Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman.Photo:Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittmanhave had the careers most songwriters dream of, with a string of acclaimed hits including the Tony winning musicalHairsprayandSome Like It Hot, which wraps up its run at the Shubert Theatre in New York City on Dec. 30 ahead of a North American tour next year.PEOPLE sat down with the pair this month to celebrateSome Like It Hot’s Grammy nomination for best musical theater album. Here, the pair look back at their prolific career and tell the story behind some of their most-recognizable hits.Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittmanhave had the careers most songwriters dream of, with a string of acclaimed hits including the Tony winning musicalHairsprayandSome Like It Hot, which wraps up its run at the Shubert Theatre in New York City on Dec. 30 ahead of a North American tour next year.
PEOPLE sat down with the pair this month to celebrateSome Like It Hot’s Grammy nomination for best musical theater album. Here, the pair look back at their prolific career and tell the story behind some of their most-recognizable hits.
Never miss a story — sign up forPEOPLE’s free daily newsletterto stay up-to-date on the best of what PEOPLE has to offer, from celebrity news to compelling human interest stories.
01of 16"GOOD MORNING BALTIMORE" — HAIRSPRAY (2002)Shaiman and Wittman’s first musical collaboration to hit Broadway was the musical adaptation of John Waters' 1988 filmHairspray. It’d go on to win eight Tonys, including one for best musical, and spark botha new film adaptation and an NBC live musical event. But it all kicked off with “Good Morning Baltimore,” a joyful opening number that introduced audiences both to protagonist Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokurin the original Broadway production) and Shaiman and Wittman’s pitch-perfect score.SHAIMAN:When we got the gig, we started immediately thinking about what tone we wanted the score to be. And Scott said, “Tracy Turnblad should be like Curly at the beginning ofOklahoma!, looking out at the expanse and finding all this beauty in it.“WITTMAN:Only Tracy would look out at the John Waters version of Baltimore and have those same kind of feelings.SHAIMAN:That song poured out of us from there. I started with that classic Phil Spector beat, which seemed to be right. Based on the description Scott gave, I wrote a first verse and the chorus, and then — once we had the musical framework down — we collaborated on the rest of the lyrics together, with mentions of flashers and rats and all.WITTMAN:Our goal all the time was, “Can we make John laugh?” We all shared a similar sense of irony and humor so we thought if John was laughing, we were on the right track.SHAIMAN:They shall remain nameless, but as we were talking to different directors, one said, “I would ask you to rewrite that song because we can’t start a musical with a girl waking up.” Needless to say, they didn’t get the job.
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“GOOD MORNING BALTIMORE” — HAIRSPRAY (2002)
Shaiman and Wittman’s first musical collaboration to hit Broadway was the musical adaptation of John Waters' 1988 filmHairspray. It’d go on to win eight Tonys, including one for best musical, and spark botha new film adaptation and an NBC live musical event. But it all kicked off with “Good Morning Baltimore,” a joyful opening number that introduced audiences both to protagonist Tracy Turnblad (Marissa Jaret Winokurin the original Broadway production) and Shaiman and Wittman’s pitch-perfect score.
SHAIMAN:When we got the gig, we started immediately thinking about what tone we wanted the score to be. And Scott said, “Tracy Turnblad should be like Curly at the beginning ofOklahoma!, looking out at the expanse and finding all this beauty in it.“WITTMAN:Only Tracy would look out at the John Waters version of Baltimore and have those same kind of feelings.SHAIMAN:That song poured out of us from there. I started with that classic Phil Spector beat, which seemed to be right. Based on the description Scott gave, I wrote a first verse and the chorus, and then — once we had the musical framework down — we collaborated on the rest of the lyrics together, with mentions of flashers and rats and all.WITTMAN:Our goal all the time was, “Can we make John laugh?” We all shared a similar sense of irony and humor so we thought if John was laughing, we were on the right track.SHAIMAN:They shall remain nameless, but as we were talking to different directors, one said, “I would ask you to rewrite that song because we can’t start a musical with a girl waking up.” Needless to say, they didn’t get the job.
