Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Kail have another stage hit with their hip-hop musical, "Hamilton" (pictured); how the sound editors for "Unbroken" created a pivotal scene for the movie; Thomas Lennon plays Felix Unger in CBS' remake of "The Odd Couple."
'Hamilton': The power of partnership with Lin-Manuel Miranda and dir Tommy Kail
Update: On May 3rd, 2016, "Hamilton" made history by earning 16 Tony Award nominations.
The musical "Hamilton" opened Tuesday night at New York's Public Theater, and the reviews are glowing.
The New York Times writes: "Ambitious, enthusiastic and talented in equal measures...a show that aims impossibly high and hits its target."
"Hamilton" tells the story of the first secretary of the treasury, Alexander Hamilton, who was fatally shot in a duel with Aaron Burr. But the story here is one of a revolutionary figure who came from nothing and went on to change the world.
While the musical has become an overnight success, its creator, Lin-Manuel Miranda, has been working on the show for more than six years.
When Miranda performed at The White House in 2009 for an event featuring poetry, hip-hop and spoken word — hosted by President Obama and the First Lady — he had only one song. But it would eventually blossom into New York's hottest musical.
Miranda and "Hamilton" director Thomas Kail stopped by The Frame to chat about the origins of their acclaimed show and the history of their creative partnership.
Interview Highlights:
How did you come up with the idea to write a musical about Alexander Hamilton?
Lin-Manuel Miranda: The things you spend years writing are the things that just won't let go of you; they're just too good not to act upon. I picked Ron Chernow's biography of Hamilton off a shelf in a bookstore. I was going on vacation and I just wanted a big, long biography to read, and by the end of the second chapter — and this has never happened to me before — I said, This is my next show.
There was something about his story, the unlikeliness of his story — the fact that he used his gift with words to pull himself out of pretty tragic and insane circumstances and helped build this country on the backs of those words. I found it really inspiring and I immediately thought hip-hop's one of the best ways to tell this story. This guy produced more verbiage than pretty much anybody on earth. [laughs] Well, maybe Shakespeare.
But it immediately became a compelling story to me and it wouldn't let go of me until I started writing it, so I started writing that White House piece. That was really all I had when I performed at the White House, and when they asked me to perform I was just finishing "In the Heights." And the White House called and said, "We're doing this evening, do you have anything on the American experience?" And I did.
Tommy, I want to hear a little bit more about your history with Lin, about the first time you two met and whether you immediately thought you two had something you could do together.
I started a production company called Backhouse Productions that was in residence at the Drama Bookshop down on 40th Street in New York City. Two of my classmates and dear friends from Wesleyan University were still there when I'd already graduated, and they saw a very early version of "In the Heights."
It had the same title, it was 80 minutes, it was a one-act. Lin directed it and was not in it. But the spirit of the show was absolutely there, and through strange circumstance it was recorded.
They sent me that demo, and at this point I was driving a van and sweeping stages in New Jersey for the bargain price of $100 per week, and I listened to the CD that summer in 2000 and I felt like someone had told me a secret. I knew that 500 people had seen it on that campus and that was it, and I said, "I don't know when this kid graduates, but let's find out and invite him to come work at the theater company which we have not yet founded." [laughs]
OSCARS 2015: 'Unbroken' sound designers recreated a 30-minute scene from scratch
As the Academy Awards ceremony nears, we're taking a closer look at one of the categories that often goes under-appreciated: sound editing.
Becky Sullivan and Andrew DeCristofaro were the supervising sound editors for "Unbroken." They've already won a Golden Reel Award from the Motion Picture Sound Editors organization for their editing of dialogue in "Unbroken."
When asked about one scene they were most proud of, Sullivan told us: "The raft scene brings all of our elements together in their best light."
Originally, director Angelina Jolie had shot the scene exactly where one might expect: the ocean. But the turbulence caused by the waves prevented any sort of steady shot, so they had to improvise a backup plan.
"They constructed a tank in a parking lot next to a freeway and a [theme park]," Sullivan laughs. "They put the boys in the raft and did most of the recording that way, but you can hear the traffic and people screaming on the roller coasters."
Which meant the sound editors needed a backup to the backup plan. Sullivan remembers giving Jolie the bad news.
I told her, "We're going to need to loop this entire raft scene," which goes on for two reels, it's 37 minutes of raft, I think. [The challenge was to] recreate the performances on that raft where they first arrive — and then they get weaker and thirstier as time goes on, and they're dying — to bring actors onto a sound stage six months later and say, "Okay, we just need to redo all this."
But Sullivan had no intention of leaving her actors out to dry; DeCristofaro recalls: "Becky worked really hard to help them find that voice and that space again." Several months after the scene was shot, Sullivan had to bring the actors back to a sound stage to have them perform the entire sequence again.
She went so far as to lay them on the ground, put some cushions around them, turn off the lights to try to get them back into the head space of being stuck on a raft in the middle of the ocean. "Everywhere we go there [were] water bottles," Sullivan recalls, "but I took all of them off the stage because their throats needed to dry out."
Still, that wasn't enough, as Sullivan notes: "Then you need the [sound] bed to lay that dialogue into, so you have to have the backgrounds correct — the winds, the water."
That bed was also ruined by the noise pollution from the freeway and amusement park, and so, DeCristofaro says, "Every drip, every little crinkle on the raft, every water lap, you name it — that's all completely done from scratch."
And it's not just for some misguided perfectionism; as Sullivan explains: "Everything has to be real, so that when you mix in that dialogue and you lay it in there, everyone thinks we're there on the raft with those boys."
That feeling of verisimilitude requires a more nuanced approach in some situations than others. The filmmakers managed to wangle an operating B-24 to track the dogfight scenes, but as DeCristofaro says, "You can hide little edits when there's a lot of sonic energy. When you're in these quiet scenes, there's nowhere to hide; it's got to be perfect."