The Simpsons return for their 33rd Season, the longest run for any scripted show on a broadcast network, with a Broadway-style all-musical episode with seven songs, plus reprises.
The episode is a musical about Marge restaging her high school play (where she was, naturally, the stage manager) 20 years later. The Rent-inspired production is titled Y2K: The Millennium Bug, a musical taking place on New Year’s Eve, 1999. Executive producer Matt Selman calls it, “an end-of-the-world musical… [and] a funny little cultural flashback.”
“The Star of the Backstage” boasts a trove of original songs and features Kristen Bell as… Marge? Well, sort of. Bell will be heard every time Marge sings, because as executive producer Matt Selman says, “The only place Marge sang beautifully was in her head, so she has a magical inside singing voice that only we can hear. When she sings, it comes out beautiful, like Kristen Bell.”
An egotistical star Sasha Reed (voiced by Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt‘s Sara Chase), now a Broadway actress, returns to make things even more difficult for Marge. Marge’s rude awakening and misplaced anger with Sasha spurs “A Delicate Approach,” a soft-shoe “Tea for Two”-like ditty sung by Homer (Dan Castellaneta).
“Star of the Backstage” was written by Simpsons writer-producer — and former Crazy Ex-Girlfriend writer-producer — Elisabeth Kiernan Averick. She co-wrote the lyrics with Crazy Ex-Girlfriend composer Jack Dolgen, who penned the music with inspiration from massively popular musicals like Chicago, Wicked, and The Music Man.
