Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are the latest artists to achieve EGOT status, winning the Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics for their Only murders in the building composition, together with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman, “Which of the Pickwick Triplets did it?”.
The duo, who took home the trophy on Sunday during the second night of the 2024 Creative Arts Emmys, beat out fellow nominee Sara Bareilles for Girls5eva“The average time”; the Saturday night live the team of Eli Brueggemann, Maya Rudolph, Auguste White, Mike DiCenzo and Jake Nordwind for “Mother” from the Mother's Day episode of the variety series; The Tattooist of AuschwitzHans Zimmer, Kara Talve, Walter Afanasieff and Charlie Midnight for “Love Will Survive” and True Detective: The Land of the NightJohn Hawkes for “No Use”.
The duo has already won the Oscar for Best Original Song for “City of Stars” by The The Earth and the Best Musical Theater Album Grammy for Dear Evan Hansenwhich also earned them a Tony for Best Original Score. They later won a Grammy for Best Compilation Soundtrack for The greatest showman and the best musical Tony for their work as producers on A strange loop.
Pasek and Paul were previously nominated for an Emmy for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics in 2018 for Christmas Story Live! song “In the Market for a Miracle”, where they lost to Brueggemann and his SNL colleagues for “Come Back Barack”.
The song “Pickwick Triplets” is featured in the third season of Broadway set Only murders and is performed by star Steve Martin, whose character, Charles-Haden Savage, struggles to master the fast melody. He finally succeeds during the episode “Sitzprobe.”
THE Only murders The writing team approached Pasek and Paul to help them make the series' “Death Rattle Dazzle” musical as realistic as possible; the pair also brought in other well-known Broadway songwriters, including Shaiman, Wittman and Bareilles.
Paul spoke with The Hollywood Reporter last year about the process of writing songs for the show, including “Pickwick Triplets.”
“Finding those couplets was like a really fun and juicy experiment,” he said. DAY“We've made a long list of possibilities to draw from, here's our palette that we want to work with lyrically and then go and tell the story that we've really broken down quite thoroughly with [showrunner] John Hoffman. And then it was just the fun of performing it, finding our favorite lines, how we can continue to outdo each other, outdo that line. It was a joy and definitely something that I know we would never have come up with on our own.”
Pasek added: “What was so fun was that John Hoffman and the writers really designed this moment to have several moments in the show where you, as an audience member, are waiting for the payoff to see if… [Martin] can do that. And often when songs are used in TV shows, in our experience, you're cutting a song, and even some of the songs in this musical are more in the background, while the action is happening elsewhere. And what was so exciting, particularly in the moment of “Pickwick Triplet,” and also “Look For the Light,” is that those songs are so integral to the plot of what's happening in the musical. So, really, as an audience member, you're waiting to see whether or not Steve Martin can get through a song that has a very, very difficult pattern, full of alliteration and full of dexterity. And so it really allowed us to be in a sandbox, where we could really play and collaborate and try to reverse engineer the most difficult thing to sing and then present it to Steve, who was incredible and was so up for the challenge and attacked it with such rigor and determination. Steve's dedication to learning the song was really not dissimilar to [his character] Charles-Haden Savage, in the sense that he had a real tongue twister to overcome and he approached it with such care and diligence.”
Pasek also recalled how Shaiman and Wittman gave the duo their “first TV job” in the second season of Destroy.
“Not only are we fans of their work, but they have also been wonderful and supportive writers in our lives,” she said. DAY.
With their win, Pasek and Paul join an elite club of EGOT winners that includes Richard Rodgers, Rita Moreno, Audrey Hepburn, Mel Brooks, Mike Nichols, Whoopi Goldberg, Frozen AND The Book of MormonRobert Lopez, John Legend, Viola Davis and Elton John, who earned EGOT status at the 2023 Emmys, awarded just eight months ago.
The duo also join Lopez in the group of youngest ever to achieve an EGOT: Lopez, Pasek, Paul and Legend achieved the feat at the age of 39.
The pair are the second to win the EGOT as a team, after Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.