The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel composers Thomas Mizer and Curtis Moore are used to being kept on their toes. So, when creator Amy Sherman-Palladino approached them about writing a few musical numbers for a variety act, which would culminate in a tune about the neighborhood trash man for Season 5, the composers knew they’d “figure it out.”
“We have no idea what’s going to happen in the scripts, we don’t get them. They write them late. So we had no idea what it was gonna be about. We knew there was a big musical coming up,” Moore said during an appearance at Deadline’s Sound & Screen: Television awards-season event, where he was joined by Mizer. “So we got the assignment, [and] we were like, ‘Wait, what?’”
Added Mizer: “She just brought us into a room and said, ‘It’s gonna be about trash.’ And imagine our faces at that moment.”
For Episode 4, titled “Susan,” Mizer and Moore had to craft several numbers, though viewers are only treated to the entirety of the trash-themed act.
Sherman-Palladino wanted each to sound like a different composing team, prompting the duo to take a deep dive to understand “what those writers would have been like in the early ’60s and how they would have been different from each other,” according to Moore.
“Instead of being method actors, we were method writers,” Mizer said.
For the trash-themed act, they landed on “a young composer … and they’re showing off. They want to be entertaining. They’re going to be razzle dazzle. They’re gonna be a little dirtier than ’50s musicals.”
They didn’t exactly have time to spend in each headspace though, explaining that they actually had to craft all three numbers simultaneously. In fact, they only had three weeks from the time they found out the topics for each musical to the time they hit the recording booth.
Check back Friday for the panel video.