Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff to star in new live-action musical 'Molly and the Moon'
They'll play a married couple who sing to their unborn baby.
Previously starring together in the Frozen movies as Anna and Kristoff, Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff will reunite on screen in a new movie musical. They'll play parents in Molly and the Moon, created by How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas.
Bell and Groff will play Kate and Brian respectively, a married couple who sing to their unborn. At the same time, audiences meet a girl in a rowboat in Kate's womb, using these voices from the "sky" to reach the "moon" and be born.
The Frozen actors have also starred on Broadway; Groff notably as King George III in Hamilton. Meanwhile, Bell hasn't been on Broadway in 2002, last appearing in The Crucible as Susanna Walcott.
In an interview with Deadline, film creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas spoke of the musical's inspiration. Craig Thomas spoke of his son's disability, saying: "We discovered after he was born that Elliot had Jacobsen Syndrome, a rare genetic deletion where a piece of one of the 11th chromosomes has broken off, resulting in the loss of certain genes that go into making a healthy, typical baby. And what it meant for Elliot is that he had several heart defects and needed open-heart surgery at only two weeks old, and we did not see any of this coming."
"He was having a more mythic, epic journey that I had in my three decades of life, all in his first couple of weeks of life... You hear phrases like, 'Oh the surgery went well but he's not out of the woods yet,' and we would wonder, what are the woods like, and how would you show them? Later, that would inspire elements of Molly and the Moon."
Music will be written by Stephanie Diaz-Matos and composer Nathan Larson. Harvey Mason Jr. is executive music producer, previously working on the Pitch Perfect movies and Sing.
Photo credit: Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff (Photos by Gage Skidmore via Flickr under CC 2.0 and IBDB respectively)
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