Sharp: It is harder sometimes when you have lyrics on a page than when the song becomes real, because it’s so much easier to tear apart these crazy lyrics when you’re reading them.

But Nathan and Megan and Megan Thee Stallion and Bowen and us, we were all pretty down to clown. People are like, “Well, surely not this!” And we’re like, “No, it is this.” That was more where people would balk at a lyric. Nathan Lane is probably not the most prudish actor in the world.Īaron Jackson: I would just say more in the development process, we were dealing with many, many rounds of notes. So I think a lot of us were coming in with very legitimate musical references that we were trying to embody and honor rather than being like, “Ah, let’s sell it out and make a comedy song.”ĭid any of the cast members balk at singing any of the more outrageous lyrics? In the bloopers section at the end, Nathan Lane is lamenting what his career has come to, doing this, although we imagine he was kidding. There’s some obvious references for us - “Urinetown” and “Little Shop” and “Book of Mormon” and “South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut.” Then Marius has such an even more expansive knowledge of all the stuff he’s worked on, and Larry, the director, was coming in with a lot of these grand old MGM musicals in mind. We were talking to a comedian friend recently who’s done a lot of that, and he was like, “The best note I can give you is that, for a comedy musical, you had incredible scansion.” A lot of people don’t give a shit about that, because as long as it’s got a joke, who cares? So it was very fun to work with people who really wanted it to be a great musical. A lot of comedy songwriting doesn’t care as much about the songwriting. Because you’re doing all this crazy stuff, you have to ground it in real songs. But I also think it’s a funnier joke that way. Joshua Sharp: We obviously are people who love musicals, and so are Karl and Marius, so it comes from that. The score feels like a classic Broadway score, in a way, that if you wipe off all the lyrics and just handed over that music to someone to write a completely sincere set of lyrics and make it the feel-good hit of the year, they could do it. Variety Zoomed with Jackson and Sharp - whose rapid-fire, real-life patter makes them especially suited to write Broadway “patter songs” - to talk about the music of “Dicks.”

The portray utterly non-identical identical twins who discover each other as dickish adults working for the same boss (Megan Thee Stallion), and decide to get their parents (Lane and Mulally) back together, under the watchful eye of God (Bowen Yang), in a sort of nearly NC-17 “Parent Trap” update. (The latter rapper may actually have one of the less profane songs in the score, though that’s all relative here.)īesides assuming the lead roles, creators Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson co-wrote the dozen songs that fill the movie, along with longtime cohort Karl Saint Lucy and legendary producer Marius de Vries. 20.) In the meantime, a full soundtrack album came out Friday, for anyone wanting a pre-filmgoing sample of musical numbers sung by cast members like Nathan Lane, Megan Mulally and Megan Thee Stallion. The weekend box office indicates that “Dicks” is quickly finding that audience, with Variety’s report saying the outrageous film “was a bright spot at the specialty box office, generating one of the best limited openings of the year.” (The A24 pic generated a very solid $220,867 from just seven screens in New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco in its opening frame, on its way to further expansion next weekend and a nationwide opening following on Oct. But the movie musical will hit an especially sweet spot for folks who want filth and subversion with their show tunes, and who like to hear the classic tropes of musical theater being embraced even as they’re being thoroughly upended. In other words, the warning not for every taste has never applied more.

The most appreciative audience for “ Dicks: The Musical” may be the Venn-diagram overlap between viewers who think the envelope for raunchy language in R-rated comedies doesn’t get pushed nearly hard enough and people who saw “Les Miserables” on Broadway three times.

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