‘Star Trek: Strange New Worlds’ Musical Episode Choreographer Breaks Down the Space Boogie (Exclusive)

"I thought it was a joke." That's how award-winning Toronto-based choreographer Roberto Campanella described first getting a call to work on "Subspace Rhapsody," the first-ever musical episode in Star Trek's lengthy history, which debuts on Paramount+ on Aug. 3.

When Star Trek's first pilot, "The Cage," was shot in late 1964, it included a memorable scene in which Susan Oliver, as the shipwrecked human Vina, is presented by the godlike beings of Talos IV as an Orion Slave Girl. (These are, in fact, the seductive green-skinned women non-Trekkies like to think all Trekkies are obsessed with.) During the hallucinatory sequence, Oliver wriggles and cavorts to vaguely Middle Eastern music while the men lounge near cantaloupe. Since day one, dancing has been part of Star Trek.

And so has singing. Uhura serenaded Spock in the first episode ever aired ("Charlie X"), Klingons would rally themselves through song as they headed into battle, and the Doctor on Star Trek: Voyager was rather fond of Italian opera. Deep Space Nine featured '50s and '60s pop crooner James Darren in a recurring role (a factoid that stunned my father one day when he walked in as I was watching, in his words, Star Dreck.) 

But it has taken the brave writers and producers of Star Trek: Strange New Worlds, which, in its second season, has proven itself to be the most willing-to-experiment iteration in the franchise in decades, to mind meld dancing and singing for the duration of an entire episode. This season's penultimate chapter, "Subspace Rhapsody," enters a strange new world indeed, one of musical theater.

It does so without breaking Star Trek's firmly-held internal logic. (This is a franchise in which a doohickey called the Heisenberg compensator is intended to quiet anyone who knows too much about physics.) An anomaly in spacetime creates an expanding reality in which members of the USS Enterprise start expressing themselves Broadway-style. It gets better: The phenomenon actually poses a security risk because, as per the conventions of the genre, pent-up emotions are what trigger musical numbers, and the singers are forced to express untidy true feelings. (Writers Dana Horgan and Bill Wolkoff really went to warp nine on this one.) 

The 10 original songs were written by Letters to Cleo's Kay Hanley and Tom Polce, who has also written music for Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Jane the Virgin and other shows. Choreographer Roberto Campanella's previous work includes the films The Shape of Water, It and the sci-fi series The Expanse, which means a lighter-than-air moment in "Subspace Rhapsody" was "the second time" he'd choreographed for zero gravity. ("It creates challenges," he says of dancing outside Earth's pull.)

Campanella, who grew up an Original Series fan with a devoted Trekkie brother, says he was given an unusual amount of time to work with the cast and walk through the sets to strategize for each song. The cast knew this episode was coming all season, and by the time Campanella met them, the enthusiasm had built up among them as a group. "Usually you get one actor who says, 'Sorry, I'm not a dancer, I have two left feet,' and it takes extra time, but they were all excited."

Celia Rose Gooding, who plays Uhura (the first among equals in this ensemble episode), is a Tony-nominated, Grammy-winning Broadway alum. Christina Chong (security chief La'an Noonien-Singh) studied musical theater, and, in Campanella's words (made more exciting with his Italian accent), "She can daaaaance, oh, she can dance." 

Some online have speculated (in amusing ways) that since Strange New Worlds' Captain Pike has a bit of a trad streak (he likes camping, riding horses and eating non-replicated food), perhaps Anson Mount may not have been thrilled about the singing-and-dancing episode. 

This was not the case.

Indeed, one of his more splendid moves (falling to his knees while pouring his heart out to his girlfriend, Captain Batel) was his idea. "He came to me saying, 'Well, I have this thing here…' and I said, 'Go for it! If it doesn't work, we'll get rid of it," Campanella says.

While Jess Bush's (Nurse Chapel's) upbeat number in the Port Galley or the grand finale all over the ship may seem like it would have been the most complicated, Campanella says it was actually the seemingly calm, Gilbert and Sullivan-esque walk-and-talk between Rebecca Romijn (Number One) and Paul Wesley (Lt. James T. Kirk) that was most challenging.

"They had to act, sing, dance and make sure they start at point A and end at point B to up the little ladder." Negotiating the corridor to the Jefferies tube took a considerable amount of time to get just right. 

Indeed, the Enterprise was built as a vessel for science, exploration, diplomacy and, when necessary, racing to battle stations. An interstellar soft shoe was never in the original blueprints.