Interview: How Marc Shaiman & Scott Wittman Created a Marvel Musical in HAWKEYE

Disney's latest Marvel series, Hawkeye, featured a trip to Broadway with Rogers: The Musical. Tony-winning collaborators Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote an original song for the series' fictional musical.

"Save The City" features music by Marc Shaiman and lyrics by Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. The voices of Adam Pascal, Ty Taylor, Rory Donovan, Derek Klena, Bonnie Milligan, Christopher Sieber, and Shayna Steele can be heard on the track.

Shaiman and Wittman's best known collaborations include Hairspray, Disney's Mary Poppins Returns, Catch Me if You Can, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and NBC's Smash.

Marvel Studios' "Hawkeye" is an original new series set in post-blip New York City where former Avenger Clint Barton aka Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) 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 (Hailee Steinfeld), a 22-year-old skilled archer and his biggest fan, to unravel a criminal conspiracy.

BroadwayWorld caught up with Shaiman and Wittman about the new song, their Marvel knowledge, and which Marvel film they would give the full musical treatment to!

Were either of you Marvel fans when you signed on to write this song?

SW: I had seen maybe one of the movies, but because it was the middle of the pandemic and we got the assignment, I watched all of them in the space of a week. So I was very immersed in the Marvel universe by the end of that.

MS: On the other hand, it seemed fated that I married a man, Louis Mirabal, who also appears as the mysterious man sitting behind Jeremy Renner, he's a full on Marvel nerd. So I've gone to every single one of the movies with him just as a beautiful husband. Then, we would always sit in the parking lot after the movie and I'd say, "So what, what did I just see? What happened? Who does what? And what's a Tesseract?!" So luckily I had all those words in my head from Lou drilling them into my brain, as I tried to understand exactly what I'd been seeing. Then, I had Lou in the kitchen, so I could say, "Is it 'chitauri?' How do you spell 'chitauri?' And 'shwarma.'" I remembered that one, Robert Downey Jr. is always saying in the Avengers movie, like, "Let's get some shawarma!" So those sounded like fun words to be able to put into a song. But luckily, we were able to create a rhyme scheme where we didn't have to rhyme any of them. So those words are in the middle of the lines because, well, I guess he could rhyme "tesseract" with "fact".

SW: But it's fun to write because of the mythology of it is so grand. So I kind of appreciated it on that scale. That kind of accomplishment creating that world and all those universes that somehow interconnect in all the movies, it's kind of an amazing feat.

How did that knowledge of Marvel then inspire the sound you wanted to create while writing this song?

MS: Well, we knew it should be like an act one closer. So this kind of like pop rock, gospel sound where they're imploring the Avengers, "Save This City." It should have that kind of Broadway drive. We also knew it had a sound Broadway and we also knew it had to hopefully be a good song that you enjoy listening to or watching. But it also had to be on that side of Broadway where certain people who maybe don't love Broadway, like Clint, would roll their eyes at it. We knew in the script. That was the main point where he's there and he's going, "What is this?" So we knew we had to also write something that would make someone like him be like, "What am I doing here?" So that was a real tight rope to have to walk and so I hope we achieved that.

SW: But it was also written at the height of the pandemic. It was the days of pounding on pots and pans for healthcare workers at night and things like that. So that kind of fed into the theme of the song in a way.

If you could give any Marvel movie the full musical treatment, what would it be?

MS: I think it would be a Thor. Ragnarok! I mean that whole world up on planet Asgard. Yeah. I mean, that is just a wild, wild scenario and Cate Blanchett's character, she'd be phenomenal in a musical! So that would be the one I'd pick.

SW: Yeah. Thor is good!

Listen to "Save the City" from Marvel's Hawkeye here: