Friends’ Central graduate is one half of Hollywood duo with newly-minted EGOT status

Rodgers & Hammerstein. Gamble & Huff. McCartney & Lennon. These are all great song-writing teams.

But Pasek & Paul could eclipse them all.

Ardmore-born Benj Pasek and his writing partner, the Connecticut-bred Justin Paul, are the 20th and 21st artists to achieve EGOT status. Pasek and Paul have a Grammy, an Oscar, a Tony, and as of Sunday, an Emmy, putting them in rare air.

The duo — known in Hollywood circles as P&P — won for “Which of the Pickwick Triplets Did It?” the plucky song they cowrote with Marc Shaiman and Scott Wittman for the Hulu series Only Murders in the Building and performed by Steve Martin. The Creative Arts Emmy Awards ceremony was Sunday night.

The duo had been waiting to complete the EGOT circle since 2018 when their song, “In the Market for a Miracle,” from A Christmas Story, was nominated for an Emmy.

According to Variety, Pasek told reporters after the win that the assignment was “to write something that is as difficult to sing as possible” and hard to do in one take. Mission accomplished. Martin sings the Broadway-style tune at a fast and furious pace for three minutes, seemingly without taking a breath.

Pasek & Paul, who met at the University of Michigan’s musical theater department, earned an Oscar for the original song “City of Stars” in the 2016 film, La La Land. They won Grammys for their featured compositions in the Broadway shows Dear Evan Hansen in 2018 and The Greatest Showman in 2019. They won a Tony for the score of Dear Evan Hansen, too, and in 2022, they took home a Grammy for producing A Strange Loop.

Impressive.

Pasek, who grew up in Ardmore, went to Friends’ Central High School in Wynnewood. Dear Evan Hansen was based on the story of a troubled teen at Pasek’s school who ended his life and suddenly had more friends in death than in life.

“There was this public mourning from those who didn’t know him at all,” Pasek told The Inquirer in 2016. “Then 9/11 happened, and there was another moment that had a similar effect. I remember people who inserted themselves into that tragedy, claiming to know people who were involved even though they did not.”

Pasek’s mother, Kathy Hirsh-Pasek, is a professor of developmental psychology at Temple University and the coauthor of books like Becoming Brilliant: What Science Tells Us About Raising Successful Children.

Raising an EGOT winner certainly gives her expert status.