How We Make Our Songs Actable by Craig Carnelia, Jason Robert Brown, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and Stephen Sondheim
Updated: Oct 11
In 2007, I interviewed Stephen Sondheim for The Dramatist. The focus of the interview could be anything I chose and, since I had been teaching “acting through song” to the Broadway community for fifteen years at that point, I decided to focus on the unique actability of S
ondheim’s songs.
In 2024, when planning the second edition of my book The Reason to Sing: A Guide to Acting While Singing, I decided to conduct similar interviews with two of today’s best, Lin-Manuel Miranda and Jason Robert Brown, and to add a chapter on how musical theatre writers make their songs actable.
Throughout the book, I have suggested that the writer’s process and the actor’s are in some ways “mirror images” of each other. In this chapter, I draw on these three interviews to explore this idea further.
Note: I’ll be using initials to show which of the three writers is speaking and, in the case of myself, I will also include to whom I’m speaking, which in some cases will be you, the reader. When addressing the reader, I will italicize the text to further delineate these passages from my dialogue with the writers.
CC (to LMM)
In the album notes included with the CD of In the Heights, your director, Tommy Kail, quotes an email you sent him during the development of the show: “So I was procrastinating on Nina’s song and wrote this instead.” And you sent him the song for the “piragua guy.” Would it be fair to say that you were procrastinating on writing a song in which Nina is procrastinating about telling her parents that she has lost her scholarship?
LMM
The reason it was tough to write was that Nina is probably the closest to my life experience and I didn’t necessarily want to live there. My sister went to college before me, and I remember a dinner her senior year where she came home and informed my parents that she was gonna need an extra semester to graduate. I remember my mother bursting into tears at the table because my parents were killing themselves to pay for college. My sister had kind of said this very off-handedly, but it landed like a bomb. And I remember, you know, as the younger sibling you make a silent decision, “I will never put myself in this position, ‘cause I feel shrapnel from it and I’m not even involved.” And I remember the stress of that, and so, all of that goes into Nina.
CC (to reader)
I’m starting with this story to point up the “visceral” nature of this memory for Lin and how those feelings served to motivate Nina’s song “Breathe.” Because of his personal experience, the writer was already primed with the same sort of emotional preparation an actor might use when playing the role, something (in this case, a memory) that stirs up feelings and causes the song to be the inevitable thing to do.
JRB
The only way I know how to write a song is because it has to do a certain thing; a character has to do a certain thing. There’s always an objective to a song or else I really would have trouble figuring out how to write it.
SS
The character singing goes through a development process and comes out with a conclusion emotionally different from where they began.
JRB
You know, what are they working through?
LMM
The best performers feel like they’re figuring it out in real time.
CC (to SS)
Cinderella has the problems Cinderella has always had, but you gave her a really quick mind. She has no experience, she’s never been anywhere but man, she is smart.
SS
In the 500-plus years of that folktale, Lapine (James Lapine, bookwriter of “Into the Woods”) is the only person who ever suggested that she left the slipper behind on purpose. If you’re a girl who wants to be loved for herself, that’s what you do. When you look at Cinderella as a story from the outside: she gets beaten up at home, has to clean pots and brush out the urinals. Then she goes to this ball, wearing a beautiful dress and looking gorgeous and the handsomest and richest man in the kingdom falls in love with her...and she’s got a problem? In every Cinderella story, she doesn’t just go back to the castle. Why? What’s the problem? Well, she’s got a problem if she wants to be loved for herself. For me, that explains her story and makes it alive.
CC (to SS)
As writers, how do we know what not to say?
SS
If you think in terms of subtext, you’ll always leave something out. It’s the Hemingway principle: what you leave out is more important than what you include. If you leave something for the actor, they are only grateful, and a good performer will fill that space, or not fill it, with all kinds of richness and subtleties.
CC (to JRB)
In writing “See, I’m Smiling” (from “The Last Five Years”), it seems like you had the situation and the setting, you had where they are in their marriage, you had Ohio and the dock. But there’s such a powerful undercurrent in the scene. What sort of process did you go through to find this?
JRB
I needed to convey that she was aware that things were very off. They are at a very bad point, and she knows it. But she needs to make this moment feel okay and, when that doesn’t happen, she’s unwilling to sit in the reality of this moment, because it’s not what she wants it to be. That felt very clear to me. I knew what that was.
And structurally, it does exactly what an AABA thing is supposed to do. You know, there’s a first A where she tries to communicate something and she doesn’t get what she wants. So, she tries a different version of it and that’s what the second A does, and again she doesn’t get what she needs. So then, we hit the bridge and, in the bridge, she just starts falling apart because she cannot manage to keep the ball in the air, pretending everything is alright, when she knows it isn’t.
