Marvel Director Reveals Kevin Feige’s Reaction to Hawkeye’s Captain America Musical

The Star-Spangled Man with a Plan gets an encore when Clint Barton (Jeremy Renner) attends Rogers: The Musical in Marvel’s Hawkeye. The Marvel Cinematic Universe’s Captain America musical inspired by Hamilton is played for laughs in the first episode of Hawkeye, where the retired Avenger takes aim at the flashy stage show’s inaccuracies in its depiction of the Battle of New York from 2012’s The Avengers. Saturday Night Live alum Rhys Thomas, behind the camera of the six-episode series with directing duo Bert and Bertie, reveals Marvel Studios president and producer Kevin Feige’s reaction to Marvel’s own Hamilton and why it was almost curtains on Rogers: The Musical before cameras rolled on Hawkeye.

“That musical, early on, we were trying to figure out what’s a fun way to meet Clint,” Thomas told Uproxx. “We knew he was going to be in the city with his kids, and how do you sort of introduce him? And my brain just got to work on what was the last place that he’d want to be?”

Set in a post-Blip New York City at Christmas time, Hawkeye is about Clint’s mission to make it back to his family for the holidays when his past catches up to him. For Thomas, who directed a Guardians of the Galaxy parody for SNL before joining the MCU, making an actual Captain America musical meant landing somewhere between a satisfactory Christmas present and a lump of coal. 

“I threw it out there in a meeting with Kevin Feige. And I kind of almost immediately backtracked on it as well. Because, suddenly, I was like, hang on a second, we’re going to have to write music and choreograph it and stage it. And it’s still a lot of work,” Thomas said. “But Kevin really took hold of it and got excited. And then next thing I know I’m getting to work with [songwriters] Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman. I think I tapped into my specialty of making something ‘not too good, not too bad.’”

On producing a showstopper for Hawkeye, Thomas added: “You just want it to be absurd. And, yes, I obviously had to meet the standard of, ‘This is a musical about Steve Rogers in the MCU.’ So obviously, it needs to feel big and produced well.” 

During Hawkeye‘s global press conference attended by ComicBook, Thomas characterized his pitch for Rogers: The Musical as “an innocent suggestion in one of our calls that I quickly tried to backtrack on.”

“Which is true, but I loved the idea, and it gave a reason … it was a bit of a generic Christmas in New York, Clint taking the kids. It was a daddy weekend before Christmas,” added Feige. “And I had met the amazing composer Mark Shaiman at an event … and thought he would [be interested], and his husband is a giant Marvel fan. So, when Rhys said that it gave us context for the opening episode, context for why Clint is in New York, context for Clint seeing himself in the way the world sees Hawkeye. And gave us an opportunity to have an amazing song by Mark Shaiman.”

The first two episodes of Marvel’s Hawkeye premiere November 24 on Disney+.