The words “Star Trek musical” might seem like an oxymoron, but as any Trekker knows, music has been a major part of the scifi franchise since its beginning. Uhura sang on the original 1960s series, as did several characters on the spinoffs. For Deep Space Nine, supervising producer Ronald D. Moore pitched a musical episode but lost that battle. On Picard, season-one showrunner Michael Chabon also struck out when he tried to recruit Lin-Manuel Miranda as a songsmith.
Finally, in its second season, the Paramount+ prequel Strange New Worlds made the long-gestating dream of a Star Trek musical episode come true. Here, the cast and crew of “Subspace Rhapsody” explain their extraordinary group effort to emmy contributor Jennifer Vineyard.
OPENING NOTES
Akiva Goldsman (Co-showrunner): When we started Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, [a musical episode] was a dream.
Christina Chong (Actor, La'an Noonien-Singh): My persistent nagging did it. I started pitching the idea. They said, “Funny you should say that … .”
Celia Rose Gooding (Actor, Nyota Uhura): Christina has this magical way of manifesting cool episodes.
Alex Kurtzman (Executive Producer): How far out did we start before we were shooting this episode?
Henry Alonso Myers (Co-showrunner): About six months. By the time we had a composer and a lyricist, we had broken an episode. They were sending us the songs as our writers were doing the script.
Bill Wolkoff (Writer): I pitched to make it seem possible as both Star Trek and a musical. That’s where the idea of the improbability field came in, which creates this reality that unleashes them to sing their feelings in a way that causes trouble.
Goldsman: The infinite-universe theory would suggest that there is a musical universe — and in that, why wouldn’t there be music in the air, in the way there’s oxygen? It’s the most improbable universe ever known to man, short of the one where we turn into bunnies.
Dana Horgan (Writer): The episode’s dialogue about bunnies, that’s an homage to Buffy the Vampire Slayer’s musical episode. That was the bar. When we were trying to think about the structure, we had recently fallen in love with Encanto. It was a language to talk about what our musical could be, with the mystery.
Myers: I sort of expected that people would think this is silly. The goal was to do something gut-wrenching, because that would surprise them.
Tom Polce (Songwriter): I enlisted my sister in rock, [fellow Letters to Cleo member] Kay Hanley. We got a sense of who wanted to sing, who could sing, what their skill set was. And we had ringers. Rebecca Romijn: ringer! Christina Chong: ringer! Celia Rose Gooding: ringer of all ringers!
Goldsman: It was more tailor-made to an ensemble cast. You discover Celia’s voice, and you’re like, “Oh! That’s going to land there at the end.” She led us there.
Dermott Downs (Director): They gave me two weeks for additional prep. We didn’t have a full script then. We had songs, an outline and a temp track. It was scary, like, “What’s this going to be?” And then we got the songs.
TREK TUNES
“Status Report”
After encountering an anomaly, the Enterprise crew files station reports, only to be bewildered that they appear to be singing an ensemble number.
Downs: In the first number, this musical virus moves through the ship. It’s a sound wave that motivates the singing.
Horgan: It feels like the opening of Into the Woods or the opening of Newsies — setting the world.
Wolkoff: There’s a lot of Treknobabble. It’s a song that has science in it.
Polce: Dana and Bill would give us these ammo emails with nomenclature. I thought it would be amazing to open up with Spock’s voice, especially since he has to be the first person to clock that they are singing.
Wolkoff: “Status Report” relies a lot on cast who aren’t primarily singers. When Anson Mount sang on the end, we knew, “This is going to work.”
“Connect to Your Truth”
Combining the talents of Rebecca Romijn (singing) and Paul Wesley (ballroom dancing), their characters Una Chin-Riley and James T. Kirk do a “Waltz of the First Officers” while chatting about their respective roles aboard the starship.
Polce: This is our one hat-tip to old-school musicals.
Downs: It’s a light waltz.
Kurtzman: We did a series, Short Treks. For one of them, I called Rebecca and I said, “What hidden talents do you have?” She said, “I can sing any Gilbert and Sullivan song.” Obviously, that made its way into Strange New Worlds.
“How Would That Feel?”
La’an hides in her quarters to sing a heartbreaking torch song and debate the danger of revealing feelings in public, since they can be security risks. (She has a classified crush on an alternate-timeline James T. Kirk.)
Chong: The only song I could think of when Tom asked me to sing was “Summertime.” He said, “You have a big range!” I said, “I do?”
Horgan: We had a conversation about La’An’s story arc, how she could tell Kirk how she feels, even though she can’t break time-travel rules. We felt that the moment where she says this should not be a song. It should not be a subspace rift that is compelling her to do it, but a choice.
