The musical crossover between the CW’s Supergirl and The Flash lets stars Melissa Benoist and Grant Gustin trade superpowers for tap shoes, with help from the mad songwriting mind of Rachel Bloom.
The Crazy Ex-Girlfriend co-creator and star penned one of the original tunes in a two-part superhero spectacular “overstuffed with joy and fun,” says Flash and Supergirl executive producer Andrew Kreisberg.
“I’m used to wearing a cape, and Grant is used to being in the cowl, and it was a nice change to be doing something so different,” adds Benoist, who’s part of a mini-Glee reunion with Gustin and Darren Criss.
Criss’ supervillain The Music Meister makes his presence felt first on Monday’s Supergirl (8 ET/PT) by attacking its heroine and then following suit with the Scarlet Speedster Tuesday on The Flash (8 ET/PT). After he whammies the pair, they wake up in an alternate reality of an old-school Hollywood movie musical — complete with 1940s-era gangsters and gun molls — and have to stick to the script to make it out alive.
“We thought it would be a bridge too far to have our characters singing and dancing in their costumes,” says Kreisberg.
The Flash episode is packed with musical numbers, from covers of Moon River and Put a Little Love in Your Heart to the two originals: The La La Land songwriting team of Benj Pasek and Justin Paul contribute a solo for Gustin, Runnin’ Home to You, while Bloom’s Super Friends is a peppy duet between the two stars that’s reminiscent of her irreverent Crazy Ex songs but with a meta element.
Bloom describes the tune as “kind of a comment on all of those songs like Together Wherever We Go or You’re the Top, a very classic musical-theater ‘We’ll always stick together’ song that knows it’s super cheesy.
She had her skills tested, too: Super Friends was conceived, approved and written in less than 24 hours, and she enlisted her old Robot Chicken boss Tom Root to add extra superhero jokes. “That was a really nice exercise as a songwriter and flexing my muscles from doing a show with now 82 original songs and, OK, can I write a song this quickly,” says Bloom.
Gustin admits he’s never performed a song like it on stage or in his Glee days, and with it he also got to do a tap number for the first time in nearly a decade. “Tap dance is how I started as an 8-year-old, and it was awesome and bizarre to find myself doing it on the set of The Flash with Melissa Benoist.”
Benoist had been looking forward to doing a musical episode for a while. Supergirl and The Flash lend themselves to that sort of “joy and lightness,” the actress says, though she was nervous she had lost her dancing touch “since I fight so much now. It was shocking to us how easily we picked it back up.”
Battling bad guys in the average Supergirl action sequence takes about the same time to produce, Benoist says, “but when you’re doing a musical number, you have 50 people kicking and singing and dancing around you. It creates this energy that’s really infectious.”
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