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“I KNOW WHERE I’VE BEEN” — HAIRSPRAY (2002)
WITTMAN:In John’s movie, there’s a moment where they go to a dance on the Black side of town and in the background, you can hear someone is singing a great R&B-style song. And I said, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a song with that kind of power for this moment?“SHAIMAN:We used to rent a house in Laguna Beach, and I had my piano and all of my equipment set up in the corner of this woman’s garage, next to her Aston Martin. We had been talking about this song and one night, while Scott was making dinner, I found myself writing the beginning of that first verse. “There’s a light in the darkness, thought the night is Black as my skin.” And I remember saying to Scott, “Are we even allowed to write this?“WITTMAN:Well we were writing for Motormouth, so the words are from her perspective. But the song has gone on to mean so many for so many people. There’s a documentary coming out about the AIDS project Los Angeles, and they asked to use it over the credits (of course, we said yes).SHAIMAN:I’m very proud of what we did. It’s a very meaningful song for us. Our friendJenifer Lewisactually sang the original demo, and she had been invited to sing at the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s daughter. I’ll never forget playing keyboard while watching Jennifer sing, “There’s a road we’ve been traveling / lost so many along the way” as Martin Luther King, Jr.’s family sat there in the front row.
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“YOU CAN’T STOP THE BEAT” — HAIRSPRAY (2002)
WITTMAN:We knew we had to finish a lot of stories with the song, and [choreographer] Jerry Mitchell wanted a very big active production number for the end. But we were stalled on what the hook was. And then one night, I was on the way out the door and I said something to Marc—SHAIMAN:—Scott said, “What if the song’s aboutthe beatandthe beatcan mean forward motion?” And that’s what’s great about working with Scott because he’s also a director, so he’s really good about connecting a lyric to the bigger picture. So he goes to met Nathan Lane at Angus, which was a bar next to whereThe Producerswas playing, and suddenly — like “Good Morning Baltimore” — the song just poured out of me. Well, until I got to just about the first line of the chorus. Then I called Scott and said, “Come home. You’ll be mad if I write anymore without you here.“WITTMAN:They don’t all go that way. When people ask, “How long does it take to write a song?” I usually say, “A lifetime in three days.“SHAIMAN:The first day or two, we just stare at each other in abject terror of like, “What are we going to write? What does it have to be? Do we have any talent? Why are we doing this?“WITTMAN:But we had fantastic collaborators onHairspray.That was a very lovely experience from start to finish. And that song really does a lot, I think, to encapsulate the spirit of Tracy and everything the show represents.SHAIMAN:Once, Scott and I were in England and we got completely lost on our way to visit a rehearsal for a tour ofHairspray. We were like, “Is it this building? Is it that building?” and then we heard them singing, “I was lost ‘til I heard the drums and I found my way.” So we, too, just followed the beat.
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“DON’T BREAK THE RULES” — CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2011)
After penning songs forMartin Short’s one-man Broadway showFame Becomes Mein 2006, which Wittman also directed, the songwriting team next treaded the boards in 2011 with the musical adaptation ofSteven Spielberg’s 2002 filmCatch Me If You Can. The show only had a six-month run, but nabbed four Tony nominations including best musical. It won one award, for actor Norbert Leo Butz, who received nightly standing ovations mid-show for his full-out performance of “Don’t Break the Rules.”
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“FLY, FLY AWAY” — CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2011)
SHAIMAN:Talk about someone who stopped the show. I’ll always remember our first performance in Seattle when “Fly, Fly Away” came up and Kerry Butler completely had the audience on its feet. The applause, it just kept going on and on. It was spectacular.WITTMAN:We didn’t write that song for Kerry, because we had very long gestational period with that show and a few other actresses had played the role prior to her, but Kerry completely made it her own. She was able to draw everyone in and then, just as effortlessly, blow them all away.SHAIMAN:And that was sort of the point when we were writing that song, I remember Scott saying, “He’s telling his life story as this glorious television special. What if this little wallflower could show up and suddenly blossom into Janice Joplin?” And so we definitely wrote that song with that kind of Janice Joplin, slow build idea.
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“GOODBYE” — CATCH ME IF YOU CAN (2011)
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“LET ME BE YOUR STAR” — SMASH (2012)
WITTMAN:When we got the call to doSmash, we said yes immediately. But the question always was what the musical within the show was going to be. There was talk of the Three Musketeers, and some other things. And I said, “I think it should be about Marilyn Monroe because it could tell the story of the two girls rise and fall trying to get to the top of show business.” And that was the only time I’ve ever been in a meeting where the whole room unanimously went, “That’s it!“SHAIMAN:That’s never happened before or again.WITTMAN:We originally wrote “Let Me Be Your Star” with lyrics that were all very Marilyn-centric. And it was Bob Greenblatt who very cleverly said, “In ‘Don’t Rain on My Parade,’ Mr. Arnstein is mentioned once, but otherwise, it could be about a lot of things. Is there any way you could make it more of a universal thing?” So we went back and rewrote it.SHAIMAN:And Megan and Kat just sang the hell out of it.WITTMAN:Smashwas like being on a treadmill of song writing. We’d write the song in one day, learn them the next, record them, stage them and film them all with in a week. So a lot of it was was actually in real time.SHAIMAN:And once you’ve written it, you almost forget you wrote it.WITTMAN:But that pilot was so beautifully crafted and conceived, and to end with “Let Me Be Your Star” was a genius move.SHAIMAN:We’ve been having auditions [for the Broadway adaptation ofSmash] and we’ve easily heard it 5,000 times in the last few weeks. And in the most obnoxious thing I could ever say, I’ll tell you — it holds up.
