One of the most musical shows on Broadway right now isn’t, in fact, a musical. Pop music has a tangible presence in, and is intrinsic to the fabric of, Kimberly Bellflower’s play John Proctor Is the Villain.
The story follows a group of girls from small-town Georgia who, amid the #MeToo era, are reading Arthur Miller’s The Crucible and starting to doubt that the titular protagonist is as morally upstanding as he’s often portrayed to be — just as a classmate and friend (played by Stranger Things star, and now Tony nominee, Sadie Sink) returns to town after a much gossiped-about absence. Concurrently, they decide to form a feminism club in an attempt to learn more about a subject the adults around them don’t seem to love addressing head-on. And from the bop-filled pre-show playlist (constructed meticulously by sound designer and composer Palmer Hefferan) to Hefferan’s original music woven throughout to the references to seminal female pop singer/songwriters like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé, Billie Eilish, Selena Gomez and Lorde written into (and crucial to) the plot, the pop music the girls love might as well be another character in the play.
“There’s something about music that is so connective — there’s just this language there that everyone understands,” says actor Fina Strazza, a Tony nominee for her portrayal of passionate overachiever and club founder Beth. “Even if you don’t know the song we’re referencing, you can see what it’s about and what it means to them.”
Chief among those songs is Lorde’s “Green Light,” which is referenced throughout the play before finally being played at its most cathartic moment (no further spoilers here!). Bellflower — who calls it “a perfect song” — never considered any other in its place, which made its somewhat complex journey to approval especially anxiety-inducing. Songs are usually cleared off-Broadway on a production-by-production basis, but once John Proctor moved into wider publication and was clearly headed for Broadway, “We were like, ‘OK, we need to clear this song, like, forever,’” she explains, which entailed approaching Lorde’s publisher, UMPG. Bellflower wrote an impassioned letter to Lorde, asking that it be passed to her personally — only to get a “no” as the first response from her team.
Sadie Sink and Amalia Yoo onstage.
Julieta Cervantes
“I had, like, a panic attack in the Whole Foods parking lot when my agent called to tell me,” she recalls now with a laugh. But two weeks later, a “yes” came through from the artist herself, saying she loved the letter (and that the initial “no” had just been due to a miscommunication between teams; while Lorde hasn’t seen the show yet, Bellflower is hopeful that will change whenever she’s next in the city).
John Proctor Is the Villain is now the most Tony-nominated play on Broadway currently, with seven nods; in advance of the awards ceremony on Sunday (June 8), Bellflower, Hefferan and Strazza spoke to Billboard about a few of its most prominent music moments and how they came to be.
Dayna Taymor and Kimberly Belflower on the first day of rehearsals for “John Proctor is the Villain.”
Jenny Anderson
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Selena Gomez, “Bad Liar”
The pre-show playlist is a bit like a preparatory mixtape for both the actors (who, Strazza says, will sing along to it before the curtain goes up each night) and the audience: a mix of artists referenced in the show (even Lorde, whose “Team” gets a snippet right before curtain up) and others who would connect multi-generationally with the audience (like Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, Florence and the Machine and Miranda Lambert). Gomez’s spare track interpolating the bass line from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” is one standout — timely (it was released in 2017, approximately right before the play’s start and at the start of the larger #MeToo moment) and especially meaningful after you’ve seen the play. “Once you know the show, it kind of feels fun and empowering,” says Hefferan. Bellflower particularly loves thinking about how the song might be a teenage girl’s first introduction to Talking Heads too.
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Beyoncé, “***Flawless”
In one scene between smart school and friend-group newcomer Nell and Mason, her male partner on a class Crucible project, she quotes one of the sections of “***Flawless” sampling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” speech. It’s a moment that lays the foundation for a heartwarming flirtation between Nell and Mason, but also a prime example of how pop music introduces young listeners to new ideas. “Mason’s like, ‘Whoa, this really cool feminist message is jogging my memory but I can’t place it,’” Bellflower says. “And it’s from a pop song he knows.”
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Taylor Swift, “Dear John”
Bellflower clearly remembers being floored the first time she heard the seven-minute-long Speak Now track: “It’s, like, really intense. It is so open and naked, so full of fire and just, ‘F— you,’ and also the lyrics are so poetic. I remember just being like, ‘Whoa. This is a big statement from her.’” Later in the play, the subtext of including a song about the heartbreak following an age-inappropriate relationship will become clearer, but in the moment when “Dear John” appears, it’s just passingly referred to as “that one song she wrote about John Mayer” before the group of girls burst into an exuberant rendition of the bridge. And Strazza’s Beth relates to something entirely different about it: the yearning to leave a small town behind and do great things.
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Lorde, “Green Light”
Bellflower always knew the play would end with a dance to this slow-build Melodrama hit — “just for awhile, I didn’t know exactly how we would get there. And part of the joy of writing it was figuring that out.” She was drawn to many aspects of Lorde’s artistry — her willingness to play with form, her penchant for wild dancing, her raw portrayal of the true experience of a teenager from a small town — but especially, for the play’s purposes, to the pervasive theme in both Melodrama and “Green Light” specifically of moving through something traumatic to the other side and making something beautiful out of pain. Strazza, whose character participates in the moment when “Green Light” finally appears, likens it to “a whale song of the girls just reaching out to each other. It’s this shared heartbreak and shared jubilance that they’ve had … their love for each other, this time when nothing had gone wrong yet. Every night, it just feels like these feelers are coming out, and the girls are reaching for each other. That thought is just so heartbreaking every day.”