Showrunner Vivienne Medrano And Broadway Star Talk About A24's Hazbin Hotel
Image Source: YouTube
After more than a decade of development, and over four years after the release of its pilot, the highly-anticipated animated series ‘Hazbin Hotel’ has finally made its streaming debut.
Created by Vivienne Medrano, ‘Hazbin Hotel’ is a horror-comedy-musical focusing on Charlie Morningstar (voiced by Erika Henningsen), the Princess of Hell, as she creates a hotel to help the demons of Hell become angels and get into Heaven. The series started as an indie production, releasing its pilot on YouTube in 2019 before being picked up for a full series by A24, making it the studio’s very first animated series. Even before the series made its way to streaming, Medrano launched a spinoff titled “Helluva Boss” which still releases episodes on YouTube.
When making the transition from indie to streaming, Hazbin Hotel also picked up an all-star cast including actors like Keith David and Kimiko Glenn, as well as Broadway veterans and Tony nominees Daphne-Rubin Vega, Jeremy Jordan, Patina Miller, and Alex Brightman. In anticipation of the show’s debut, Brightman and Medrano sat down with the LA Times to discuss their inspirations and work on the show, combining grim horror with the comedy, colors, sights, and sounds of musical theater.
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When asked about the sounds of Hell and Heaven, Medrano states “I’m a musical snob. I was very much like, ‘The music needs to sound coherent and relatively Broadway.’ One challenge was that all the characters have a different kind of sound. Like with Alex, one of his characters is very rock themed and the other is very old and Victorian-ish, kinda steam-punky. Neither of those characters feel like they lend themselves to a regular Broadway sound. In the soundtrack, one second it’s pop, the next it’s something Latin-y. It’s so cool how well they were able to pull that off.”Alex Brightman also discusses the transition between stage acting and voice acting.
“There are huge differences but also more similarities than you’d think. In both, you use all of yourself. In animation, you can step back a tiny bit from choreography, hitting your marks and being seen from the balcony. The only big difference is that you can get it wrong 500 times. Onstage, you get one chance but you can’t cut and hold and go back and do it again.
I’m an improv guy, so getting the chance to do alternate takes is great. But the one shot in musical theater is exciting. I love that things can go wrong.”
The full interview can be checked out here.
The first four episodes of Hazbin Hotel are now streaming on Prime Video, with new episodes on Fridays.
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Source(s): LATimes
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