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“THE 20TH CENTURY FOX MAMBO” — SMASH (2012)
Among the many songs Shaiman and Wittman penned for ‘Bombshell,’ the musical within the musical ofSmash, was “The 20th Century Fox Mambo” — an upbeat dance number to tell the story of Marilyn’s transition from Norma Jean to the blonde bombshell Hollywood would embrace. Lyrically, the song covers a lot of ground. Musically, it offers something starkly different than “Let Me Be Your Star.”
09of 16"THEY JUST KEEP MOVING THE LINE” — SMASH (2012)By season 2, the songs of ‘Bombshell’ had already been packed with bangers, but Shaiman and Wittman were far from finished. The duo wrote “They Just Keep Moving the Line,” a song of resilience for Marilyn that Hilty and her powerhouse vocals delivered tenaciously. (Need more proof? Watch a pre-fameReneé Rappperform the song at BroadwayCon 2019).WITTMAN:I’m the research guy between us. When I knew it was going to be Marilyn, I spent almost a month reading every book and article about her, and even met people who knew her. And there was one magazine interview Marilyn did where she said, “I always think I’m coming into the finish line, but they just keep moving it.” Well, if there wasn’t a better metaphor for our characters’ struggle on the show, I hadn’t heard it.SHAIMAN:I wanted to mimic that with the music so every time the song modulates, it actually modulates down. You think there’s going to be a key change forward, but it just keeps going backward.WITTMAN:That song came in season 2, and though we’re always writing for our character first, there’s part of our frustration with doing the show in that song, too. It came from a real place, the feeling of that song.SHAIMAN:And there was another reason for those modulations, too. We like to say this now, although I wonder if it’s really true, but we figured out that the network wouldn’t be able to edit songs down if we made key changes throughout the song. Because that made it very awkward in the edit.WITTMAN:I remember when they first heard “They Just Keep Moving the Line,” they did say, “Oh, we can’t have this whole song, it’s too long.“SHAIMAN:Luckily, they filmed it all, and luckily I did put that intricate key change into it where it sounds like it’s going higher, but it’s actually going down a full step. And luckily it’s all in there because yeah, Megan just nailed that performance and it would have been a shame not to see the full thing.
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“THEY JUST KEEP MOVING THE LINE” — SMASH (2012)
By season 2, the songs of ‘Bombshell’ had already been packed with bangers, but Shaiman and Wittman were far from finished. The duo wrote “They Just Keep Moving the Line,” a song of resilience for Marilyn that Hilty and her powerhouse vocals delivered tenaciously. (Need more proof? Watch a pre-fameReneé Rappperform the song at BroadwayCon 2019).
WITTMAN:I’m the research guy between us. When I knew it was going to be Marilyn, I spent almost a month reading every book and article about her, and even met people who knew her. And there was one magazine interview Marilyn did where she said, “I always think I’m coming into the finish line, but they just keep moving it.” Well, if there wasn’t a better metaphor for our characters' struggle on the show, I hadn’t heard it.SHAIMAN:I wanted to mimic that with the music so every time the song modulates, it actually modulates down. You think there’s going to be a key change forward, but it just keeps going backward.WITTMAN:That song came in season 2, and though we’re always writing for our character first, there’s part of our frustration with doing the show in that song, too. It came from a real place, the feeling of that song.SHAIMAN:And there was another reason for those modulations, too. We like to say this now, although I wonder if it’s really true, but we figured out that the network wouldn’t be able to edit songs down if we made key changes throughout the song. Because that made it very awkward in the edit.WITTMAN:I remember when they first heard “They Just Keep Moving the Line,” they did say, “Oh, we can’t have this whole song, it’s too long.“SHAIMAN:Luckily, they filmed it all, and luckily I did put that intricate key change into it where it sounds like it’s going higher, but it’s actually going down a full step. And luckily it’s all in there because yeah, Megan just nailed that performance and it would have been a shame not to see the full thing.
