Old School. Biblically Independent.
By Lisa Laman | Film | March 26, 2025
Modern cinema has countless frustrating obstacles. However, for musical cinema geeks, one issue is pressing above all others. That issue would be the works of songwriting/composing duo Benj Pasek and Justin Paul. After breaking through with the 2015 stage musical Dear Evan Hansen, they’ve dominated musical cinema, writing original tunes for movies like Marc Webb’s 2025 Snow White remake. In the process, they’ve infested this genre with insipid and generic lyrics. This status quo cannot endure. Pasek & Paul’s rampage must stop.
Credit where credit is due, Pasek & Paul’s throwback tunes for La La Land (their first major theatrical movie songwriting credits beyond penning a solitary Trolls ditty) are bangers. Confined to channeling the age of Technicolor MGM musicals, their songwriting sensibilities instead embrace more timeless melodies and rhyming schemes. After that feature, though, the pair embarked on The Greatest Showman. Here, they established their default movie musical sound and style. Showman was crammed full of songs devoid of specific character or environment details. You could transfer these lyrics or orchestral accompaniments to a pop song on the radio, and they’d fit just fine.
There are some toe-tapping beats in that film’s soundtrack, sure. However, ditties like “Come Alive” or “Tightrope” don’t function well as musical numbers. They’re just so devoid of personality, colorful verbiage, or traits specific to the Greatest Showman universe. These tracks sound tailor-made for karaoke sessions or showing up in the background of T-Mobile commercials, not as vessels for characters to express themselves. Classic musical songs (both in film and stage) weren’t always deep wells of extraordinary poetry worthy of A Strange Loop, goodness knows. There aren’t words to convey how cringey tunes from something like Gigi are. Meanwhile, even the titular song of Meet Me in St. Louis, for instance, has lines like “We will dance the hoochie-coochie/You will be my tootsie-wootsie.”
Still, I’ll take confidently goofy declarations of “hoochie-coochie” and “tootsie-wootsie” over Pasek & Paul’s mimicking Katy Perry and Sia. Worst of all, The Greatest Showman’s immense success ensured it wouldn’t be a one-off. Pasek & Paul were now go-to family movie musical songwriters and lyricists. Just 17 months after Showman, the pair penned two new songs for Disney’s Aladdin remake, including Jasmine’s new power ballad “Speechless.” The tune’s obviousness as a “Let It Go” pastiche just underscores the flatness of Pasek & Paul’s writing. That 2013 Robert and Kristen-Anderson Lopez song deployed inspired words like “isolation” and “fractals” and featured an orchestral accompaniment that excitedly evolved over 3 minutes and 42 seconds.
“Speechless,” meanwhile, had a static sound offering little insight into what Jasmine is feeling as she expresses herself. Worst of all, performer Naomi Scott is saddled with unimaginative rhymes like “quiet” and “try it” that just aren’t very fun or fierce to sing out loud. After this remake, the duo focused on transforming the children’s book Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile into a live-action family movie musical starring Shawn Mendes. Here, the pair’s songwriting, like the tune “Rip Up the Recipe,” evokes The Sherman Brothers and Mary Poppins tunes. However, Pasek & Paul can’t shake the duo’s gratingly modern sound.
In Crocodile, that quality distractingly undercuts the conceptually timeless ambitions of these numbers. It’s like my father told me the day I graduated high school, “You can’t be both the Bedknobs & Broomsticks soundtrack and Katty Perry’s ‘Firework.’” Plus, endlessly reprised song “Take a Look at Us Now,” the film’s answer to “This Is Me” or “Speechless,” reaffirms how Pasek & Paul’s big power anthems lack verve. These kinds of tunes can convey various distinct moods, like defiance (“And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going” from Dreamgirls), rage mixed with sorrow (“Burn” from Hamilton), or emotional catharsis (“Defying Gravity” from Wicked). Across Hansen, Showman, and Crocodile, though, Pasek & Paul are too afraid to embrace palpable messy emotions that might undercut their “universally-applicable” pop song aesthetic. Thus, these tunes are hollow when they should be screaming to the heavens some character’s very specific worldview and emotions.
Despite appearing through a profoundly committed Javier Bardem performance, Lyle, Lyle, Crocodile’s songs were more forgettable Pasek & Paul pop swill. There’s a reason baby Lyle going “la la la” became infinitely more famous than any of their original Lyle songs. A month after Lyle, the duo’s songs for the Christmas Will Ferrell/Ryan Reynolds feature Spirited were accompanied by in-universe characters groaning about other players in the story bursting into song. Writing tunes for such an apologetic movie musical crystallizes why Pasek & Paul’s musical numbers are such a slog. These tunes are afraid to be musical numbers. They masquerade as pop tunes and pepper their verses with snarky retorts about musicals rather than engage in the confident songwriting displayed by Stephen Sondheim and Howard Ashman.
Not even writing tunes for 2025’s Snow White remake can rub some extra pixie dust on their creative skills. The duo’s new tracks for this film range from another Katy Perry-style pop ballad in the form of “Waiting on a Wish” as well as the most buttoned-up villain song, “All Is Fair,” in history. Most egregious is “Princess Problems,” a snarky tune sung by new love interest character Jonathan (Andrew Burnap) to Rachel Zegler’s Snow White. It’s a ditty full of criticisms of classic fairy tales so very familiar it’s a wonder it didn’t originate in a deleted Happily N’Ever After sequence.
A close runner-up in underwhelming Pasek & Paul Snow White songs, though, is easily the new love ballad “A Hand Meets a Hand.” The unimaginative rhyming of “A hand meets a hand/like it found where to land” alone had me groaning. The whole track, though, is an underwhelming concoction. It sounds too much like a forgotten 2014 Ed Sheeran and Meghan Trainor duet, not a big flashy musical movie set piece. Not even adapting the soundtrack for a Disney movie from 90 years ago inspires Pasek & Paul’s timeless La La Land song energy. Instead, they once again opt for sounds and rhymes that don’t challenge or stir the audience. They simply settle for subpar pop music ditties that can’t even reach the fun earworm status of actual pop songs like “Rude!” or “Thrift Shop.”
Musical cinema is a gift. Works like Singin’ in the Rain, Hedwig and the Angry Inch, and countless others create imagery and communicate emotions that couldn’t be possible in any other genre. Pasek & Paul’s movie songwriting, La La Land bangers exempted, constantly fails to exploit that potential. Their tunes instead bathe viewers in limp lyrics and a hesitancy to embrace all the stylized possibilities of musicals. They’re perfect for writing tunes belted out by Ryan Reynolds or snarky Disney male love interests. When it comes to bolstering the world of musical cinema, though, Pasek & Paul are nothing short of a menace.
