When USA Network’s “Psych,” a show about a private investigator named Shawn Spencer (James Roday) who uses his observational powers to convince people he’s psychic, premiered in 2006, the first episode ended with a musical number.
As Shawn explained the grisly details of a murder he had just solved, his sidekick, Gus (Dulé Hill), sang and danced in the background to Michael Jackson’s “Man in the Mirror.”
That episode set many of the show’s features in stone, including an irreverence bordering on parody and the inexplicable reoccurrence of musical numbers in unexpected places. All of this sets the stage for tonight’s two-hour musical episode, which includes 14 original songs, and guest stars Ally Sheedy, Kurt Fuller and Barry Bostwick.
“Psych: The Musical” finds Shawn and Gus chasing down a deranged playwright known as “Z,” played by Anthony Rapp (“Rent”).
In a flashback, we see how Z’s Jack the Ripper musical, known as “Ripper,” was about to be decimated by a theater critic who snuck into an early rehearsal. Minutes after his presence was discovered, the theater mysteriously caught fire, killing the critic. Eventually found guilty of the crime, Z was institutionalized.
In present day, when a producer (played by Bostwick) revives Rapp’s production, Z escapes, perhaps to exact revenge on those involved. To track him down, Shawn and Gus must turn to an old nemesis who happened to be institutionalized — a woman named Yang, a serial killer played by Sheedy.
While the plot concerns murder, the tone of the piece is slapsticky — from Gus’s showbiz dreams (he’s performing in a musical version of “Wall-E” in a parking lot, and begs Bostwick to place him in the new production) to Yang forcing police investigators to beg for her cooperation in a saucy musical number.
As with traditional musicals, the plot is interrupted by song-and-dance numbers, including jaunty tunes in such unlikely locales as a morgue. Chase scenes and murders abound, and Hill, who performed on Broadway as a teen in “Bring in ’da Noise, Bring in ’da Funk,” tap dances at every opportunity.
According to executive producer Steve Franks, the show’s musical side can be traced to its stars.
“The boys were singing in-between takes [during the pilot], and they were really good,” says Franks, a musician who wrote and sang the show’s theme song.
“I said, ‘We’re gonna do a musical. I’m gonna write all the songs, and it’s gonna be spectacular.’ ”
Franks’ massive workload postponed the project, but when he had some spare time this season — the show’s seventh — he began pounding out the story, song lyrics and basic musical ideas.
The show’s composer, Adam Cohen, was then brought in to flesh out the songs.
Traditionally, whenever cast members sing, Cohen creates the backing tracks on his computer. For a full-fledged musical, he instead wanted the rich, full sound of a 50-piece orchestra. Given their limited budget, though, he’d only have use of an orchestra for four hours.
So once the songs were written, Cohen created his usual computerized versions, and had the cast record vocals over those tracks. The versions with the full orchestra were added several months later, after the episode was shot, allowing him to ensure that the orchestral music matched the vocals exactly.
“Steve had to shoot the episode with them lip synching to their performances,” says Cohen. “If, during the shoot, the songs weren’t working exactly, we could then make edits [for the orchestra].”
The first number, “Santa Barbara Skies,” is a joyous song-and-dance, led by Shawn, about how the show’s locale of Santa Barbara — actually represented by White Rock, British Columbia — is, in his eyes, “the murder capital of the world,” despite the vendors, picnickers, policemen and perps merrily dancing in the background.
Amazingly, the number was shot in just one day. “There was no room for error,” Franks says. “We worked from first light until sundown. I scheduled [the scenes] in sequence, so you can watch the sun go up and over the sky as they go through the song. By the very end, we had time for our very last take. If we had needed another one, I don’t know what we would have done.”
For Hill, the chance to sing and dance was so inspiring that it prompted him to perform in his first Broadway show in 15 years — “After Midnight.”
“We performed a version of the opening number at the USA upfronts,” says Hill. “Doing that got me antsy to do another musical, and a few months later, ‘After Midnight’ came looking for me.”
Given “Psych”’s history, the success of the musical episode is a case of what goes around, comes around. Discussing the pilot, Franks explains that the scene, where Hill sang Michael Jackson was the very last scene filmed. Had that not occurred, the entire tone of “Psych” could have been different, and “Psych: The Musical” might never have come to pass.
“If a lightbulb had burned out, or if we had blown a fuse, we never would have shot that,” says Franks. “Who knows how far into the musical world we would have gotten if we hadn’t shot that song.”