‘Crazy Ex-Girlfriend’ Team Breaks Down Pivotal Premiere Music Video
By Danielle Turchiano
LOS ANGELES (Variety.com) – The third season premiere of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” opened with a song entitled “Where’s Rebecca Bunch?” to address the second season’s cliffhanger: how and when Rebecca (Rachel Bloom) would react to being stood up on her wedding day. “It was way more plot-driven than we normally do,” executive producer Aline Brosh McKenna says of the vibrant musical number. “We had to explain a lot about the world and reset the world because it was right at the beginning of the episode. She didn’t really have the nerve to go full-[on] revenge mode, and the song tells you she’s disappeared, everyone’s looking for her, and she’s holed up in a hotel, depressed, gathering the resolve she needs.” And it was all done as a period piece.
Melina Root
Costume designer
“It was supposed to look like the opening of ‘Beauty and the Beast’ — 18th century and based on Charles Perrault fairy tales. But I had to consider the fact that it was 100 degrees and being shot in Pasadena. That was the No. 1 consideration for how we get all of these actors to be able to move around, sing and dance and not sweat off all their makeup. The technical side of it was figuring out a lightness to the petticoats and corsets. The creative side of it was making it look like a Disney fantasy, so how to use brighter colors.”
Kathryn Burns
Choreographer
“I like the lyrics to drive the movement. Here they’re townspeople, so it’s more like traditional musical theater, but while Donna Lynne [Champlin] has a lot of dance experience, we were also putting in people that didn’t. So keeping it earnest to musical theater, but still somewhat simple was important. A good shoulder shrug is good for questioning things. Part of the joy of what I get to choreograph is having it properly live in the genre but also getting to find moments of funny.”
Rachel Bloom, Jack Dolgen, Adam Schlesinger
Songwriters
“It was very inspired by ‘Somebody’s Getting Married Today’ from ‘The Muppets Take Manhattan,’ ” says Bloom. “It was going to be a big town celebration, kind of mixed with the Disney musical feel. I really liked the idea of a big ensemble number where everyone kind of got together, making West Covina feel like a small town. It’s just meant to be this feeling of when smallish towns are gossiping, it feels like it could be the medieval times — except people are talking as much on social media as they are in the town square.”
“It’s just meant to be this feeling of when small towns are gossiping.”
Rachel Bloom
Erin Ehrlich
Executive producer/Director
“The camera is constantly moving, so you have this fluid camera movement showing this bright village — this little hamlet of West Covina — where everything’s bustling in this bright, bubbly way, but then moving into a darker, more ominous tone and mood and style where you get to the hotel where she’s hiding out. We had three cameras shooting the big dance sequence at the same time, and because we had the horse, and you find out on the day the horse can only go up the hill six times, we were like, ‘OK we’ll shoot the rehearsal.’ It’s all about getting the timing right.”
Watch “Where’s Rebecca Bunch?” below:
