BEHIND OLAF F
Meet the man who brings the lovable ‘Frozen’ snowman to life on Broadway
ROSTY the Snowman has a corncob pipe, a button nose and two eyes made of coal. Olaf — the big-hearted sidekick of Disney’s “Frozen” — is made out of different stuff: carbon fiber, foam, yarn and a metal harness. But actor Greg Hildreth makes him come to life. “It’s baptism by fire,” Hildreth tells The Post, shortly before the $50 million musical’s first preview at the St. James Theatre, where it opens March 22. Hildreth’s never worked with puppets before, but he calls Olaf, his stage partner for nearly a year, “my new best friend.” Olaf was designed by Christopher Oram, who also designed the musical’s sets, and Michael Curry, who, with Julie Taymor, created the puppets for Disney’s “The Lion King.” As Curry did for that record-breaking show, he pulls off the neat trick of having both the puppet and actor visible to the audience at the same time. Before Hildreth joined “Frozen,” his only exposure to puppets was through watching “The Muppet Show.” (He calls Fozzie Bear his “spirit puppet animal.”) He studied theater at Boston University and went on to appear in several Broadway shows — “Rodgers + Hammerstein’s Cinderella,” “Peter and the Starcatcher” and “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson” — but never suspected he’d befriend a snowman. Actor and puppet are attached by a j-bar, which Hildreth calls “my Kareem Abdul-j-bar.” His right hand slips through a slit in the back of Olaf’s head through which he can move the puppet’s mouth and extend its neck. His thumb works a trigger that blinks and closes Olaf’s expressive eyes. He also controls a mechanism that enables him to move Olaf’s twiggy arms. There’s a magnet on one of the puppet’s palms that allows Olaf to pick up things during the show. Although Olaf stands about 5 feet tall — Hildreth’s 5-foot-10 — he weighs only a few pounds. Six inches separate Hildreth from Olaf, but with months of practice in front of a mirror, the actor and his puppet have become one. He has, however, drawn odd looks on the subway when he runs lines
on his way to work, opening and closing his hand as if he’s manipulating Olaf’s mouth, but it’s paid off. After a performance in Denver, where “Frozen” tried out last fall, a 4-year-old girl at the stage door asked him, “How did you fit inside Olaf? He’s smaller than you are!”
“That was a good moment,” Hildreth says. “In her mind, nothing separated us.”
With the help of two dressers, Hildreth can suit up as Olaf in about two minutes. First he puts on a pair of snow boots with long poles attached to Olaf’s legs. He slips on a white jacket and vest, and then a harness with the j-bar attached to Olaf’s midsection. The final touch is a cap topped by a fuzzy orange ball the same shade of orange as Olaf’s carrot nose.
The pointy hat, Hildreth says, makes “me look like the archbishop of snow.”
Raising his voice a pitch or two, Hildreth — now Olaf — extends a twig arm to shake my hand.
Although Olaf has become one of Disney’s most beloved characters, he almost didn’t make it into the movie “Frozen.”
Veteran animator Chris Buck first drew him in 2008 for a movie inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.”
Buck imagined a snowman that could come apart in, say, a blizzard but then put itself back together. In early incarnations, Olaf resembled a marshmallow.
He remained on the drawing board until 2011, when Disney decided to go ahead with a new version of “The Snow Queen” called “Frozen.”
Buck wanted Olaf in the movie, but its writer Jennifer Lee, who has since adapted her screenplay for the stage, resisted.
She loved the character but didn’t see how he fit dramatically into the story of Elsa and Anna. Then she hit on the idea that the sisters create him together, singing “Do You Want To Build a Snowman?”
Olaf represents the innocence and love they enjoyed as children. He’s the link that binds them, even as Elsa shuns Anna and the world in her castle, and he’s a snappy second banana.
The musical even gives him a lively vaudeville turn. In a song called “In Summer,” the snowman dreams of lying on the beach.
And while Olaf doesn’t appear until late in the first act — “page 52,” says Hildreth — the instant he stepped onstage in Denver, the kids went bonkers.
Says Hildreth: “It felt like a Beatles concert.”