CC (to reader)
How does the writer know what not to say?
LMM
There is a version of “Sunrise” where I hadn’t had the idea for the Spanish lesson yet.
CC (to reader)
I had just praised the subtlety of this song from “In the Heights,” its idea and its use of subtext.
LMM
It had the same bed of music, but the lyric was like: “Did I dream last night or am I really in your arms? If I am, don’t wake me, let the dream just take me. My favorite time of night is just before the dawn. Benny, you open your eyes just before the sunrise...sunrise...sunrise.” And it was...pretty. But then we got to the Spanish lesson and realized, “Oh, we’re really off to the races with this,” now it can be a scene.
CC (to LMM)
And the closest they get to being direct in that scene is when the word “promise” is translated and they each ask for a promise. They don’t even promise it.
SS
Less is more. I have few artistic principles. One of them is “less is more.”
CC (to LMM)
They simply say, “Promise me you’ll stay beyond the sunrise,” end of song. They don’t say, “Yes, I promise you.” And the subtlety and restraint of this is so much more effective than if you had been more explicit.
And that, for me, is your trademark. You never come marching through the front door; you’re always coming in the side window.
LMM
That means the world to me, Craig, thank you. That means a lot, because it takes a while to find the side window.
CC (to reader)
So, how did Lin know what not to say? He had to write the spot the first way in order to find out, just as actors often need to experiment with different approaches to find the one that works best.
JRB
The thing about “You Don’t Know This Man” (in “Parade”) is that that wasn’t the first song I wrote for the spot. In order to get to the end of the act, Lucille has to, on some level, be somewhat unsure of what Leo did, or is, or was capable of. And the only place we get to see that, the place where that crystallizes for her, is in “You Don’t Know This Man.” The song used to be called “I Don’t Really Know,” which was really about, “I don’t really know Leo.” It was on a trolley car, and was very internal, and it didn’t do the job.
SS
There was a first draft of “Company” in which Amy, who sings “Getting Married Today” at the end of the first act, didn’t get married; she jilted her boyfriend. Then, in the middle of the second act, Bobby proposes to her by singing “Marry Me a Little.” I was halfway through writing the song when I thought, “If Bobby does that, he has nowhere to go. That’s the end of the show.”
In the 1995 Roundabout revival (and in subsequent productions), we put the song at the end of Act I. Since Amy has gone off to get married, the song has a different context and weight. In this case, Bobby is alone, and the song makes sense in the development of his character.
JRB
So, what “You Don’t Know This Man” is, is it’s really informed by that other song that no one’s ever heard, that that’s what’s hiding behind “You Don’t Know This Man.” That when she says, “He is a decent man, he is an honest man,” and you hear the music sort of jerk the emergency brake on the car, and she has to power through that in spite of the fact that everything has stopped. That, for me, where the music is telling you she is up against a wall and she cannot say the most important thing, which is, “He didn’t do it.” And she’s trying to say it and cannot in good conscience say this thing out loud. That’s how the song functions and that’s what gets us through the rest of the act.
SS
If you take the attitude of the actor at every given point in the play while you’re writing the songs, then you have a place in reserve for the characters to go, because that’s what an actor has to do.
LMM
I think a lot when I’m writing for a character, before I ever touch the piano, I think about their tempo and their temperament. And you know, Steve Sondheim always said, “The fun was in finding these themes for these people and then smashing them together,” and that’s the fun part for me too.
JRB
The music has to be actable in a way I can say to you and you understand. Music has to carry all the weight of the emotion. So, I can be very precise about whether that chord has a suspended second in it or it doesn’t, and what does that suspended second do? And how is it going to affect the actor playing this part?
LMM
Hamilton’s verses in “My Shot” needed to show he was the smartest guy in the room. So, I needed to pretend to be much smarter than I am.
JRB
I’m making things that I can feel intuitively are pushing things forward, intuiting an emotional state, but they are definitely things I have to then execute. And when I’m doing that, I don’t want anyone around. I want to fail in private. And writing is a process of failing constantly.
LMM
His two verses were the hardest lyrics I’ve ever written. They’re so dense. It took me a year, like truly. Never rhyme once when you can rhyme five times on a line.
SS
Those four characters: The Baker’s Wife, Little Red Riding Hood, Jack, and Cinderella...each has a moment of self-assessment. Lapine thought of that; I never would have. They each have a moment to say “this is what I’ve been through and this is what I’ve learned, or haven’t learned, and now I must go on.”
