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The pre-show playlist is a bit like a preparatory mixtape for both the actors (who, Strazza says, will sing along to it before the curtain goes up each night) and the audience: a mix of artists referenced in the show (even Lorde, whose “Team” gets a snippet right before curtain up) and others who would connect multi-generationally with the audience (like Robyn, Carly Rae Jepsen, Florence and the Machine and Miranda Lambert). Gomez’s spare track interpolating the bass line from Talking Heads’ “Psycho Killer” is one standout — timely (it was released in 2017, approximately right before the play’s start and at the start of the larger #MeToo moment) and especially meaningful after you’ve seen the play. “Once you know the show, it kind of feels fun and empowering,” says Hefferan. Belflower particularly loves thinking about how the song might be a teenage girl’s first introduction to Talking Heads too. 

In one scene between smart school and friend-group newcomer Nell and Mason, her male partner on a class Crucible project, she quotes one of the sections of “***Flawless” sampling Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” speech. It’s a moment that lays the foundation for a heartwarming flirtation between Nell and Mason, but also a prime example of how pop music introduces young listeners to new ideas. “Mason’s like, ‘Whoa, this really cool feminist message is jogging my memory but I can’t place it,’” Belflower says. “And it’s from a pop song he knows.”

Belflower clearly remembers being floored the first time she heard the seven-minute-long Speak Now track: “It’s, like, really intense. It is so open and naked, so full of fire and just, ‘F— you,’ and also the lyrics are so poetic. I remember just being like, ‘Whoa. This is a big statement from her.’”  Later in the play, the subtext of including a song about the heartbreak following an age-inappropriate relationship will become clearer, but in the moment when “Dear John” appears, it’s just passingly referred to as “that one song she wrote about John Mayer” before the group of girls burst into an exuberant rendition of the bridge.  And Strazza’s Beth relates to something entirely different about it: the yearning to leave a small town behind and do great things.

Belflower always knew the play would end with a dance to this slow-build Melodrama hit — “just for awhile, I didn’t know exactly how we would get there. And part of the joy of writing it was figuring that out.” She was drawn to many aspects of Lorde’s artistry — her willingness to play with form, her penchant for wild dancing, her raw portrayal of the true experience of a teenager from a small town — but especially, for the play’s purposes, to the pervasive theme in both Melodrama and “Green Light” specifically of moving through something traumatic to the other side and making something beautiful out of pain. Strazza, whose character participates in the moment when “Green Light” finally appears, likens it to “a whale song of the girls just reaching out to each other. It’s this shared heartbreak and shared jubilance that they’ve had … their love for each other, this time when nothing had gone wrong yet. Every night, it just feels like these feelers are coming out, and the girls are reaching for each other. That thought is just so heartbreaking every day.”