A stage version of 'Coraline,' with music by Magnetic Fields' mastermind Stephin Merritt, previews in New York City this week. Though it debuts just a few months after the hit movie, which Merritt says may be his favorite 3-D film, the play has been in the works for years. "I originally did the music for the audio book maybe nine years ago," Merritt tells Spinner. "Soon after that, I thought of doing the musical and I approached ['Coraline' author] Neil Gaiman about the theater rights, which were bound up with the film rights at the time. That was, I think, five years ago, and it's taken quite a while to get this on the stage, but here we go."

After five years of working on the same project, most artists would be eagerly awaiting the culmination of their work. But Merritt isn't most artists. "I don't get excited," he says. "I'm not that type of person. I'm not having that feeling yet and that feeling will probably be something more like terror. Probably there will be something going horribly wrong at the last moment, as usually there is, and I'll have to figure out how to solve it while worrying that I won't succeed."

The most he will allow himself in the way of enthusiasm comes down to the end. "There are songs that I will be most disappointed by the realization of, versus other songs whose realization I'm not particular about," he says. "Like, at the end of 'Coraline,' there's the mouse circus with tiny pink fingers playing tiny little instruments just as she drifts off to sleep. That better work on stage or I will be genuinely upset and I'll have an emotional response."

Of course, there is a practical reason for his concern over that particular song. "The last song is called 'One Long Fairy Tale' and that one is more special cause it is the last song," he says. "If it doesn't go well then the audience will go out humming, 'I hate this show. What a terrible show,' rather than 'One Long Fairy Tale.'"