CC (to SS)
I love how they each travel this murky, twisted course that then resolves.
SS
I tried to relate all of them musically and lyrically. It almost works.
CC (to SS)
Where do you think you didn’t succeed?
SS
In “Moments in the Woods.” The Baker’s Wife is not really a folktale character. She’s an urban, 20th-century character in the middle of these fairytale woods, so her self-knowledge has to be slightly different. But also, hers is the only musical theme that I reused. I’m not sure it’s right or wrong, but it doesn’t bother me a lot because the moment works so well.
LMM
I think what helped me / let me off the hook (in writing so densely) was I really thought about this as an album. Like I’m writing a hip-hop album that tells the story of Alexander Hamilton. And so, I set myself free of, “You’re going to understand every metaphor the first time.” So, I wrote the two verses that really anchor the song first, Hamilton’s “I’m ‘a get a scholarship to King’s College” verse and the “I imagine death so much it feels more like a memory” verse. And those were like, those were a year, just making those feel as powerful and packed as possible.
SS
How packed or loose do you make a lyric? How quickly do you go from thought to thought? How do you keep things going without repeating an idea over and over again, but not going by so quickly you lose what’s being said? That is one of the trickiest parts of lyric writing.
JRB
The fun of writing “Bridges” is that it’s an entire company of people who are mostly quiet and mostly not thinking about the bigger picture of what their lives are supposed to be; they are just moving forward, just doing their thing. And then this catalyst comes in that forces them all to kind of catalogue all of this stuff that they’ve just been storing up and try and make sense of.
CC (to JRB)
“To Build a Home” and “Almost Real” (two of Francesca’s songs) feel like companion pieces. The first of them opens the show and the other occurs three songs into Act II, after Francesca has become involved with Robert but, combined, they paint a picture of Francesca’s entire life, to date.
JRB
“To Build a Home” really was an opportunity to literally build a home onstage over the course of the song, to both build it for us and to let the character explain what her role in that home looks like. Musically, I’m building a home out of it. I’m starting with just a single line and then I’m building on top of that until gradually it becomes this huge tapestry. And then, physically, the world is being built in front of us. The idea was to sort of show us what the architecture of the house was.
So, by the time “Almost Real” comes in, I now get to tell you what’s inside that house, and I’m able to use those same motifs that I used musically in the opening, but now I get to sort of pry them open. And what we’re doing is the same thing the character is doing. She’s unloading about how she ended up where she is, and she’s saying things she’s never told anybody, because she never needed to. And now she needs to express this thing to somebody. That whole sense of her cracking open is also really the sense of this home that she’s built cracking open.
CC (to JRB)
But I don’t think it’s simply that she now needs to say it. I think she’s never told anyone these things before because there’s never been as good a listener as Robert. It’s possible that Francesca has never really been seen or understood by anyone before.
JRB
Yeah, and again, I don’t attribute that in any way to anyone’s malice because I don’t think anyone has time.
CC (to JRB)
That’s true. But also, Bud is operating on a totally different frequency than Robert. He loves her, he just doesn’t completely get her.
JRB
Yeah, and if she expresses something, he’ll try to solve it.
CC (to JRB)
He truly loves her...
JRB
And he’s totally committed...
CC (to JRB)
He just doesn’t completely get her or see her. And this, plus the practicalities of the family, the farm, and the fact that no one has time, have kept her from really seeing herself for a very long time. And then, like you said, this catalyst comes in and causes them to look at themselves and their lives differently.
LMM
Hamilton comes into the ball like “Ooh yeah.” And Angelica’s smitten, and she looks at her sister Eliza and goes, “She’s smitten,” and she makes a split-second decision that reverberates throughout the rest of her life.
CC (to LMM)
“Helpless” and “Satisfied” represent an ingenious piece of construction. In the first, you show us the story of Alexander and Eliza’s courtship, from Alexander entering the ballroom and Eliza being mesmerized by him, to Angelica introducing him to Eliza, to a flurry of letter-writing, meeting the father, proposing and getting married, all in a matter of weeks, all in a 4-minute song.
LMM
“Helpless” is a perfect little R&B, hip-hop song. And I was really modeling it on like the 2000’s Ashanti, Ja Rule songs where it’s like the R&B girl sings two verses, there’s a rap verse, then there’s a third verse, and like that’s the end of the song. That R&B, hip-hop song is a form that I understood how to put their courtship into.
