Behind the ‘Only Murders in the Building’ Musical: The Broadway Songwriters Who Created It
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In season three of Only Murders in the Building, Broadway director Oliver Putnam, played by Martin Short, lands on the idea of turning his murder mystery play Death Rattle into a musical after the shocking death of his leading man.
The musical, in which a detective investigates the murder of a woman in a lighthouse that was only witnessed by her infant triplets, is meant to salvage the show, and his career. But it also acts as a motif for the rest of season, wherein the Broadway numbers performed by cast further the plot of the actual murder mystery being solved by Short, Selena Gomez and Steve Martin, the trio at the center of the series.
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And so to make the already over-the-top musical feel as real as possible, the Only Murders in the Building writing team called on the Tony- and Oscar-winning songwriting duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul, who are behind Dear Evan Hansen, The Greatest Showman and La La Land and had already offered up their services as fans of the show, after a chance encounter with show writer Sas Goldberg.
The duo then invited other well-known Broadway songwriters to help complete the score for the fictional musical, which features Paul Rudd, Meryl Streep, Martin and Ashley Park. In collaboration with Pasek and Paul, Sara Bareilles (Waitress) wrote “Look for the Light,” a lullaby sung by Streep to the infants. Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman (Hairspray, Smash) wrote “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” a tongue-twisting patter song that Martin’s character repeatedly struggles to sing. Michael R. Jackson (A Strange Loop) co-wrote the finale, “For the Sake of a Child,” which sees Streep battling with Rudd while protecting the triplets.
“The genius of having Justin and Benj at the center of all these collaborations is that they were able to maintain a kind of continuity [within the musical],” Jackson said.
The Hollywood Reporter spoke with Shaiman, Wittman, Pasek and Paul together on Zoom (and later spoke with Jackson, who had been traveling) about the guidelines provided for this fictional musical, the process of writing the comical and sometimes difficult numbers, and how it felt to write for actors such as Streep and Martin.
Was there a certain sound or genre of musical that you wanted to capture?
Benj Pasek: Once we got that wonderful, fateful call from Sas Goldberg, then we started to connect with showrunner John Hoffman. We joined the writers room in an early session where they were breaking down ideas and pitching what the show should be. And we got to be in some of those conversations to talk about style and talk about what the themes of the show would be or what kind of broader musical it would be, and it was something that was ever evolving.
I remember our first conversation was something along a sort of City of Angels-inspired track, and we were going to do a very classic 1940s kind of show, and it evolved to be a hybrid of a couple of different styles, but something that felt very classically Broadway and that was really, lovingly poking fun at some of our favorite genres of musical theater, but also taking itself as seriously as those shows do. So there was inspiration from anything from Gilbert and Sullivan to Frank Wildhorn to a pretty wide array of musical styles that fed into the Death Rattle Dazzle musical algorithm and came out as something that feels like, hopefully, a loving tribute to some of our favorite genres of musical.
How much direction did you get from the writers on the show?
Pasek: We got an entire synopsis of what Death Rattle is, and while a lot of that’s not actually shown in the show, it was completely thought out by the writers, and Justin and I had some input in that as well. On paper, it really is a complete, however absurd it sounds, musical idea with character development and all of that. You only see glimpses of it, but that’s how thorough and beautifully attentive the writers were to making sure that we had a foundation that that really could serve us, as we were trying to parallel the stories.
What’s also so hard, and what we try to do in each of these songs, is to try to create something that obviously makes sense for the fictional show, but then has the parallel resonance. So whether that’s a song like “Look for the Light,” where ultimately yes, it’s to the triplets, but it’s really about Loretta [Streep] and her son, or the “Pickwick Triplets,” as the potential suspects narrow, who could it be and how that could be a parallel outside the show. “For the Sake of a Child” is all about what we risk for our kids and how that then plays out to the broader plot. It was this really nice puzzle to have to figure out with every song moment as well.
What was the process like writing these numbers?
Marc Shaiman: The guys came over to our studio. And I was skeptical, I was like, what is this gonna be like with four lyricists? But it was exactly like when Scott and I wrote, only with four people just throwing phrases out. Word Association, phrase association. We had to come up with vocabulary that had to do with infants and murder [for “Pickwick Triplets”].
Scott Wittman: I like to say if we had had five more people on the song, Beyoncé would have recorded it.
Justin Paul: Finding those couplets was like a very fun, juicy experiment. We came up with a huge long list of possibilities of what to pull from, here’s our palette that we want to work with lyrically and then going about telling the story that we had really broken down pretty thoroughly with John Hoffman. And then it was just the fun of executing it, finding our favorite lines, how can we keep besting each other, besting that line. It was a joy and certainly something that I know we would never have come up with on our own.
Michael R. Jackson: We did three or four Zoom sessions that were each three to four hours long [as the songwriters were all in different locations at the time]. I feel like Frank Wildhorn was the reference point that kept coming up. And we wanted something that had a kind of virtuosic quality to it, since we knew that Meryl was going to be doing a lot of the heavy lifting on the song [“For the Sake of a Child”].
It’s for a comedy, and it’s meant to be, not bad, but it’s meant to be in a musical that’s kind of a bad idea. It’s improbable. So it’s both challenging and freeing at the same time, because it has to have its own integrity, but its integrity has to be kind of ridiculous.
Was there a certain degree of difficulty you were aiming for with “Pickwick Triplets”?
Wittman: Something that Steve would take a long time learning in the show had to be a bit of an ear worm that he keeps struggling with. So we knew it had to be a real tongue twister for him to conquer.
