Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff cannot let go of each other, as they will star in Molly and the Moon, the original musical that the creators of How I Met Your Mother, Carter Bays & Craig Thomas, scripted and directed. Harvey Mason Jr (Sing, Pitch Perfect franchise) will be the executive music producer, Stephanie Diaz-Matos (The Get Down) will be the music supervisor, and Nathan Larson, the composer.
Molly and the Moon could be a welcomed relief for customers who, like anybody else, find the post-election tension heavy today. Like their sitcom, Bays and Thomas’ filmmaking has comic qualities, but there are serious stakes, rooted in a personal crisis experienced by Thomas shortly after his show established itself on Monday night lead for CBS.
“Carter and I were running the show, and between Season Two and Season Three, my wife and I were having our first kid, a boy, Elliot,” Thomas told Deadline. “I was heading into parenthood, and I figured everything was going according to the life script I imagined for myself. I’m going to have this healthy, perfect kid and come back and keep running that show. Instead, life served up an enormous curve ball to us. We discovered after he was born that Elliot had Jacobsen Syndrome, a rare genetic condition where something is missing in Chromosome 11 chromosomes…there was a genetic deletion where he was missing one of those chromosomes that contain certain genes that have certain functions in making a healthy, typical baby. We got a crash course in genetics all of a sudden and what all of that meant.”
Bays & Thomas would discover that there was a story that they should write, filled with that experience and with their love of music, about a baby attempting to survive and go home with its parents and begin their life together.