FX
In Adults Season 2, one particular musical performance left a searing impression. We’re not talking about “Carly With a Y’s” (Rachel Marsh) K-pop track “Hiccups (Body Go Crazy),” which was a bona fide earworm and absolutely deserves a release in its most extended version. We’re talking about Issa’s (Amita Rao) rendition of “I Dreamed a Dream,” which she performed in the episode “Pop Girlie” as a fill-in for the aspiring pop girlie Carly.
For some of Adults‘ cast and crew, this was not their first time watching Rao sing the number from Les Misérables: The actor had performed it at series creators Rebecca Shaw and Ben Kronengold‘s wedding afterparty last year. Rao wanted to make sure viewers knew her performance at the celebration did not come unprompted. “Ben asked me to perform it at the afterparty,” she told TV Guide at Adults‘ premiere in New York City. Rao had previously sung “I Dreamed a Dream” for karaoke at Shaw and Kronengold’s house. “So I just need to say I wasn’t like, ‘And now I’m gonna sing at the wedding!'” She laughed. “They asked me, and I gave it to them as their wedding wish.”
Shaw described how the occasion led to a moment of art imitating life. “[Rao] brought the house down,” the co-showrunner said. “It was so amazing and we were like, we got to get this in the show.”
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Almost immediately after the wedding, Adults‘ music supervisors worked on getting clearance for the track. ” Les Mis is really hard to clear,” Kronengold said. “Once we got the news [that it was cleared,] we basically jumped up and down in the writers room because a lot of our writers were there at our wedding witnessing Amita do it.”
“And we love Issa’s physical comedy, so it’s one of my favorite parts of the season,” Kronengold added. Shaw felt similarly. “I really want to release an extended cut of that song,” she said.
Issa’s “I Dreamed a Dream” was perhaps one of the most dramatic iterations of the musical number in its history. In the midst of singing, she noticed a non-responsive elderly man — Carly’s 96-year-old grandfather — in the front row. “Dead or asleep, sir? Are we dead or asleep?” Issa asked frantically in between verses. Thankfully, he was only asleep. Rao shared that filming this scene was dramatic in another way.
“I kept inserting Fergie cartwheels, I literally tried to insert it in every single shot,” she said, referencing the singer’s viral one-handed move in her 2008 performance on The Today Show. “I really wanted it to make it into the cut. I did it so much in the footage, I can’t even imagine how much they had to cut to cut around it.” The final version in the episode did not have said cartwheels. But since FX may soon release the original K-pop track from this episode — Shaw posted on her Instagram Story on Sept. 3, “hard at work in the booth to get you Hiccups (Body Go Crazy)” — we can only hope that a cut of Issa’s “I Dreamed a Dream” with one-handed cartwheels will also be shared one day.
Adults Season 2 is available to stream on Hulu.