Revisiting Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells Before They Hang Up Their Hats in Gutenberg! The Musical!

The Book of Mormon reunion we waited over a decade for is coming to an end on January 28. For the past three months, Andrew Rannells and Josh Gad have repurposed their infectious onstage partnership for the two-handed comedy Gutenberg! The Musical! And if all the exclamation points in the title don’t betray the tongue-in-cheek tone of Scott Brown and Anthony King’s musical-within-a-biomusical about the inventor of the printing press, Rannells and Gad are more than happy to broadcast that themselves.

“We wanted to bring his legacy back to light in the same way that Alexander Hamilton had his second [moment],” says Gad in earnest to Broadway.com Editor-in-Chief Paul Wontorek for The Broadway Show. Gad fittingly references the musical Rannells got to spend some time in himself as King George. He continues the bit, Rannells chuckling in the chair next to him. “We want Gutenberg! to have the same sort of Lin-Manuel Miranda-style halo effect,” he says. “Now, it's not going to happen with our show. But we want that.”

Set at a backers’ audition, Gutenberg! The Musical! follows a pair of aspiring theater writers—Bud (Gad) and Doug (Rannells)—as they sing and dance their history-loving hearts out in a desperate plea for seed money. They’ve rented out a Broadway theater for one night only, and if their performance falters, it’s curtains for their magnum opus. What ensues is a mosaic of wildly under-researched hypotheses about the life of Johannes Gutenberg and a tornado of hats that indicate every made-up character, from “Another Woman” to “Drunk #1.”

“These guys are dreamers— Bud and Doug,” says Rannells. Gad adds, “And they're not going to let a couple of backers tell them no.”

Having soldiered through plenty of backers’ auditions themselves (they disagree on whether they jointly participated in one for The Book of Mormon, but Rannells confirms that “they can get very sweaty”), the pair know how difficult it often is to force Broadway stars into alignment. In fact, both Gad and Rannells were waiting for different projects to fall into place when their common denominator—director Alex Timbers—dropped Gutenberg! at their feet.

“Alex Timbers and I had been talking about doing A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum,” Gad recounts, “and you and Timbers were talking about something— which you've never told me what it was.”

“I'll tell you later,” Rannells says with coy indifference.

Gad aggrievedly continues. “And then Alex sort of evilly but brilliantly…flopped this script in front of us and was like, ‘While we're exploring these other things, what would you think about this thing called Gutenberg!?’”

And the rest, as they say, is utterly fabricated history.