National Post (National Edition)
Can Disney keep it Frozen, but still fresh, on a new stage?
CAN THE MEDIA TITAN TRANSLATE ITS RUNAWAY SMASH HIT TO THE STAGE?
Yes, you will hear “Let It Go.”
Nearly an hour into the stage adaptation of Disney’s Frozen, Elsa, Queen of Arendelle, will embrace her fearsome power and turn the stage into a shimmering wintry landscape, at once chilly and magical. The song that launched an ocean of tributes will rev up, and, as the Act 1 curtain falls, audience members will race out with that impossible-to-shake lyric (“The cold never bothered me anyway”) still in their heads.
But to get there — to create a must-see musical out of the juggernaut movie that made a superstar of Idina Menzel and a belter of many a five-year-old — has meant several years of tricky decisions, the sort that Disney has largely, but not always, mastered in turning successful movies into stage hits.
That entertainment giant has set the bar for Broadway blockbusters with The Lion King, which has grossed $7.9 billion globally. And Frozen is no ordinary property, even for Disney. The film, released in 2013, was the highest-grossing animated movie ever, and the stage musical was fast-tracked even before it reached theatres.
Despite an exceptional Broadway track record, from Beauty and the Beast to Aladdin, the company is still smarting over a pair of high-profile flops (The Little Mermaid and Tarzan) about a decade ago, and is determined to get this show right.
Along the developmental journey, a period that includes readings and rehearsals, there have been distracting disruptions indicative of the high stakes: two directors (Alex Timbers was dismissed last summer and replaced with Michael Grandage); three choreographers (now Rob Ashford); two set designers (now Christopher Oram, who is Grandage’s husband and longtime collaborator); and two Elsas (now Caissie Levy).
The show is scheduled to begin previews here Thursday before transferring to New York in the spring. Disney is unveiling to the public new songs and special effects that to this point it has held very close.
Given the title and subject of the show, one of the big questions that looms: As Elsa sings her self-affirming power ballad, how will Disney create an ice palace before our very eyes on stage? The filmmakers had closeups and computer animation; the theatre makers must deliver a parallel punch with sets, sound, lighting and video.
Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions and a veteran of adapting animated films for the stage, bluntly acknowledged that the fame of the song and movie’s young and fervent fan base is a mixed blessing.
“This is the first time we’ve done one of this scale with so much social media around the movie,” he said. “That means that you have seen a lot of Frozen around you. I’m sure you could go online and find bleating goats that sing ‘Let It Go.’ Firemen. And schoolchildren.
“People know this material profoundly, and have seen lots of different interpretations,” he added. “That can be a very positive thing, or maybe not a positive. I don’t know.”
For Disney there is great potential. Frozen is expected to cost between $25 million and $30 million to develop, on the high side for Broadway but a small sum for a company that grossed about $56 billion in its last fiscal year.
But when Frozen was set in motion, Disney could not have known it would arrive on Broadway during an especially competitive time — directly opposite the new and acclaimed “Harry Potter” play. Another complication: Frozen fever is pervasive — the show has been adapted on ice, at Disney California Adventure Park and on a Disney cruise ship, and its characters and costumes are highly merchandised.
Because the Frozen material is so familiar, and the fans so intense, finding the right balance between replica and reinvention is complicated. “You want to do everything they know the piece to be, and go much deeper,” said Grandage, the show’s director. “It is incumbent upon us to come up with surprises.”
That means new elements starting right at the beginning: Whereas the movie opens on a frozen lake, with a group of singing ice harvesters, the musical will start in a verdant landscape, with a group of scruffy (covered in greenery), sexy (greenery only goes so far), tailed creatures, called hidden folk, drawn from Scandinavian folklore and chanting in Norwegian.
But there will also be lots that is familiar in the show, including the basic narrative, the major characters and even some of the jokes.
Frozen, as diehard fans know, is loosely (very loosely) based on The Snow Queen, the great 19th century Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale about the formidable power of love — more specifically, in the Andersen tale, about a young girl’s drive (abetted by a reindeer) to rescue her best friend, a boy whose heart and mind have been frozen by ice shards, from the snowwalled palace of a wintry monarch.
In the musical, as in the film, the snow queen figure Elsa is not evil but tormented — her power, which is the magical ability to create snow and ice, is also a problem, because she is unable to control it. Elsa’s struggle strains her relationship with her younger sister, Anna; that relationship between the sisters, now princesses (this is, after all, Disney) is at the heart of the story as Anna, driven by love (also aided by a reindeer), determines to save Elsa.
