How The Captain America Musical In The Hawkeye Series Came Together
Marvel's upcoming Disney+ series "Hawkeye" will allow us to spend a little more time with everyone's favorite bow and arrow specialist around the holidays. Unfortunately for Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner), that means he won't be heading home for the holidays with his family as soon as he'd like. The superhero finds himself keeping an aspiring archer (and Hawkeye fangirl) named Kate Bishop out of harm's way when she inadvertently puts herself square in the sights of some dangerous people after coming into the possession of Hawkeye's Ronin outfit.
But before all that, Hawkeye does get a moment to hang out with his kids in New York City, and that includes catching a Broadway musical based on the life of Captain America. The show is called "Rogers: The Musical," and even though this sequence is bound to be played for mostly laughs, it comes with plenty of professional musical flair. That's because the musical scenes that we see in the show were created by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the duo behind the likes of "Hairspray," "Smash," and "Mary Poppins Returns," and they've revealed how Marvel brought them into the fray.
"I never knew that Scott and I would write a song with the word 'Tesseract' in it."
Marvel.com recently caught up with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman to find out how they were recruited to create this Captain America musical that takes cues from "The Avengers" climactic battle in New York in 2012. Shaiman and Wittman were at an Academy Award dinner when they were told that Kevin Feige wanted to meet them right that very minute. Shaiman recalled:
"Turns out Kevin is a film score nerd. He started talking about [the scores I've written] one by one and I was like, I cannot believe this is happening. We started trading emails about scores and this and that, and when I would see [Marvel movies] I would send him an email. I guess when this idea came up for Hawkeye, for there to be a musical on Broadway, he luckily thought of us, and [Scott and I] couldn't be more ecstatic about it."
However, neither Shaiman nor Wittman were particularly well-versed in the Marvel Cinematic Universe at that point. But the one good thing that came out of the COVID-19 pandemic was an abundance of time that everybody suddenly had. Wittman explained:
"We got this assignment during the height of the pandemic, so I had many hours, and I watched many of the movies. Much to my delight, I was really quite amazed at all the kind of sly fun that existed in them and I was hoping to get that into the song."
Aside from the extra hours spent catching up on Marvel movies, Shaiman got even more help from inside his own house. The songwriter revealed:
"It seemed fate that I married a man who was a total Marvel nerd. So, I would go with him as a good husband to go watch all the movies, then we would usually sit in the parking lot of the movie theater, and I'd say, 'What did I just see?' How does that all work and who's who, and little by little I started putting all the pieces together. We were both lucky to have [my husband, because] he could just spit out whatever the words are like, you know, 'Tesseract.' I never knew that Scott and I would write a song with the word 'Tesseract' in it."
The result is a big musical sequence, albeit with cheap costumes, that creates a song-and-dance routine out of the destructive battle of New York. Based on what we've seen in the "Hawkeye" trailer, we'd like to see an entire musical in this style with tongue firmly in cheek. If Disney+ is looking to boost their content library, they should seriously consider giving the "Hamilton" treatment to "Rogers: the Musical."
In the meantime, here's the official synopsis for "Hawkeye" from Marvel Studios:
Hawkeye is an original new series set in post-blip New York City where former Avenger Clint Barton aka Hawkeye has a seemingly simple mission: get back to his family for Christmas. But when a threat from his past shows up, Hawkeye reluctantly teams up with Kate Bishop, a 22-year-old skilled archer, and his biggest fan, to unravel a criminal conspiracy.
"Hawkeye" premieres the first two episodes of the series on Disney+ on November 24, 2021.