Downs: The song is an interior monologue about her fear. The flashback was going to be like a Terrence Malick film.
Chong: Swaying trees, longing looks. I said, “That feels weird. She needs to be on her own.”
Downs: They were doing pickups, shooting in a hotel room, so it became, “What if it’s just in her mind? Let’s just shoot handheld, make it intimate, in and out of focus.”
Kay Hanley (Songwriter): I felt in touch with the theme, which is, “Why does everybody else seem to have the manual for how to interact with other people?” I dove into it in a way that I had never really done before.
Horgan: “Defying Gravity” [from Wicked] was on our mind, and “On My Own” [from Les Misérables]. La’an was like our Éponine in her longing for a Kirk who didn’t exist, whom she couldn’t have.
Chong: My solo is fricking hard. Vocal acrobatics.
Wolkoff: Christina had never sung a torch song like that before. Now she’s launching a musical career.
“Private Conversation”
Captains Christopher Pike (Mount) and Maria Batel (Melanie Scrofano) — who are in a romantic relationship — inadvertently reveal too much when talking becomes singing in front of their respective crews.
Downs: La’an wants to share with Pike that this song is moving through the ship. Pike goes full live singing in front of everybody.
Polce: Anson Mount said, “I don’t sing.” I said, “Do you want to sing?" “Heck yeah.” So we sang some John Mellencamp, Bryan Adams.
Anson Mount (Actor, Christopher Pike): I’m more comfortable doing rock ’n’ roll and country.
Horgan: We talked about “Confrontation” from Les Misérables, with the two escalating.
“I’m Ready”
Dance break! Nurse Chapel (Jess Bush) gets good news — she’s decided to leave the ship and take a fellowship — and sings a rousing number that gets the crew’s groove on, save for one holdout, Spock, who’s disappointed.
Wolkoff: It’s a freeing song, like Treat Williams’s song in Hair, “I Got Life.”
Gooding: It’s an almost–Amy Winehouse bar number.
Polce: I was watching Grease, so I said, “We need a dance number! Can I put in 16 bars so we can do a dance break?"
Roberto Campanella (Choreographer): We went from a few to almost 20 dancers, because Dermott kept saying, “We need more.”
Downs: Roberto crafted this dance moving through the whole bar, with the trust of falling back into dancers, being lifted up and surfed.
Wolkoff: At the end of shooting that night, everybody started singing. Our poor assistant director had to wrap the crew: “That’s great, I love it. Now get off my set!”
“I’m the X”
Spock retreats to embrace his more stoic Vulcan side, singing a dark reprise of Chapel’s “I’m Ready.”
Polce: Ethan said, “I used to play cello, but I don’t sing.” So I said, “Why don’t you show me some artists you listen to?”
Ethan Peck (Actor, Spock): I think I presented Nirvana, Twin Shadow, Frank Sinatra.
Polce: When there were some singers with lower voices, I said, “Can you sing along to this?” So the kid opens his mouth, and it’s a beautiful, velvety baritone. Just delicious — “Oh my god, Spock’s going to sing!”
Hanley: But we did not plan to make the Chapel and Spock songs companions.
Wolkoff: We wanted Spock to have a big emotional moment in song. Spock has a serialized emotional arc with Chapel, and we wanted the episode to culminate with a big moment for both of them. It was Tom’s idea to do the same melody with tonal differences. A song of pure joy for Chapel, a torch song for Spock.
Hanley: Yin and yang, dark and light. Tom started playing this dark chord progression, Joy Division–style. Then I heard “This news really changes everything” in a different key. The melody fit over it. We were like, “Boom!”
Peck: His experience with Nurse Chapel could arguably set him on his path to being much more like Leonard Nimoy’s Spock. With my Spock, we are definitely exploring much more of what’s useful, or not, about being human. We can trace his development back to this moment.
Polce: This might be the moment that Spock turns almost fully Vulcan. This is why Spock is Spock.
Kurtzman: It’s less that it’s a retcon [retroactive continuity] of what was there, and more that there are blanks to fill in.
Hanley: Tom and I stretched out how to make that work as a lyric, through math. The first thing I brought was “I’m the X” — like, I’m the ex-boyfriend. I wanted to take the language of the equation and make it an analog for his disappointment and disenchantment.
Polce: One of the notes said, “Can you make it more yummy?” The line I’m most proud of is, “I solve for Y,” or “why.”
Hanley: Cracking that code is how it felt.
Peck: It was only a two-minute song, and it probably took me nine hours to nail it, which blows my mind.
The complete version of this article originally appeared in emmy magazine, issue #5 2024, under the title "All About That Space."