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“THE VIEW FROM HERE” — CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY (2017)
SHAIMAN:In England, that’s where “Pure Imagination” went — in the scene where they went up in the elevator. And we learned in England that people wanted “Pure Imagination” much earlier in the show, because we had written a song that we adored called “Simply Second Nature” when Wonka brought the kinds into the chocolate room, but audiences never seemed to grasp it.WITTMAN:They were listening but they were wondering, “Where’s ‘Pure Imagination?’ " Because that’s where the song came in the movie.SHAIMAN:And so when it came time to retool the show for New York, Scott said, “We want that spot.“And then Scott had the brilliant concept of using Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot thesis.WITTMAN:It’s a beautiful speech about Earth and our place in the cosmos. It’s a good reminder of perspective, and that felt like the right jumping off point for Wonka in that moment.SHAIMAN:And so with that idea, we sat down and wrote that song and yeah, I’m proud of that song. And I’m especially glad that the last moment in that show got to be ours.
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“THE PLACE WHERE LOST THINGS GO” — MARY POPPINS RETURNS (2018)
12of 16"SAVE OUR CITY” — HAWKEYE (2021)A musical about the life of Captian America Steve Rodgers and the Avengers? Not the most unlikely of ideas, especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has always explored the impact its heroes have had on the greater public. But what was originally intended to be a gag on the Disney+ seriesHawkeyehas had new life, with Shaiman and Wittman’s hilarious song “Save Our City” now performed daily in an attraction at Disney California Adventure.SHAIMAN:My husband is a full-on Marvel nerd. I went to all the movies with him and afterwards, when we got to the parking lot, I’d say, “So what was that about?” and he’d explain them to me. So when the call came, I turned to my husband and said, “You won’t believe this…“WITTMAN:Meanwhile, I knew very little about the MCU. So I had to catch up, quickly!SHAIMAN:All those years of watching the movies, words like “Tesseract” and “Shawarma” had gotten into my head. I was ready! Poor Scott, he watched them all in one delirious week.WITTMAN:But it was a great thrill to be part of this world. And this was right at the height of the pandemic when people were banging pots and pans on their balconies every night for healthcare workers, so I related to that feeling of, “Somebody please save us.“SHAIMAN:And who would’ve ever thought the song would be performed now in a theme park! That’s… that’s pretty cool.
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“SAVE OUR CITY” — HAWKEYE (2021)
A musical about the life of Captian America Steve Rodgers and the Avengers? Not the most unlikely of ideas, especially in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which has always explored the impact its heroes have had on the greater public. But what was originally intended to be a gag on the Disney+ seriesHawkeyehas had new life, with Shaiman and Wittman’s hilarious song “Save Our City” now performed daily in an attraction at Disney California Adventure.
SHAIMAN:My husband is a full-on Marvel nerd. I went to all the movies with him and afterwards, when we got to the parking lot, I’d say, “So what was that about?” and he’d explain them to me. So when the call came, I turned to my husband and said, “You won’t believe this…“WITTMAN:Meanwhile, I knew very little about the MCU. So I had to catch up, quickly!SHAIMAN:All those years of watching the movies, words like “Tesseract” and “Shawarma” had gotten into my head. I was ready! Poor Scott, he watched them all in one delirious week.WITTMAN:But it was a great thrill to be part of this world. And this was right at the height of the pandemic when people were banging pots and pans on their balconies every night for healthcare workers, so I related to that feeling of, “Somebody please save us.“SHAIMAN:And who would’ve ever thought the song would be performed now in a theme park! That’s… that’s pretty cool.
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“SOME LIKE IT HOT” — SOME LIKE IT HOT (2022)
The 1959 Marilyn Monroe filmSome Like It Hotalready had
SHAIMAN:Like I mentioned, when we start a song, first we sit in terror. But once we figured out that we could take the idea of “Some Like It Hot” — which, great tip of the hat to Billy Wilder for that title — it really opened the gates for us. Because we were able to explore all these things people like, which is what makes the show so contemporary, and say, “Why can’t we all just be happy with what we like?“WITTMAN:I don’t even dare to kiss the hem of Cole Porter, but we tried to say, “What would Cole Porter do?” And there’s probably 300 verses just like he would’ve done with other things “some like.“SHAIMAN:Oh, we wrote verse upon verse upon verse. And we didn’t need half of those verses, but they do exist if you want them!WITTMAN:There’s around six or seven other verses, at least. “Mrs. Claus likes things with Elves,” stuff like that.SHAIMAN:It always amazes us that we’re so scared in the beginning, saying, “What are we going to write?” And then suddenly we have too many verses and choruses for what’s even needed.WITTMAN:But that’s a song that has such a great energy to it. And when Matthew López and [director] Casey Nicholaw decided to move the period of the musical from the height of the Depression to the end of Prohibition, it allowed us to embrace the big band sound that started then.SHAIMAN:And also the glorious sense of humor of stars like Fats Waller, Jimmie Lunceford and Cab Calloway. And then, the idea that our Sugar would be more like Lena Horne or Ella Fitzgerald or Billie Holiday? There was just a lot of inspiration for it and we wanted to stay pure to that time.
