Composer Karl Saint Lucy Created a New Type of Movie Musical Experience for R-Rated ‘Dicks’
“We’ve gotten to a moment in time where there’s lot of preconceived notions about what a musical is, what a movie musical can be,” says Saint Lucy.
Saint Lucy and co-composer Marius de Vries wrote music for the film’s stars, from Nathan Lane to Megan Thee Stallion.

“As far as I was concerned, it was like, ‘I’m just doing this dumb show with my friends,’” remembers composer Karl Saint Lucy of Fucking Identical Twins, the one-act off-Broadway musical that ran in 2015.
Over a half decade later, that “dumb show” is now one of the more anticipated openings at Toronto Fest. Retitled Dicks: The Musical.
The A24 movie is an R-rated dirtbag version of The Parent Trap where two megalomaniacs (Josh Sharp and Aaron Jackson) discover they are twins and try to get their parents (played by Nathan Lane and Megan Mullally) back together.
He first met Sharp and Jackson, the stars and co-writers of Dicks, at Story Pirates, a theater program of aspiring comedians that travel around to elementary schools putting on improv shows.
Along with Sharp and Jackson, Story Pirates alumni include Emmy nominees Bowen Yang and former SNL head writer Anna Drezen.
“It requires a performer that’s very flexible and very willing to say yes to the dumbest ideas that kids throw at you, which are actually brilliant,” says Saint Lucy, who acted as live piano accompanist. “As a pianist for them, you’re following all the gestures. It’s almost like being a silent movie organist.”
“We were doing elementary school shows, I had no idea what U.C.B. was or who these guys were, and it had no developmental prospects,” they remember, bluntly. He signed on, anyways.
For the film, Saint Lucy was paired with Grammy and BAFTA-winning film composer Marius de Vries.
Together they composed Dicks’ 12 musical numbers (the staged version had only 6) and added orchestral score in full movie-musical fashion.
“I’ve always thought of this musical as being a sendup of musicals,” says Saint Lucy, who has long worked as a musical director and accompanist at storied NYC outposts like Playwrights Horizons, where he worked as rehearsal accompanist for the future Pulitzer Prize-winning musical A Strange Loop.
They turned to shows like Little Shops of Horrors, the Full Monte, and the entire Sondheim catalog for inspiration.
One of the film’s climactic songs is a play on Les Misérables’ “One Day More,” which has the film’s four stars singing over one another as they traverse the New York City sewer system.
With Dicks, Saint Lucy hopes that audiences have different type of contemporary movie musical experience.
“We’ve gotten to a moment in time where there’s a lot of preconceived notions about what a musical is, what a movie musical can be.”
With Dicks, the composer wants to show that “you can do music in a movie musical that treats an audience like they’re adults who understand how music functions.”





