It’s a long song, and that last note - many, many times I almost blacked out and fell on top of our conductor Alex Lacamoire, which is not a pretty sight.
The song is very challenging - vocally, breath-wise, emotionally - and when you’re doing eight shows a week, you’re battling exhaustion and your voice is always tired. Merediz: It was groundbreaking to have an elderly person like that in a housecoat, singing an aria at center stage. She poured all of it in there because she drew from the same kinds of experiences. Her voice has a beautiful anguish to it - you hear the perseverance, the tenacity, the pain of leaving behind a homeland and the struggle to try to find a new home. Lacamoire: Olga sang that song with such power. I was a bit younger then, and I thought, “I’ll audition for you, but you’re gonna know it’s a mistake.” Olga Merediz (actor): I was playing a different character in the workshop, and they couldn’t find an elderly actress who could do this part, and they asked me to give it a try. Most of what I improvised that day is still in the song today, which hasn’t happened to me often. Bits of mambo, Latin jazz, counter harmonies that Lin responded to as he sang. We hit “record,” he started singing, I started playing. So there we were in a rehearsal room in Manhattan - it was between shows at “Wicked,” where I was working at the time, so I only had an hour or so to lay down a demo for the actor to sing the song at a workshop. I was reading basically a lyric sheet with chord symbols. It took me all summer to write.Īlex Lacamoire (show’s arrangements and orchestrations): Lin’s first draft of the song was like nine pages long. I’d break it up at the Drama Bookshop and chip away at this song for an hour before the second leg of the trip. paper, so I will tell you: From 212th Street where I lived, that’s the A train to the E train all the way out to the end of Queens to the J/Z train into Woodhaven. My co-teacher was Dominique Morisseau, it was her and I playing theater games with fourth graders. In 2004, I got a job with a summer school arts program. She played the numbers every day while I ate Now & Laters. My earliest memories were being in the bodega on our corner of 200th Street. Lin-Manuel Miranda (composer-lyricist): I grew up with a live-in nanny who helped take care of my father in Puerto Rico and my sister and I in New York.
0 kommentar(er)