Pasek: What was so fun was that John Hoffman and the writers really engineered this moment to have several moments in the show where you as an audience member are waiting for the payoff to see whether or not he can do it. And often when songs are used in TV shows, in our experience, you’re chopping a song off, and even some of the songs from this musical are more in the background, while action is taking place elsewhere. And what was so exciting, particularly about the “Pickwick Triplet” moment, and also “Look For the Light” is that those songs are so integral to the plot of what’s happening in the musical. So really, as an audience member, you’re waiting to see whether or not Steve Martin can get through a very, very difficult patter song full of alliteration and full of dexterity. And so it let us really get to be in a sandbox, where we got to really play and collaborate and try to reverse engineer the hardest thing to actually sing and then present that to Steve, who was unbelievable and was so up for the challenge and attacked it with such rigor and determination. Steve’s dedication to learning the song was really not dissimilar to [his character] Charles-Haden Savage, in that he had a real tongue twister to have to get through and he really approached it with such care and diligence.
Paul: He’s a great musician himself. So we knew that we could really write it to a pretty challenging degree, knowing that Steve is musical himself and so would rise to the occasion.
Shaiman: I just had a flashback that I knew he could do it because for many, many years, Scott and I would go to Marty Shorts’ on Christmas. Marty Short used to have legendary Hollywood Christmas parties that were just like things you’ve ever heard read out of a book about like classic Hollywood, and certain people would have the balls to get up and perform and other people would run into the kitchen. Scott used to say it was kind of like The Diary of Anne Frank, certain people would run and hide and others would stay, and one year Steve Martin, out of the blue, said this is what I’m going to do and he did the entire opening of The Music Man [the salesman’s patter song, “Rock Island”] all by himself.
Were you writing for the particular character’s voices?
Paul: Marc even had the subconscious memory of him doing “He doesn’t know the territory” from The Music Man. So I think we very much were writing for those voices. Meryl, same thing. Sort of knowing and investigating her voice a bit, which you know, she has sung beautifully on other projects before, but knowing where her sweet spots were.
We wrote a little opening number for the show called “Creatures of the Night” that Marty Short sings. It was all written to be a bit over the top and sort of ridiculous and we knew that he could pull that off perfectly. I remember the first time he came to the studio and it was all way over done in that great Marty Short way. It was preposterous and exactly what you want it to be. He was like “Is it too big?” And it’s like it couldn’t be too big.
Have you worked with this number of songwriters before? How was it?
Shaiman: We’ve written special material for one-night performance kind of things. And then I worked for SNL and actually wrote something with Steve Martin. These guys wrote La La Land, where they shockingly had someone else writing the music, so I’ve often wanted to know what that was like…
Pasek: We find it really fun to get to collaborate with folks whose work we love. Justin and I have been working together now for 20 years. And so getting to bring other folks into our collaboration and getting to be in a room with other people who have the same…
Paul: It’s necessary!
Pasek: It’s really nice. We’ve done this more recently of late. The last couple of movies that we’ve worked on, we have created little mini musical theater writers rooms, and we found that to be really fun on Lyle Lyle Crocodile and on Spirited and we co-wrote La La Land songs. But this was also just a great opportunity to get to work with folks that we love. Marc and Scott are the folks that greenlit our participation in Smash season two and give us our very first TV job. And not only are we just fans of their work, but they’ve also just been wonderful, supportive writers in our lives.
It feels sort of like building Legos or something like everybody’s putting a little piece on top of another piece and eventually you look back and you build a little tower together. And you don’t even know who put what piece on, but something has emerged. So that was just a really fun and really collaborative way to write. And sometimes writing can get very lonely, and it’s really nice to just make it a joyful experience and a collaborative one and something that feels a little bit communal.
Shaiman: Also, it was so much fun because people in our profession don’t often get to hang out as much as you wish, because we have such similar life stories and similar viewpoints about things that are going on. So we had great moments, such as luxuriating in the ability to share kinds of things that you don’t get to talk about, especially, of course, songwriting and lyric writing. And getting to see how these two guys work, was kind of similar to Scott and I could see the dynamic between them is kind of similar to Scott and I and it was just fascinating. The whole thing was phenomenal.
Jackson: It was really fun and educational. I feel like I’ve learned a lot sort of watching how Benj and Justin work with each other as longtime collaborators and getting to jump in with them.
It’s like a machine. They understand each other’s rhythms and they are not precious about ideas. They know how to fight for their ideas without ever becoming personal or tense. I’ve seen some collaborations where it’s really intense between the collaborators, and with them, they just sort of hack it out. They have a goal. They know what they want, and they go after it, which I think is a great quality to have in two collaborators.
Did you make any changes after the songs were performed or hearing the songs along the way?
Pasek: Definitely things happened along the way, you know, Ashley Park, when her storyline was added then that became a really cool bit of a duet moment in “Look for the Light,” which was fun.
Paul: And Meryl had a few lyric requests and asks and notes in the finale number. But by and large, when things work, you always can point to the hard work that was done in the talking, in the fleshing out and between the writers room and the chance we got to work with them, and then the chance that we all got to really talk these things out amongst ourselves and with John Hoffman. A lot of work went on the front end, and a lot of thought and care was put into what these moments should be. So the execution was just kind of the fun part.
Pasek: Steve definitely had one lyric change, which is the lyric was “Will a baby get fried for matricide?” [in “Pickwick Triplets”]. And he was like, I don’t know that we want to imagine a child on the electric chair. But luckily the word “tried,” which made total sense, just slotted right in and was a little more palatable for America.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
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