And then “Satisfied” is much more unwieldy. But one of the things that keeps it from being too unwieldy is it’s the same chord progression the entire thing. So, it’s a trance. You’re being lulled into a trance. It never moves from those five chords. (Plays chord progression on the piano.) So, even when Angelica’s flying off in fifty directions, you’re anchored musically.
CC (to LMM)
And in “Satisfied,” you rewind the action so you can now show us a fully detailed version of that first encounter between Angelica and Alexander at the ball, before she crossed the ballroom and introduced him to her sister. That construction device is so inventive.
LMM
And we dilate the moment when Angelica makes her split-second decision so she can basically - she’s annotating the scene before. And this is where my life as an English teacher came in handy, because Angelica is writing a personal literary essay about why she can’t marry Hamilton. It is: thesis, three proofs, conclusion. And she realizes “three fundamental truths at the exact same time,” and she lists them. And what is the way to show the audience, viscerally, that she is smarter than Hamilton, is that she reads him from the moment he walks in the room. She sees all the ambition coming off him in waves, and she knows her place in society. She knows from his ambition that he can’t have come from very high up. Because when you have power, you don’t care.
CC (to LMM)
And to make the song even richer for the actor and the audience, it’s all being played out during Angelica’s maid of honor speech at her sister’s wedding celebration. So, what the character is trying to do and what she is actually doing are two different things. She’s trying to be a good maid of honor for Eliza, she’s trying to deliver a good maid of honor speech. But, in her thoughts, she is swept back to her own first encounter with Alexander where, despite her pragmatism, she too fell in love with him.
JRB
“How do I get this feeling out?”
CC (to reader)
Jason said this when talking about Frankie (a friend of the girl who was murdered) in “Parade,” how when the reporter simply asks him, “Did you know the girl?”, it gives him an outlet for his grief. But I think this simple question: “How do I get this feeling out?” applies to so much of what we’re talking about.
CC (to LMM)
“The Room Where It Happens.”
LMM
Talk about a side window. That’s the ultimate side window.
CC (to LMM)
It totally is.
LMM
Burr, not being there. That’s the side window.
CC (to LMM)
And the feelings that cause the song: hunger, envy and rage, are the same feelings that cause Burr to challenge Hamilton to the duel that ends his life.
CC (to reader)
“How do I get this feeling out?”
CC (to SS)
George (in “Sunday in the Park...”) seems to believe that if Dot just understood why she’s not getting her emotional needs met by him, she’d stay. He thinks that’s the problem.
SS
Exactly. It starts when she goes to the Follies at the end of “Color and Light,” and he says “What’ll I do? What’ll I do? What’ll I do? Oh, I know...red.” When he says “red,” that’s all you need to know about the character.
CC (to SS)
If he had the awareness he doesn’t have, then he doesn’t sing “Finishing the Hat.” So, his not knowing something provides the motor for this massive outpouring of emotion.
SS
You’ve hit on something. Every time you can write a self-deluded song, you are way ahead of the game. When the audience starts to know something the character doesn’t, they get excited, and who wouldn’t? We got it, why doesn’t he get it?
CC (to JRB)
Jamie doesn’t know that he can’t fix Cathy. It takes him the length of the play to find this out. He doesn’t know it when he writes the “Schmuel” story for her, and he still doesn’t know it late in the play, when he launches into “If I Didn’t Believe in You.”
JRB
“I have to get her out this door, or I have to get her to be okay with me walking out the door without her; one of these two things has to happen. So, I’m going to make something change.” And, in our imagination as the audience, Cathy not responding to him just keeps leaving the door open for him to keep digging himself deeper and deeper until he finally says the thing that is the most true thing in the world. The thing she knows is true and he must not ever say unless he wants to blow stuff up. “I will not fail so you can be comfortable. I will not lose because you can’t win.”
CC (to reader)
Hamilton doesn’t know in “Hurricane” that writing about his infidelity, trying to explain himself, going public in this way will not save him. It will destroy his marriage, and end any chance he ever had of becoming president.
LMM
Hamilton is in this situation that he has created. Some very powerful people know about his extramarital affair, and he looks back at his life experiences and goes, “This is what I need to do,” and he makes the wrong decision. He racks up his life experiences and says, “Man, I wrote about this hurricane and got a scholarship to get out of St. Croix. I wrote about the Revolution and got a job as aide-de-camp for George Washington. At every important juncture, I have figured out how to write my way through it.” That’s one of the reasons I was attracted to Hamilton’s story. I was like, “Oh, this guy’s a writer.” And it saves him, until it doesn’t.
