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

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

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

Miss you Doreen. -LMM

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

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

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

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

When he had a choice between teaching seventh grade at his public-school alma mater or pursuing the show full-time, he sought his father’s advice. Though Luis was worried about his son traveling down an uncertain road, he wrote him a letter that encouraged him to go for his dreams. (He keeps a copy of the letter in the house, obviously.) “If I want my kids to learn anything,” Luis says, “It’s that they have to do everything they can to make sure their own kids move ahead in society.”

With director Jon M. Chu’s fantastic adaption of In the Heights getting ready to arrive in theaters and streaming on HBO Max, I recently landed an exclusive interview with Lin-Manuel Miranda. During the wide-ranging conversation, he talked about his reaction watching the finished film for the first time, his long history trying to get In the Heights made as a movie, what director Kenny Ortega’s version would have been like if they’d made it a decade ago and why that version never happened, how Chu changed the game with the way he cast Crazy Rich Asians, getting to film on location and the way the neighborhood embraced the film, and much more. In addition, he talked about the challenges of trying to make a Hamilton movie, why he loves the version that’s available on Disney+, and the way lyricist Howard Ashman impacted his life both as a child and in his work on animated films like Moana, Vivo and Encanto.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MIRANDA It’s that simple and it’s that complicated. You’re talking to first-generation writers whose parents were born on the island of Puerto Rico. You grow up with the “Sliding Doors” thinking: “What if they’d stayed? Who would I be if I grew up in Vega Alta, Puerto Rico?” The nuance that we always fought for is to say, “I can accept the sacrifice of my ancestors. I can accept the responsibility that bestows upon me and still find my own way in the world.” It’s not an either-or, it’s not about, “Forget your dreams. It’s my dreams.” It’s thinking, “I accept the incredible journey you had to take for me to even be standing here and still my job is to make my own way in the world and define home for what it is for me.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My hope is that we can continue to be a hub for the theater community,” Miranda said. “I don’t expect we’ll make a great fortune, but I hope with the coffee we’ll break even.”

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

[This interview contains spoilers for cut songs!]

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

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

Lin: To revisit these characters again was really, really fun, and it's still from this perspective of joy. We wanted to write about our own community with a sense of joy, and that shines through. I'm really proud of these 20s us-es, but also really proud that we had another crack at it.

Melissa Barrera: I was inside the bodega waiting for my cue. The bodega was not operating because we had taken over, but people just kept coming in to shop. I’d say, “Oh, I’m not working right now,” and they’re like, “Oh, well, can I just grab something?” I was like, “I’m sure it’s all props, or the production will pay for it. Just grab whatever you need, but we’re shooting.” They would shop, and I’d just say, “Thank you so much for coming.”

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Mitchell Travers, Costume Designer: Oftentimes I would just pick a corner and people watch, letting certain real-life outfits on the street inspire the outfits I would put on camera. One day while filming, a real-life abuela (grandma) walked by wearing the exact same dress our abuela wears in the film!

Jon M. Chu, Director: The neighbors treat you like family, and they share with you. They yell at you like family too, if you’re in their parking spot. I even brought my mom [to set] one day, and by the time I came back, she was having drinks with the neighbors.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: You know, there is the nightmare Hollywood version of this where it looks like a telenovela and has nothing to do with this neighborhood. But we cast these incredible actors who have lived in authenticity, who don’t feel out of place next to our neighbors on 175th Street.

Jon M. Chu: Every day, we knew the responsibility to share, as truthfully as we could, what it felt like to have family and community there. Even down to the food and the sauces. One of the actors would say, “Oh, you know what, they wouldn't have these sauces here,” and someone would bring sauce from home, so we put that bottle on the table. It was a constant conversation to make it as truthful as possible.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: In The Heights exists because in so much of the entertainment world, particularly in musical theater, Latinos are invisible, and so, my mandate, my dare to myself when I started writing this with Quiara [Alegría Hudes, co-writer], was to put us on the map and tell the stories I wasn’t seeing [in the media].

Anthony Ramos: [A 2012 touring production of] In The Heights was the first time I had a lead role in anything. It was a principal role where I got my union card, which then allowed me to audition for Hamilton, which is how I met Lin. In The Heights set it off for Latinos, and now, hopefully, the movie can be that.

Lin-Manuel Miranda: I think the most autobiographical lyric in this whole movie for me is, “I used to think we lived at the top of the world when the world was just a subway map.” That was true for me. When you watch movies about New York, or you look at a tourist map, they hardly go above 96th Street. That used to drive me crazy growing up, because I grew up at the top of the A train, and I just loved my neighborhood.

There’s something about Washington Heights that just is undefeatable. It’s historically been an immigrant neighborhood. When I was growing up, it was a largely Dominican neighborhood. Before that, it was a Puerto Rican neighborhood and Cuban neighborhood. Before that, it was an Italian neighborhood, an Irish neighborhood and Jewish neighborhood, but there’s a lot of first chapters in American life that begin in this neighborhood.It’s for strivers and it’s for survivors, and I’m really proud to call it home.