Up here in their heads, a musical gem emerges

Early in the pandemic, a phone call linked three strong forces in musical storytelling.
“Tommy (Kail) gave us a call,” recalled Kristen Anderson-Lopez, “and said, ‘Hey, we’re not sure when we’re going to get back into the theater. Do you guys have anything you want to do for TV?’”
They did; her husband, Robert Lopez, started nurturing the idea 17 years ago. Now “Up Here” (shown here) arrives Friday (March 24) on Hulu, with all eight half-hours available at once
”Imagine this as eight mini-musicals that would add up to one season-long musical,” said Steven Levenson, who co-wrote the scripts and previously did “Tick, Tick … Boom” and “Fosse/Verdon.”
That notion might have drawn doubters elsewhere. On TV, musicals have done fine as one-shot movies (“High School Musical,” etc.) on the Disney Channel, but have often stumbled as series.
But now things may be different. “There’s never been a generation of musical-theater songwriters that have loved TV as much as this generation,” Lopez said. “We grew up watching.”
He’s 48 and has had huge successes composing for Broadway (“Avenue Q,” “House of Mormon”) and, with his wife, for movies (“Frozen,” “Coco”). Kail is 45, a director who triumphed on Broadway (“Hamilton,” “In the Heights”) and on TV (“Fosse/Verdon,” “Grease Live”).
Now they’re part of a musical mini-surge on TV: “Schmigadoon” starts its second season April 5 on Apple TV+; a “Grease” prequel starts the next day on Paramount+.
But first is “Up Here,” reflecting Lopez’s long-ago idea.
“I was really interested in telling a story about ordinary people as a musical,” he said. “But they were telling me, ‘No, it has to be set long ago and far away. It has to be characters that are larger than life.’”
Then he decided to set it in people’s heads. Two young people – tentative and likable – meet. Jarring them are the voices in their heads, people – parents, friends, ex-lovers – who keep finding fault.
For the woman, Kail cast Mae Whitman, who’s been a professional actress for 28 of her 34 years, while giving few hints she wanted to sing. “Being in front of a camera (is) where I feel the most comfortable,” she said. “(But) singing — that, to me, is so vulnerable and, like, terrifying,”
For the guy, they chose Carlos Valdes, 32, who focused on musical theater at the University of Michigan, for two years in tours and a year in a supporting role in Broadway’s “Once.” Then his career was diverted by his “The Flash” role as Cisco. “I did musical theater for a long time,” he said, “and I was a bit of a newcomer to doing things on camera.”
Now Kail was sending them and others through a theater marathon. “We basically recorded an album and rehearsed every single dance number for a month,” Whitman said, “before we even started filming …. It was all in one building, so it was almost like camp.”
It was sort of like doing summer-stock theater. “There’s always something going on,” Kail said.
Meanwhile, Levenson was polishing the scripts with Danielle Sanchez-Witzel. “Usually, musicals take years,” he said.
Not this one. In a Covid era, everyone could focus on the things up here, in people’s heads.