Interview: THE MARVELOUS MRS. MAISEL Songwriters Tom Mizer & Curtis Moore Talk Season 4!

Season 4 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel on Amazon Prime Video is out now! The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel from renowned creator Amy Sherman-Palladino and Executive Producer Daniel Palladino, written and directed by Sherman-Palladino and Palladino stars Emmy and Golden Globe winner Rachel Brosnahan, Golden Globe winner and four-time Emmy winner Tony Shalhoub, two-time Emmy winner Alex Borstein, Emmy nominee Marin Hinkle, Michael Zegen, Kevin Pollak, Caroline Aaron, and Emmy winner Jane Lynch.

The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel is the winner of sixteen Emmy Awards including Outstanding Comedy series, three Golden Globes including Best TV Series-Comedy, six CRITICS' CHOICE AWARDS including Best Comedy Series, two PGA Awards, a WGA Award, and a Peabody Award.

BroadwayWorld spoke with The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel's original songwriters/lyricists Tom Mizer and Curtis Moore about creating the music for one of the most popular TV shows out there today!

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Let's talk about your songwriting partnership! How did you two come together?

Curtis: We've been writing together for a long time. We met way back in college. Two years ago, when we were undergrads! [Laughs]. We like to joke. No, we met at Northwestern in Chicago, and we were both studying different things. Tom was doing English and Acting, and I was doing Engineering, and we met to work on a show there as writers, and have been writing together ever since. And we moved to New York together after school, and have been lucky and privileged enough to keep writing. We started from a theatre background, that was our first start.

Tom: The person we sort of blame for all this was an alum of Northwestern, Larry Grossman, who's an amazing composer, he has written many Broadway shows. He came out and heard some of our stuff, and he encouraged Curtis to leave the Engineering program and compose. So, we always like to blame Larry for everything!

How did you two you come to work as the songwriters for The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel?

Curtis: We've been writing shows together for a long time. We'd been mostly doing theatre writing. A show that we had written that was produced and workshopped about seven or eight years ago now, called Triangle, got us the attention of a producer. And that producer, a big producer, Scott Sanders, asked us to come on and work to help develop... at the time it was when they were really trying to explore a lot of movie catalogues for stage adaptations. So they were looking to make musicals out of movies. And we came on to help him figure out which shows would make the best theatre pieces. And in that process we were paired up with Amy Sherman-Palladino, the head writer and creator of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to work on some of these pitches. We met her doing that kind of stuff. So basically we were working on a musical with her. Tom, you tell this part, it's so funny.

Tom: We were just starting to work on a musical we had, it was all approved, we were ready to start, we had started to write an outline-

Curtis: And we had written some songs!

Tom: Yeah, we had written some songs. And she came to us one day and said, "Hey I have to take a little break for a while. I've got this little Amazon show, I have to film it. I'll be gone for six months, no one is going to watch it, and then I'll be able to come back and work." And that was The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel. So, needless to say, we did not see a lot of her for the next year. We always kept in touch. We would meet and still try to work on the show. And one day I literally just joked, "Hey, can't we write, like, the theme song for one of your shows while we're waiting?" And she thought about it and was like, "Wait a second, I need some music coming up!" And it just worked out. It was a great combination of the relationship we had built with her in theatre, but she gave us an opportunity, and it was just a joy.

Can you tell me about the work that you did for Season 4 of the show?

Tom: Sure! The big thing was that in Season 3, our focus was mainly on creating the world of Shy Baldwin, the pop singer, and making sure that he and his backup singers, and their band, felt like they had their own sound, and that he felt like a real artist. So that was really our focus. And then coming back this year, it was like a whole bunch of wild challenges! We were going to get to do a pop song and a calypso song, and a Broadway song, and a bunch of striptease numbers. We would pick up the phone and never know what she was going to ask this year, which was just incredible, to get to show the wider range of skills.

Curtis: Last year we were primarily just the songwriters, and this past season, we really became the general writers for all the music on it, whenever they needed original stuff, we would come in and do that, which is great. We come from this theatre background, you're so used to doing things like, no money, no budget, and you have to do everything yourself. Like, "You can have a tambourine and a kazoo, go make that happen!" So, between Tom and I, we have a fun skill set where we're not only songwriters, we're also writers, and composers, and orchestrators, and conductors, and arrangers, so we could do all of that last year.

Because Maisel treats the music so respectfully, they really give you the resources to do a good job, which is part of what makes the show so spectacular. You walk into those rooms with a full orchestra, and we get to try out arrangements with them, and we get the best players in New York City to do this. So, it's a really fun, amazing space to work in. And they let us do all the fun stuff that we want to do. It's a mutual trust across the board.

That sounds like the ideal creative situation.

Tom: We know we're spoiled by it. When we first started, we said it was like being asked up to the Majors, you are with the A-Team on every level. From costumes, to the acting, to Amy and Dan who run the show, everybody is at the top of their game and it is just so much fun to be around people all working at that kind of level!

Curtis: The music team, Stewart Lerman is this world famous producer, and to be sitting in that room and collaborating with him on this stuff is really exciting.

Tom: And Robin Urdang is their Music Supervisor, and she has won now two or three Emmy's for this show. She is just one of the best in the business. We're surrounded by people who push us and encourage us, and are not afraid to try things.

What is your actual process in approaching the music for this show? How do you go about getting the tone right for the character, or the scene, or the time period?

Curtis: It's interesting. Simply, we do immerse ourselves in the music of the time, of course. We listen to a lot of the music then. And one of the things that's really interesting, is that Tom and I really grew up with both of our parents listening to a lot of that music, so it's kind of already in our DNA. So, we will approach it from a big point of research, but also because we're songwriters from theatre, we look at what is happening in the storyline. So, even though we're writing these pop songs, we're writing music specific for whatever, we're always going to do our little theatre wink and think about, "How can we put in the songs we're writing just a little wink towards what's happening in the overall arc of the story?"

