![]() It was like group therapy because we were all talking about the voices in our heads, sharing these incredible stories and dreaming up song moments with the comedy team. Kristen: This was my first time being in a comedy writers’ room. We wanted to make each episode its own musical with a beginning, middle and end, but we also wanted to tell a full story with all eight episodes. Robert: It boiled down to structure, because it’s a little different when writing a full-length piece versus eight mini pieces. How did you navigate threading the story throughout a TV series, rather than just one show? We had them do a scene that takes place in the woods where they’re in a fight and I felt like we were watching fantastic actors in an amazing play. I remember being in this dark room and Carlos was reading with Mae, and you could feel the electricity. So, we had fun exploring the depths of the journey and adventure that Lindsay is on.Ĭarlos came in after we cast Mae. As a child actor, she has spent her whole life having to live up to what adults and other people in her life tell her to do. This is Lindsay.” She knows the arc that we’re exploring, which is people-pleasing and how it can sometimes be hard to be authentic if you’re very good at living up to the expectations of others. She came in and sang “What If?” and “Please Like Me.” We were like, “She’s got chops. Can you share the casting process of Mae and Carlos, because who knew Mae could sing like that? The beauty of television is a simple edit can get you right inside a huge emotion at the same speed our emotions change, and you don’t have to deal with stagehands clearing the set. On stage, giant set pieces need to roll in and costume and light changes have to happen. And there are so many reasons that this works better on television than on stage. Kristen: That show captured, with ease, what was going on in the heads of either Fosse or Verdon and how it transitioned to musical theater numbers. We had just seen “Fosse/Verdon,” which he did with Steven Levenson, and that gave us the idea that this could be a streaming series, and you could very easily slip between the guy’s point of view and the girl’s point of view, and it rolled from there. So, we put it on the shelf while we did “Frozen 2,” “WandaVision” and “Frozen” on Broadway, and (“Hamilton” director) Tommy Kail called us and said, “What are you thinking about, do you have anything for us?” In the stage version, we never went into the leading lady’s mind, but we didn’t know how to write it. Robert: The idea has always been the same, which is to go inside the mind of someone and musicalize their unexpressed emotions - those doubts, fears and the huge surges of love all those feelings provide. What was it like taking that foundation and turning it into an eight-part series? Here, the Lopezes talk about the show’s 17-year journey from stage to screen and how their own courtship in the ’90s inspired them.
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