You’ll want to sit through the credits of this Marvel movie, just not for the usual reason.
“The movie ends … and then we score the whole credits for eight minutes,” said Emily Marshall, the New York-based conductor who will be leading the Broadway Sinfonietta for Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse Live in Concert when it comes to Des Moines. “The volume goes up and it becomes a live rock concert. That all comes to life and gives the orchestra even more of a moment to shine.”
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse is the Oscar-winning, 2018 animated predecessor to this year’s acclaimed Across the Spider-Verse. The film follows the coming of age of Miles Morales, an Afro-Latino teenager living in the Bronx who must abruptly take up the mantle of Spider-Man.
On Oct. 28 at 7:30 p.m., the Broadway Sinfonietta — an all-women (and majority women of color) orchestra — will arrive at the Des Moines Civic Center (221 Walnut St) to perform the music of Into the Spider-Verse with Marshall conducting.
“Bringing this score to life is so much fun. There’s so many different added sound effects and live keyboard typing and folie things that we’re doing live every night along to the movie,” said Marshall of the all-ages event. “We perform it with a click track in our ears just to match it up to everything happening on the screen. So what the audience is watching is a live, film scoring session.”
Unlike common live-in-concert films scores like Star Wars or The Lord of the Rings, Daniel Pemberton’s Spider-Verse score makes heavy use of hip hop inspired numbers, calling for DJ Damage to join the performance. The film also features original music from artists like Lil Wayne, Post Malone and Jaden Smith.
As is the case for Miles in the film as he meets alternate Spider-People from across the “Spider-Verse,” Marshall’s conducting of the Broadway Sinfonietta ended up being “a meeting of two different worlds of mine, all colliding together.”
Marshall explained, “I’ve worked with the Sinfonietta since their conception back in 2020. Their founder, Macy Schmidt, and I have known each other for years.”
Beyond conducting for the Sinfonietta, Marshall has played with the group and co-produced tracks. Many readers — particularly musical theater fans who found themselves on TikTok in the first year of the pandemic — may already be familiar with the work of Marshall and the Sinfonietta.
“In December of 2020, the Broadway Sinfonietta got to record — [Schmidt] orchestrated and Daniel Mertzlufft arranged — Ratatouille the TikTok Musical,” said Marshall. “I recorded all the piano parts for that just in my apartment.”
This TikTok musical got its start when 26-year-old Emily Jacobsen uploaded a ballad, inspired by the 2007 Brad Bird-directed Pixar film about a rat with exceptional cooking skills, that she composed while cleaning her apartment. From there, more musical ingredients were assembled as other TikTok-ers uploaded more songs inspired by the musical, created faux playbills and other work without the expectation the effort would reach beyond social media.
Yet the fan project picked up so much steam that professionals — out of work due to the shuttering of Broadway — took notice. In short order, a star-studded recording of the musical took shape. In addition to Marshall and the Sinfonietta, the musical also tagged, among others, Tituss Burgess as Remy the rat and Tony-winner André De Shields as the antagonistic Anton Ego.
“I was co-producing that and co-music supervising that so I was wearing a lot of hats,” said Marshall. “All of us were wearing a million different hats to try and produce a whole, full-fledged musical that didn’t exist without anyone being in the same room. That was one of our first big Sinfonietta projects and it was a wild one.”
According to Marshall, a performance like Spider-Verse Live in Concert allows audiences to see exactly the kind of work that goes into creating a score playing out in front of them.
“A lot of people don’t know exactly what they’re walking into when they come see the show, but you’re watching the entire movie of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and we are scoring the film alongside it,” she said. “So it’s everything that you hope to hear from the movie, plus more.”
This article was originally published in Little Village’s October 2023 issue.
