The entire performance took weeks to nail down, and was crafted and overseen by two on-set choreographers. Whenever the “Malcolm” team tackles a music sequence (think Season 1’s “Rollerskates” and Season 2’s “New Neighbors” with that “Candy Man” performance), the goal, Boomer says, is to “have it be stupid, but precisely performed. A technically accomplished version of something really stupid.”
That’s exactly how the revival approaches Hal and the poker guys’ slick Bruno Mars showing in the “Life’s Still Unfair” premiere.
“It was just such a delight,” says Boomer. “I knew that I wanted some song where it got inappropriate. It started out very sweet and then got inappropriately sexy for a public thing, and we found the Bruno Mars song. We went through a lot of songs because some things were way too sexy at the top, and some things just never got weird. [“Locked Out of Heaven”] had the perfect combo and the perfect arc. [It] starts out just so loving and sort of theatrically romantic, and then goes to, ‘Your sex takes me to paradise,’ and if you just hit the word ‘sex’ a little harder than it’s supposed to be, it turns very quickly. I just thought that was really funny.” (Read more from our interview with Boomer here.)
Executive producer Tracy Katsky Boomer recalls watching one rehearsal where it donned on them to make one significant alteration to the performance space.
“We went in to watch them do it for the first time and they did everything. Then we said, ‘What if we just push the aisles closer together?’ Originally they had more room,” she says. “And then when they were all squished together, it just made it so much… like, why are they doing this in a big box store anyway? Why in the middle of the squished up aisle?” she asks with a laugh.
Even Cranston’s screen partner Jane Kaczmarek couldn’t get over how funny the whole bit turned out — and how specific it was to shoot.
“You’ve got a camera and you’ve got six people,” she says. “You’ve got to have your head between these two people’s heads, right? The placement of everyone in a song and dance number, to be seen in a camera over and over and over, making adjustments, coming up between [Cranston’s] legs, that’s really hard work. It’s one thing to do a dance number, but to do a dance number where everyone is seen on camera is a real challenge. It was great fun to watch them do this.”
Thoughts on the “Malcolm in the Middle” revival so far? Grade the premiere, then hit the comments!