CC (to SS)
An action doesn’t have to be plausible to us, the audience; we just have to believe it’s plausible to the character. If I try to move this wall, if I invest wholeheartedly in that action, I’m not going to succeed, but it’s a hell of an action. How many folks spend a lifetime pursuing the wrong objects?
SS
How many also take the wrong action for the right reason? In “Crime and Punishment,” we understand why Raskolnikov does what he does, but oy, what a mistake.
CC (to reader)
“Hamilton” hadn’t been written when Sondheim said that to me in 2007, but isn’t this what Alexander does when he tries to write his way out of this crisis and ends up blowing up his life?
LMM
It’s wild to play it, too. Because you have to play it like “It worked before, it will work again. I’m going to write about this.” And you have his whole life swirl around him. And Andy and Tommy staged it so beautifully. But you get to just be very calm at the center of it. In the same way that Angelica clocks the situation and makes a decision that probably is the right decision, but that just causes her personal anguish, Hamilton racks it all up and makes a disastrous decision.
CC (to reader)
“These characters, if they’re well written, are part of the author. I don’t mean the plot is autobiographical. But your character, its fiber, is partially made out of who the author is.” I mentioned this idea (quoted here from Chapter 2) to both Lin and Jason to see if it rang true to them.
JRB
All the work is personal. When I’m writing, I’m very much always singing it. And I wouldn’t know how to write it if I didn’t. So, it has to feel truthful coming out of me because I’m embodying it. I can actually more clearly trace the moments in my work where something is not personal to me, because I can always pinpoint them as feeling vaguely dishonest. So, I think other than those moments, it’s all not just personal, it’s all autobiographical. Emotionally, it is all autobiographical. “I have felt this thing. I now have to figure out how to put that thing in the song.”
CC (to LMM)
You told me once that, when you wrote “In the Heights,” you didn’t know you’d be in the show, playing Navi.
LMM
I didn’t.
CC (to LMM)
But I assume that, when you were writing “Hamilton,” you knew you’d be playing the part.
LMM
I went back and forth.
CC
How so?
LMM
I went back and forth between Hamilton and Burr.
CC
Did you really?
LMM
And Tommy finally was like, “You’re Hamilton.”
But I think most of us live somewhere between Hamilton and Burr in our everyday lives. When I started reading Ron’s book (Ron Chernow, author of the book that inspired “Hamilton”), the person I thought most of when I thought of Hamilton was my father. He had graduated college in Puerto Rico by the time he was 18 years old, and got a full ride to the NYU graduate program for psychology. My dad left Puerto Rico at 18, speaking not a word of English. So, when Hamilton gets out of the Caribbean at 18, I thought, “I know a guy like that.” My dad is twenty times more restless than I am. I’m the slacker of my family.
CC
Wow.
LMM
So, that was the nervous energy I was tapping into with Hamilton. And for Burr, the fear of losing what you have and what you gained, I respond to that, too. It’s funny like writing all that for Burr was just as personal as writing the other stuff for Hamilton. So, I would go back and forth between the roles. Listen, if I could play Angelica, I would in a second.
CC
And she’s made out of who you are, too.
LMM
It was lovely to play her.
SS
When I’m writing a song, I try to be the character.
CC (to reader)
When I was first studying the Sondheim interview for use in this chapter, I read the above line and was instantly transported back to an evening in late 1978. I was lucky enough to have been invited to a party at Hal and Judy Prince’s, where Sondheim played and sang the entire score of “Sweeney Todd” solo, with the great Hal Prince standing behind the piano, telling the story.
“Sweeney Todd” was about to go into rehearsal for its inaugural Broadway production, and Steve sang and acted his way through this masterpiece of a score.
I vividly recall him slapping invisible cockroaches on the piano lid during Mrs. Lovett’s “The Worst Pies in London,” and aching with desire and determination while singing Anthony’s “Johanna.” And when Sweeney sang “They all deserve to die,” “We all deserve to die,” the composer meant it and, by extension, so did Sweeney.
It’s not that Sondheim was an actor or that he ever thought of himself that way. He most surely did not. But when he was first inventing this gorgeous material and again, that night in 1978, when he was singing it for the first time for a group of people, he was doing what I described on the very first page of this book.
“The writer tries to inhabit the character through identification, empathy, imagination, and a sense of play; many of the same tools the actor uses.”
“How We Make Our Songs Actable” is from Chapter 11, “Writers,” in “The Reason To Sing - A Guide to Acting While Singing” Second Edition by Craig Carnelia (Routledge, 2026), pp. 157-173. Copyright 2026 by Routledge. Reprinted by permission.
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