Tom: And then on a practical level, often what we'll do is, for every song you hear on the show, we've actually written three or four other songs. We will give Amy and Dan options, we'll write just a verse and a chorus of four or five songs for each moment that they need a song. And that way, it's a quicker way for them to grab on to something, instead of just notes going back and forth. That way when we play it, they can go, "That's it! That's the sound," or "That's the closest, let's work with that one." So, we do have a whole trunk of Maisel songs, someday we'll have to do a concert of 'Missed Maisel Songs'!

Curtis: The great thing about Amy and Dan is they are so smart when it comes to music. Maisel has so many needle drops, they know what they want before they even shoot the scene sometimes. They have an idea of what they're looking for. That's great because they can be really in depth with what they're looking for, but at the same time, for how much they have to do, and they're being pulled in so many directions, it's often better for us to write four or five things and say, "Are we in the right direction?" And in this season, for one particular moment, we wrote three numbers, and none of them were what they were looking for, but it let them get clear about what they did want so we could go back and write another set of two or three numbers, and then we got it. I think that's the fun of it, we're not precious with anything we do, we'll write whatever it takes to get the right moment because it's important for the show.

Do you have a favorite song that you have written for the show?

Tom: It's actually the song that Curtis was just talking about, it's a song called 'Baby Monica', and it's from Shy Baldwin's wedding reception. Harry Belafonte is entertaining at the wedding. We had to write a song for someone playing a young Harry Belafonte, which was so daunting because he's an icon and I love him! We wrote a couple songs, and we just weren't feeling it yet, and then Amy gave us the best notes, she said, "It's not one of his hit songs, it's a wedding toast. Think of it that way." So immediately we were like, "Oh, this is something where the band and Harry got together, and they're celebrating and teasing Shy at his wedding." And suddenly we had a story, a purpose, and some jokes, and I love it because it is just so danceable. Curtis gave me the rhythm of it and I was like, "Yes! This is so much fun." So having all those things come together was so satisfying.

Curtis: I second that. It is such a fun tune. If I were to pick another one of my favorites, it's also this song called 'They Came, They Danced' that we got to write this year. This was a little more in our wheelhouse, but still it was a hilarious process. One of the characters from Season 2 has written a Broadway musical, so they're all going to see that show on Broadway. And you don't see any of the show, but you hear it, so we had to write the show. And it was really fun to get into the show because they knew what the title of the show was, they didn't give us anything else about the show, so we kind of had to piece together what it would be. And then, of course, because we're theatre people, we wrote an outline for this entire musical. And not only that, but we wrote part of the musical. We wrote about four or five numbers from the musical just to see which one might be the one that we hear when they're in the theater.

That was really fun because we got to bring in all of our theatre friends to sing it, all the people we get to work with on Broadway, we brought in to sing this track for the show. And it was really lovely, in the middle of Covid, when all of theatre was shut down, to bring in our friends, and singers, and actors who hadn't been working. It was so nice to be able to do that, and be in the room with them, and create some art, and create some fake Broadway!

It's so cool to hear about that process! What are you most looking forward to with Season 4th, now that it's out in the world?

Tom: I think for us, it's so exciting to have seen the progression, and become a part of the Maisel family now. We feel, like Curtis said at the beginning, now we get to be a part of many episodes, we get to do a lot of different things within the show, whether it's instrumental music, or songs. We love being a part of these people, so getting to share that. It's been so long since Season 3, I think everyone needs some Maisel back in their life, a little joy, a little sass, a few F-bombs dropped, and good music. It's always wall-to-wall great songs from the era.

Curtis: It's just getting deeper into the family there, and collaborating more across the board. Collaborating with the choreographer, Marguerite Derricks, who's incredible, getting to work with her to put together these big dance sequences was a blast. Doing more rounded music for the whole process has just been really fun.

Tom: As we speak with you, we just had our first recording session for Season 5. And so we are just starting that next season, which they have announced is the last season, and it makes everything so special, because we want to savor every single moment as each episode comes out. We sit and we watch it together with people. And knowing that we've got this whole year for you to enjoy, and then one more after that that we're starting to make right now. It's so rare to get to do this for as long as we have.

I'm already sad thinking about Season 5 being the last, and I haven't even watched all of season 4 yet!

Tom: Don't think of it as a sad thing, you've got two whole seasons, that's a lot! There's plenty of Maisel stuff to come.

Curtis: This season is hilarious. We had a blast, some of the shoots this year, it's so funny to have been on the set for some of these moments.

Tom: They built an entire set this year of the theatre. When you watch the show, they did not rent a theater, they built it on a sound stage. Curtis and I were joking, "Can we do our show here?" It's a whole theater! Seats, orchestra, stage, backstage, balcony, lobby, they built a theatre at the studio!

Curtis: The camera can walk from the lobby, through the stage, up on the stage, and backstage all in one shot because it's all there.

That's wild, the attention to detail! Do you have any other projects as a songwriting team, in addition to Maisel, that you're working on next?

Curtis: We do! We have a couple of things that we're working on, which is great. Most of which we can't actually disclose entirely because they haven't been announced yet. Theatre is our main story and that's our main background, that's where we're from. So, we've got two musicals that we've been working on that are coming to fruition. We're working on those simultaneously to Maisel. One we're going to do over in London, and that's exciting. And we're writers as well as songwriters, so we've got a couple of TV projects that we've got in the works as well that are music focused.

Tom: Maisel definitely gave us the bug to continue working in the TV and film world as well, because collaborating with all of these talented people, we want to keep doing that.