morning
These lyrics are still imperfect, even after I spent the entire weekend studying the album and soundtrack, and I think that's because they are unspecific. They could be these lyrics (they aren't, although they're close) but they could not only be these lyrics.
Compare to the opening of HAMILTON:
How does a bastard, orphan, son of a whore and a Scotsman
Dropped into the middle of a forgotten spot in the Caribbean
By Providence impoverished in squalor grow up to be a hero and a scholar?
The ten-dollar founding father without a father –
And I could go on, I have gone on, I can recite nearly all of HAMILTON without wondering whether I've gotten the lyrics right because the lyrics are right, there is only one possibility for every syllable, and so the piece is memorable.
But back to IN THE HEIGHTS –
So if you remember from Friday's post, there was this huge chunk of information I skipped over, and as soon as I listened to it again I realized why I think I missed it.
Piragua Guy.
After the opening phrase there's a short chunk of dialogue, much of it in Spanish, between Usnavi and Piragua Guy. Then there's another section of spoken lyric in which Usnavi introduces himself, and I believe I forgot that lyric the other day because I can't understand the conversation with Piragua Guy without taking the time to translate it, to work it out in my head, and while my head is doing that it's missing what Usnavi is doing next, and it doesn't catch up until:
That's my abuela, she's not really my abuela
But she practically raised me, this corner is her escuela
Now, you're probably thinking "I'm up shit creek, I've never been north of 95th street!"
But you must take the A Train
Even farther than Harlem to Northern Manhattan and maintain
Get off at 181st and take the escalator
I hope you're writing this down, I'm going to test you later
We're getting tested, times are tough on this bodega
Two months ago somebody bought Ortega's
The neighbors packing up and picking up and every day the rent goes up
It's gotten mad expensive but we live with just enough
In the heights!
I did that from memory and it's probably slightly inaccurate, also the arrogant part of me says that the transition from "this corner is her escuela" to "you're probably thinking" is incorrect because there's no reason for us to be thinking that, but the important factor here is that once I'm back in, I'm back in.
So my goal as a writer is to – well, I don't precisely know.
To give people time to catch up if I present an idea they may not all be familiar with?
I don't want to go so far as to say all of the ideas must be familiar to everybody, because the whole point of art is to develop and transmit new ideas (to the point at which the most effective ideas become memes), and I certainly don't want to say that a musical about a bilingual community shouldn't include both languages.
All I dare say right now is that I believe the reason I couldn't remember the second and third chunks of "In the Heights" is because my mind was still working out what was going on with Piragua Guy (which is also why I didn't pay any attention to what was going on with Usnavi's refrigerator, the first time I listened to the musical, and had to look it up on Wikipedia later).
And now I will say what Larry told me the first time he heard the opening of MELISANDE:
"If you can pull this off without losing your audience at epistemology, you'll be a genius."
("Epistemology, my love, is the antidote to anecdote" is the sixth line of the opening number.)
(And I may or may not be a genius.)
(We will see.)