Zooming "In the Heights"

Today we share with you a story from the Music Department, as written by Lesley Bannatyne, with photos by Prof. Carol Oja.

They log in from bedrooms and living rooms in Florida, California, Washington state, and up and down the East Coast. For some it’s 7:45 in the morning; for others, nearly noon. Each of the students in Carol Oja’s “American Musicals: History and Performance” Freshman Seminar has been assigned a part in Lin Manuel Miranda’s Tony Award-winning musical, In the Heights. This morning, they are about to embark on a performance of the number, “96,000,” in which characters envision what they’d do if they won big money in the lottery. This is the last of three “staging sessions”– the other two featured scenes from South Pacific and A Chorus Line, all coached by the Broadway professional Allegra Libonati (stage director). Harvard junior Ben Sperling was music director for the session on South Pacific, and the Broadway composer David Hancock Turner stepped in as music director for the final two sessions.

No one expected the course to move online in the middle of the semester. And although moving to a virtual classroom took choreography and stage tableaux out of the mix, it didn’t take away the essence of the quick, complicated verbal interplay of Miranda’s characters.

“Think about how to accent words to infuse them with emotion,” Libonati tells the students via Zoom, speaking from her home base in Las Vegas. “Put more argument in it; don’t lose the momentum of the scene before. This whole song is an argument.”

The class starts and stops like a real-world rehearsal. Libonati and Turner coach the students through each of their parts, starting from a cold reading and developing rhythm, dynamics, and emotion. Just as in the Washington Heights Miranda writes about, there’s never just one thing happening; many things are happening all at the same time. Miranda’s laser-sharp rap lyrics have to fit in the spaces around a vocal duet and at the same time, sync up rhythmically.

“If you have something on the first beat of the measure, give that a little more,” Turner advises.

With each addition of a new element—rap, duet, chorus—the song takes shape. Confidence and familiarity grow, students sing full out, and the beauty and complexity of the song takes over. For the final run-through, Libonati smiles into the camera, “It’s showtime. Lay it all out there.”

They’re singing into a computer. They can only see each other’s faces and shoulders. There’s a trans-continental lag between computers. But they lay it out there, they do.

“It wouldn’t be anyone’s first choice to stage a number from a Broadway musical on a collection of eleven small screens,” says Oja. “There’s a lag, depending on the internet speed of each student. As David Hancock Turner said during a previous session: it’s like dealing with a pipe organ, where there is a brief delay between when you touch the keys and when the sound emerges. So the performance ends up as a community statement built of each individual singing into the void.”

Community in the time of corona. "American Musicals" has created a process—and metaphor—for these times.
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Engaging Broadway professionals Allegra Libonati and David Hancock Turner was possible through support from the Elson Family Arts Initiative Fund.