Captain America will soon be making his musical debut in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. According to Marvel's website, Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman wrote the number for Rogers: The Musical, a fictional musical about the first Avenger in the upcoming Hawkeye series.
Shaiman and Wittman have previously worked together to create music for Hairspray, Smash, and Mary Poppins Returns. According to Shaiman, their journey into the Marvel Universe began with Marvel Studios president Kevin Feige wanting to meet them.
"Turns out Kevin is a film score nerd," said Shaiman. "He started talking about [the scores I've written] one by one and I was like, I cannot believe this is happening." Shaiman and Feige kept in contact and would email each other about film scores and whenever a new Marvel film was released. "I guess when this idea came up for Hawkeye, for there to be a musical on Broadway, he luckily thought of us," Shaiman said, "and [Scott and I] couldn't be happier."
Although Shaiman and Wittman were not experts on the MCU when they were first offered the project, they went back and watched many of the films, given that they were working on Rogers during the height of the pandemic. Shaiman also credited his husband Lou, who he describes as "a total Marvel nerd," for helping him get caught up on the MCU's backstory. "We were both lucky to have [my husband, because] he could just spit out whatever the words are like, you know, 'Tesseract.'" The pandemic was also an influence on what they put into Rogers. "When we were writing it was like when people would go and bang on pots and pans for the hospital workers, first responders," Wittman said. "It all seemed to fit into the universe that we were writing to."
Shaiman also talked about what it's like to see fans react to what they've seen of Rogers in the trailer. "We've worked on a lot of stuff that goes around the world," he said, "but man, there's nothing like the Marvel fans and how they look [for hidden details] and everything. It was just wonderful to see how happy they were about the musical and that they understand Marvel's sense of humor."
Hawkeye, starring Jeremy Renner as Clint Barton and Hailee Steinfeld as Kate Bishop, will premiere with its first two episodes on November 24 on Disney+. In the meantime, fans can view the Hawkeye trailer featuring a quick glimpse of Rogers below: