How ‘Real Women Have Curves’ Took the Fast Track to Broadway

Grammy-winning musician Joy Huerta and musical theater songwriter Benjamin Velez didn’t know each other before they started working together on the score for “Real Women Have Curves.” But they managed to write a Broadway musical together in record time.

Listen to this week’s “Stagecraft” podcast below:

A musical adaptation of the 2002 indie film and the play that inspired it, “Real Women Have Curves” opened on Broadway on April 27. Huerta and Velez, appearing together on Variety’s “Stagecraft” podcast, said the two of them didn’t really start collaborating in earnest until late 2020 — which means that, in an industry where it’s standard for projects to take at least seven years to make it to midtown, “Real Women Have Curves” managed to do it in five.

“It was very fast,” Velez (“Kiss My Aztec”) agreed on “Stagecraft.” “Five years from starting to Broadway is crazy! And I’m working on so many other shows where it’s seven, eight, nine years and we’re still not on Broadway. Part of it was just that everyone involved was so eager, and every new draft, we were just pushing each other to go quickly.”

Huerta, one half of the Mexican pop duo Jesse & Joy, had never written for the stage before, but she’s since fallen in love with the process. “It’s like a dream I didn’t realize I had,” she said. “It’s just been one of my favorite experiences in my life.”

For this particular project, however, the pandemic lockdown necessitated an unusual working process for the duo — who didn’t meet in person until they’d been collaborating on the show for a year and a half. Up until then, the two of them had only met over Zoom.

It turns out that in this case, it was a good thing. “It was helpful because Joy plays guitar and I play piano, and if we both had been in the same room, it would be hard to not be bothered each time one of us wanted to play around with an idea,” Velez said. “On Zoom, we could mute ourselves and we could each fool around with different ideas, and then record voice memos and send them back and forth.”

Huerta added, “As much as we were on Zoom together and muting each other, we were keeping each other company without any sound. We were both coming up with melodies on our own. And we started getting excited, like, ‘I have an idea!’ ‘Me too, me too!’ On some songs it made the process go so much faster because we each had such different ideas and we thought: Well, maybe one idea would be great for the verse and the other idea would be great for the bridge. Things like that. Sometimes a song got pieced together so quickly that way.”

Also on the new episode of “Stagecraft,” Huerta and Velez explain how they crafted individual sounds for each of the show’s characters and explained the ways that their own musical and lyrical inspirations shaped the development of the story overall. Along the way, Huerta also revealed that, although she’s going back to touring with her band now that “Real Women” has opened, she wants to stay involved in theater.

“I’m putting it out in the universe that I want to continue doing Broadway musicals,” she said. “This has been wonderful. I enjoy it so much.”

To hear the entire conversation, listen at the link above or download and subscribe to “Stagecraft” on podcast platforms, including Apple Podcasts, Spotify and the Broadway Podcast Network. New episodes of “Stagecraft” are released every other week.