You can hear all of those influences all over the show. You can hear the "One, two, three…" on [the In the Heights song] “96 Thousand,” which is Black Star and [Boogie Down Productions] and The Fugees. What was fun about writing that number is that it was the only full, pure Hip Hop number in the show, so it was fun deciding who sounds like which rapper. For Sonny’s section in that song, he’s like the socially conscious one – so I listened to a lot of Nas’ Illmatic. I sort of made myself the Big Pun guy – as many syllables and triple-syllabic rhymes as I could fit in. It’s really fun to play “spot the influence” when you listen to these songs, because I pull from a lot of different places.

DX: Yeah, during the Tony Awards, you performed “96,000,” and it was clear from the lyrics of the song that it was influenced by KRS-One’s “Stop the Violence” [click to read]...
LM: The biggest influences for the show were sort of equal parts Big Pun and Jay-Z. Big Pun in terms of the amount of rhymes he was able to fit in per measure – he sort of “out-Kool G Rap's" Kool G Rap [click to read]. I played with that a lot… "Okay, let’s not just rhyme the ends of these sentences, but let’s put in as much internal rhyme as possible," which is a good rule of both musical theatre and Hip Hop. It’s one of the places where they interact.

And then there’s Jay-Z, whose storytelling is so natural. He’s got incredibly intricate worldplay, but it always feels as if it’s just sort of tossed off. I know he doesn’t write anything down; I think of that song off of Reasonable Doubt, “Friend or Foe” [click to read] where he’s like "Don’t do that, you’remakingmenervous!" Just the way it feels – it never feels written; it feels like this guy’s talking to you. That was really important for Usnavi the narrator. It can’t feel like [robotic voice] "We are rappity rappity rapping!" It’s got to feel like this guy is having a conversation with you. I think that’s one of the great strengths of Jay-Z’s writing.

DX: Tell us about Freestyle Love Supreme.
LM: Freestyle Love Supreme is sort of funny. We started it for shits and giggles as a break during In the Heights. Me and my friend Anthony, who is sort of one of the original people to work on In the Heights with us really early on, would say during breaks, "Let’s freestyle." We’d get around a piano or someone would beatbox, and we’d just rap about our day! Then he said, "We should do this, we should do this for people!" Our early shows were terrible! We’d get beats and we’d get suggestions from the audience, and we’d sort of just rap for like 45 minutes. Then we brought in Tommy Kail, who is the director of In the Heights, to create a structure with in the craziness. The best way to describe is sort of a Hip Hop Whose Line Is It Anyway? None of the show is scripted; we say, "We need a verb!" and the audience gives us a verb. We pull words out a bowl and say whatever the fuck comes to our head and rhymes. A lot of is based on the audience’s input. It’s not freestyling in the sense that I’m going on Hot 97 with this prepared verse that isn’t on my album – it’s freestyling in the sense that we don’t know what the fuck we’re gonna say until it’s already been said. We fuck up a lot, but that’s part of the comedy. Sometimes we’ll nail something, other times we’ll just go off the rails. Either way, it’s really fun. It’s this thing for fun, but it [took us all over the world].

DX: What came first for you, emceeing or writing – or did the two go hand in hand?
LM: Writing. I’m a theatre nerd at the end of the day. I don’t consider myself a rapper, other than that I’m really good at spitting the raps that I write. When I was a kid, I was always writing raps, but I was too shy to sort of show them. I don’t know what happened in college – there was sort of a switch that got flipped. I think maybe Hip Hop got worse? [Laughs] I thought, "I can write better than what I’m hearing!" So I started writing, and I really wanted it to sound like Washington Heights. So I wrote numbers that were not only Latin in feel, but you know, there was a scene where they’re freestyling outside of a bodega. There’s a scene where they’re getting into a fight over how hot it is outside and it becomes a rap. Continued on page 3 »