You can see it in Ars Nova hits that lately have gone off into the wider world — like Bess Wohl’s “Small Mouth Sounds,” born in Play Group; Jennifer Kidwell and Scott R. Sheppard’s “Underground Railroad Game,” which in January toured to Australia; and the groundbreaking “Comet,” whose lauded transfer to Broadway in 2016 was a glittering but bittersweet triumph.
And you could see it one evening this month, when Mr. Miranda — also part of that first Play Group — took the stage of the Greenwich House Theater with his hip-hop improv group, Freestyle Love Supreme. With tickets priced at $1,000 to $2,500, it was a sold-out benefit for Ars Nova, celebrating its expansion to the former Barrow Street Theater in Greenwich Village. (The Mad Ones’ latest show, “Mrs. Murray’s Menagerie,” starts performances there on March 26.)
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When Mr. Eagan first saw Freestyle Love Supreme, in 2004, they were performing in the basement of the Drama Book Shop. Their eight-week Ars Nova run that fall was Mr. Miranda’s first professional New York show, sharing a bill with a trapeze act.
In 2005, Mr. Eagan took the troupe to the HBO Comedy Arts Festival in Aspen, Colo., to put them in front of an industry audience. Mr. Miranda was his roommate on the trip, and when he suggested watching a movie, he handed Mr. Eagan a case of DVDs he’d brought.
“I started flipping through, and it’s all musicals,” said Mr. Eagan. “It was this penny-drop moment for me, where I was like, ‘Right: If you want to break the form, you have to know the form that you’re breaking.’ ”
For his part, Mr. Miranda doesn’t recall the DVDs, or that (as Mr. Eagan says) they settled on the TV version of Stephen Sondheim’s “Passion.”
“What I remember from the Aspen trip,” he said, “was actually getting very sick, and Jason was kind of the one who took care of me. He was getting me soup so that I could then rap at high altitudes.