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“LET’S BE BAD” — SOME LIKE IT HOT (2022) and SMASH (2012)
One song familiar to Broadway audiences in Shaiman and Wittman’sscore was “Let’s Be Bad.” Originally featured onSmash, the tune was retooled with new lyrics forSome Like it Hotas an Act II opener.
15of 16"YOU COULDA KNOCKED ME OVER WITH A FEATHER” — SOME LIKE IT HOT (2022)Ghee made Broadway history inSome Like It Hot, becoming the first performer identifying as nonbinary to win a Tony for best leading actor in a musical. The actor plays Daphne in the production, a character who discovers their true identity through the course of the show. When they do, they sing “You Coulda Knocked Me Over with a Feather” — a song encompassing the thrill of total self-acceptance.WITTMAN:We could have easily written it as a moment of, “Who am I? What am I doing?” But we wanted it to be about the joy of the revelation, and really celebrating that.SHAIMAN:J. Harrison Ghee just delivers it so beautifully. That’ll be one of the things I’ll remember years from now, when I look back on this show.WITTMAN:And we got that lyric from the idiom of feather, both the softness of it but also to move something. And all of that made sense with this idea of, you can’t undo something once it’s done. You can’t unring a bell, and all that. So it’s a step in the future.SHAIMAN:I’m telling on myself, but J. Harrison Ghee, at opening night, gave us a paperweight that had a feather in it. And I was like, “Oh, what a beautiful paperweight.” And it wasn’t until weeks later that I was like, “Oh, it’s a feather!” That’s how preoccupied I was with all that it takes to open a show.
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“YOU COULDA KNOCKED ME OVER WITH A FEATHER” — SOME LIKE IT HOT (2022)
Ghee made Broadway history inSome Like It Hot, becoming the first performer identifying as nonbinary to win a Tony for best leading actor in a musical. The actor plays Daphne in the production, a character who discovers their true identity through the course of the show. When they do, they sing “You Coulda Knocked Me Over with a Feather” — a song encompassing the thrill of total self-acceptance.
WITTMAN:We could have easily written it as a moment of, “Who am I? What am I doing?” But we wanted it to be about the joy of the revelation, and really celebrating that.SHAIMAN:J. Harrison Ghee just delivers it so beautifully. That’ll be one of the things I’ll remember years from now, when I look back on this show.WITTMAN:And we got that lyric from the idiom of feather, both the softness of it but also to move something. And all of that made sense with this idea of, you can’t undo something once it’s done. You can’t unring a bell, and all that. So it’s a step in the future.SHAIMAN:I’m telling on myself, but J. Harrison Ghee, at opening night, gave us a paperweight that had a feather in it. And I was like, “Oh, what a beautiful paperweight.” And it wasn’t until weeks later that I was like, “Oh, it’s a feather!” That’s how preoccupied I was with all that it takes to open a show.
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“WHICH OF THE PICKWICK TRIPLETS DID IT” — ONLY MURDERS IN THE BUILDING (2023)
SHAIMAN:Pasek and Paul had landed the gig and they were so sweet to have include us — which certainly wouldn’t have been my MO if I had been offered it. I’d be like, ‘Share it with other songwriters? No! It’s all mine!“WITTMAN:They were so generous. And we had a great time writing it.SHAIMAN:That was such a round-robin of us all finishing each other’s sentences. I wondered, “How do four people write lyrics?” But it ended up being just like Scott and I: two people writing lyrics, only it was two more. They’re very much like us in certain ways and we were just like four chefs. It worked.WITTMAN:We had worked for Marty withFame Becomes Me, so we assumed they wanted us to write a song for him but were thrilled to get to do something for Steve. It was so great to watch him learn it, grow with it, and then do it full out. Really, I saw him do it in one take! It was an amazing thing to witness. In fact, everyone had wrapped and they stayed to watch him do it.SHAIMAN:This was just joyful from beginning to end. And I know we’ve said that about a few of these projects, but trust me — it’s not always like that.WITTMAN:I’m sure Steve was very, very happy when it was over. But he was quite something to watch.
source: people.com