Still here: Olaf, the lovable snowman who naively fantasizes about sunbathing; Hans, a handsome prince; Kristoff, a rugged ice harvester; and Sven, the reindeer, played by the ballet-trained Andrew Pirozzi. Onstage, he wears a head-to-toe costume with prosthetic hoofs attached to his hands and feet, and walks with his feet en pointe; offstage he spent days on the floor of his apartment, studying how his dog moves.
A few minor characters have been dropped: Gone is Marshmallow, the giant snow monster, as well as the pack of menacing wolves — Grandage has opted for more psychological, and less physical, drama. The trolls have been replaced with the hidden folk, making that aspect of the show less cute and more mystical; the townspeople are dressed in costumes inspired by the bunad, a traditional Norwegian folk garment, giving them a touch of authenticity.
The show’s writer, Jennifer Lee, and the married composers, Kristen AndersonLopez and Bobby Lopez, have spent months crafting new material. The musical, about 20 minutes longer than the film, will have about a dozen new songs, in addition to seven from the film.
Among the highlights: a new first act song for Elsa, Dangerous to Dream, and a new, and vocally flashy, second act number in which she grapples with the implications of having a power that she cannot control.
Patti Murin, the actress playing Anna, is one of a handful of cast members who have been with the project since the beginning; Levy auditioned for an early developmental lab, but didn’t get cast, and then was brought in as Elsa last summer.
Both women are 36, each is a Wicked alumna (Levy as Elphaba and Murin as Glinda) and each has previously originated roles on Broadway. But Frozen is a major career break for both.
“We know that we’ve got a big project on our hands,” Murin said.
“I knew what a massive opportunity this was, and how special it would be to be creating this character for the stage,” Levy agreed. “I never thought I’d get to be a Disney princess, that’s for sure.”
The pair will lead a company with a large cast (40 performers) and a big orchestra (22 musicians). The doors to the palace are 20 feet high. And there are 64 wigs.
One unusual element of the Frozen development is that the actors and stage managers involved will share in any profits.
Profit-sharing has become an increasingly hot topic in commercial theatre, particularly because of the enormous success of Hamilton. That show’s cast hired a lawyer to successfully press for profit-sharing when it became clear it was going to be a long-running hit, and Disney has decided that 0.5 per cent of any profits from Frozen will go to actors and stage members represented by Actors’ Equity and hired between fall 2016 and the Broadway opening.
Denver has brought good — and not-so-good — luck to Disney. This is where the first touring company for the blockbuster Lion King began. It’s also where The Little Mermaid had its start — a show that wobbled its way through a Broadway run memorable because actors used “wheelies” onstage to convey gliding under water.
Crews here have experience working on a Disney scale. And the Denver Center audiences (drawn from a wide area) are big enough to support a seven-week run.
“Our audiences know that the ways in which they respond to the stories onstage will be one of the considerations as to whether changes are made, or not made, and they embrace that,” said John Ekeberg, executive director of the Denver Center’s Broadway division.
Revisions will be tucked in during days without performances. Then come three months for rewriting and redesigning before Broadway rehearsals begin in January. The show is open on Broadway in March.
“We’re only halfway up the mountain, even though we’ve been working on this for four years,” Anderson-Lopez said. “You stand there in the back, and you listen for laughs, and you listen for the moments. And then your job after that show is how to figure out, ‘How do I get them to lean in?’ You won’t know until you watch a 5-year-old and a 95-year-old watching this musical in Denver.”
Levy sat cross-legged on a red plastic chair in a Times Square rehearsal studio. It was months before Denver and she was talking about — what else? – Let It Go with Grandage, her director. They were dissecting the lyrics.
“We have to forget the iconography that the song has taken on, because otherwise you can’t play it,” he reminded her. “It’ll become a concert performance rather than something that is actually happening in our own narrative.”
By last Sunday, in Denver, Levy was on a purplish stage for technical rehearsal, as members of the creative team turned to the creation of that ice palace. Her regal gown was dark against the Northern Lights, as they debated what shades of blue should surround her.
“The snow glows white on the mountain tonight,” she sang, building slow and low as she tested her moves against the scenery. With each sweep of her hands, winter appeared on an abstracted mountain landscape. Glittering snow from above, and fog from below. Walls of ice, and a twinkling curtain of Swarovski crystal snowflakes.
As she transformed from self-doubting to self-accepting, there was a hiccup. A stage effect didn’t quite work, and Levy noticed. She smiled uncertainly for a moment, and then gamely powered through.
“Let it go, let it go,” she belted, her sound booming through the cavernous Buell Theater at the Denver Center. She removed an unseen hairpin, causing the blond braid coiled around her glittering tiara to cascade down her right shoulder. “The cold never bothered me anyway.”