The MCU’s Hawkeye series is coming to Disney+ soon, and one thing we know (thanks to the trailers) is that the show will also feature a Captain America musical called Rogers: The Musical.
Marvel revealed today that the fake Broadway show has some real Broadway talent behind it: Songwriters Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, the team behind Hairspray and innumerable other works for film and television, created the musical number for Marvel’s show within a show.
In an interview with Marvel, Shaiman and Wittman revealed that their involvement in Hawkeye stemmed from meeting Marvel’s Chief Creative Officer, Kevin Feige:
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“[Scott and I] were at an Academy Award dinner, and I’m sitting there and someone taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Excuse me, Kevin Feige would love to meet you,’” Shaiman recalled. “I knew who Kevin was, and I was like he wants to meet me, really? 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.”
When Hawkeye came around, Feige got in touch, and the duo got to work creating the musical number—a song that focuses on the Avengers and the Battle of New York.
While the two were admittedly not hardcore Marvel fans, they did have someone close providing them counsel on the ins and outs of the MCU. “It seemed fate that I married a man who was a total Marvel nerd,” Shaiman said. “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.”
And while this was their first foray in the world of Marvel, Shaiman added that they’ve enjoyed seeing how MCU fans have reacted so far to their work. “There’s nothing like the Marvel fans and how they look [for hidden details] and everything,” he said. “It was just wonderful to see how happy they were about the musical and that they understand Marvel’s sense of humor. They’re just so looking forward to it. It’s really thrilling.”
The first two episodes of Hawkeye’s six-episode run premiere on Disney+ on November 24, 2021.
