Rachel Bloom Dreams of More ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’: ‘A Stage Musical, That’s a Realistic Thing’
Is it time to go to West Covina, CA again?
When it went off the air in 2019, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” packed a great ending, but it is the age of reboots and reimagining, so when IndieWire recently Zoomed with creator and star Rachel Bloom, we had to know if there was any scenario where fans would get to see more of Rebecca Bunch. Previously, Bloom has publicly flirted with a stage musical, given the hundreds of original songs she performed over the four-season run of the CW show.
More from IndieWire
“A stage musical [version of ‘Crazy Ex-GF’] is definitely part of the goal,” she told IndieWire of future plans. “And then literally, as recently as last night, I had a dream about coming back to ‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ and doing a Season 5. I don’t think it’s gonna happen, but rest assured, this is a dream, a recurring dream, that I have had ever since 2019. And then I wake up and I’m like, ‘Oh no, we’ve definitively ended the show, why would we do a Season 5?’ Probably not, but never say never. But I would think a stage musical, that’s a realistic thing.”
More songs like “Let’s Generalize About Men”? “Strip Away My Conscience”!?
“I think the odds are good you’d have to write more songs just because, if you’re doing a musical, no matter what, even if you’re just gonna plop all four seasons into a musical, you’re gonna need songs because it’s going to be just fundamental different storytelling,” she said. “So, at some point, I think if we did a stage musical, you would have to have new songs, and it would be very, very weird to do that without Adam.”
Adam Schlesinger, the genius pop composer behind movie hit songs like “That Thing You Do!” and “Way Back Into Love,” as well as Bloom’s songwriting partner on The CW’s “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” died of COVID in April 2020. Bloom dedicated her 2020 memoir to Schlesinger, as well as discussed his death in her moving, sharp new Netflix special, “Death, Let Me Do My Special.”
When speaking about the special, Bloom told IW what Schlesinger taught her about writing a great parody song, as they did so often together on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.”
“So Adam, first of all, said a song only takes as long to write as it needs to,” Bloom said. “There was a certain fatalism where he’s like, ‘If you have a day to write a song, that’s how long it takes to write the song.'”
She continued, “He was so good at finding hooks that were these wonderful turns of phrases. So I think with my comedy songwriting, because I come from musical theater where everything is very cutesy, implied, my [song] titles before I met him were, ‘You Can Touch My Boobies,’ ‘Who Wants to Watch the Tony Awards?’ They were very much the thing that it was. Adam really taught me how to find better turns of phrase in both the lyrics but also the chorus.”
For example?
“So there’s this song [on ‘Crazy Ex’], ‘We Tapped that Ass All Over This House,'” she said. “That was an idea that I had. I came in and I was like, I want to do a Moses Supposes-like tap number that’s like, ‘We banged you here, we banged you there, we banged you everywhere.’ And they’re tapping all around the house, because it’s all the places they fucked Rebecca. So Jack [Dolgen], Adam, and I were brainstorming lyrics. We had a bunch of lyric ideas; we didn’t have a hook. And Jack went, ‘We tapped that ass all over this house’ as a pun. And Adam was like, ‘That’s the title.’ And I [said], ‘Oh, fuck! Yes! ‘We Tapped That Ass All Over This House’ is such a perfect title, and so much better than ‘We Banged You Here,’ right? So that was great.”
“Adam was much more [a] stickler for perfect rhymes,” she said, “which I had sometimes avoided, because when you rhyme, you can see sometimes the word that’s coming. If you want to do legitimately funny songs, you have to stay one step ahead of the audience. But Adam was much more a stickler for rhymes.”
Clock that as the reason that years later, lyrics like “ls there an IUD/ that can stop the image of You and Me” are still stuck in your head.
Read IndieWire’s full chat with Rachel Bloom.
“Death, Let Me Do My Special” is now streaming on Netflix. “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” is currently streaming on Apple TV.
Best of IndieWire
Sign up for Indiewire's Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Solve the daily Crossword
