Marvel has released the full audio for “Save the City,” the musical number featured in the first episode of new Disney Plus series Hawkeye. In the episode, Jeremy Renner’s titular character brings his kids to see Broadway show Rodgers: the Musical, which features all of the Avengers singing and dancing onstage.
To make a classic riff on a Broadway musical, the show’s creators brought in composers Marc Shaiman and Scott Whitman. The duo is best known for creating the musical Hairspray and they’ve worked on several other prominent musicals, including Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Mary Poppins Returns.
“[Scott and I] were at an Academy Award dinner, and I’m sitting there and someone taps me on the shoulder and says, ‘Excuse me, Kevin Feige would love to meet you,’” Shaiman explained in an interview for Marvel’s blog. “I knew who Kevin was, and I was like he wants to meet me, really? Turns out Kevin is a film score nerd. He started talking about [the scores I’ve written] one by one and I was like, I cannot believe this is happening.”
He added, “We started trading emails about scores and this and that, and when I would see [Marvel movies] I would send him an email. I guess when this idea came up for Hawkeye, for there to be a musical on Broadway, he luckily thought of us, and [Scott and I] couldn’t be more ecstatic about it.”
“We got this assignment during the height of the pandemic, so I had many hours, and I watched many of the movies,” Wittman said. “Much to my delight, I was really quite amazed at all the kind of sly fun that existed in them and I was hoping to get that into the song.”
“Save the City” is the first track from the series’ soundtrack, with the full soundtrack coming later in December. The song’s performers include Adam Pascal, Ty Taylor, Rory Donovan, Derek Klena, Bonnie Milligan, Christopher Sieber, and Shayna Steele.
Hawkeye premiered with its first two episodes on Disney Plus this week. The six-episode series will continue weekly through December.