CMU GRAD JOSH GAD IN NEW SHOW
PASADENA, Calif. — Once upon a time, musical series were as rare as they are ambitious.
Over the past decade, we’ve seen more than perhaps ever before in TV history — “Glee” (2009-2015, Fox), “Smash” (2012-13, NBC), “Nashville” (2012-18, ABC, CMT), “Galavant” (2015-16, ABC), “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” (2015-19, The CW), “Empire” (201520, Fox) — but it still feels like a minor miracle when one of these shows sees the light of day, particularly one with an original, Broadway-ready score.
Prepare to add the animated comedy “Central Park” to the list. Originally developed for Fox but premiering Friday on Apple TV+, “Central Park” melds the weirdness of “Bob’s Burgers” with original show tunes.
It’s no surprise, then, the executive producers are “Bob’s Burgers” vets Loren Bouchard and Nora Smith alongside 2003 Carnegie Mellon University School of Drama alumnus Josh Gad (“Frozen”).
When casting the voices, Gad tapped “Frozen” co-star Kristen Bell, as well as CMU classmate Leslie Odom Jr. and CMU dormmate Rory O’Malley.
“Kristen was my first phone call when we were trying to cast ‘Central Park,’” Gad said in January after an Apple TV+ news conference for the series during the Television Critics Association winter 2020 press tour. “The beauty of my Carnegie Mellon experience is now I’m getting to work and cast all my classmates on this show.”
Gad stars in “Central Park” as the voice of the show’s troubadour narrator, Birdie, who sings about the park and its caretaker: uptight, uncool Owen Tillerman (voiced by Odom). Owen lives in a stone house in the park with journalist wife Paige (Kathryn Hahn), superhero-loving daughter Molly (Bell) and oddball son Cole (Tituss Burgess, “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt”). O’Malley voices Elwood, another Central Park employee.
Adding to the high-wire act of an animated show with musical numbers, “Central Park” also has a serialized storyline involving a mean-spirited, wealthy heiress, Bitsy Brandenham (Stanley Tucci), who, with the assistance of her henchwoman Helen (Daveed Diggs), aims to pave over Central Park for new building development.
Gad said that when he attended CMU from 1999-2003, he regularly watched “The Simpsons” and “Family Guy,” but he didn’t expect to wind up working so much in animation, although Robin Williams’ performance as Genie in “Aladdin” (1992) made an impact.
“That was transformational for me because I realized in that moment I would love to do that one day,” he said, noting work in musicals came his way despite not making it into CMU’s musical theater program. “Rory and I both auditioned for the last slot, and Rory got in and I was so jealous. So when I first auditioned for a Broadway musical, which was ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee,’ I was so terrified because everybody who was auditioning for it had musical theater training, and I was the only one who didn’t.”
Gad credits the “joy of the musical form itself” and the creation of shows like “Hamilton,” “Dear Evan Hansen” and “Book of Mormon” — the latter of which Gad starred in on Broadway — with winning over a new generation of musical theater fans.
“It’s made it cool again,” Gad said. “And what Loren and I were after in approaching this was, ‘How do we bring that to this form?’”
Bell said musicals make viewers more emotionally available and have evolved to a point that the musical numbers are better integrated into the storytelling.
“[Musicals] went out of style for so long because there’s a way to do it where it is just a story and then you stop for a song, and there’s a story and then you stop for a song,” she said. “And that feels completely disjointed, cause you can tell that something’s off.”
“Central Park” aims to avoid that trap in the songs of its premiere episode that weave together plot, character development and a celebration of the location in the show’s title.
Bell also describes a freedom of working in animation versus live-action — no insecurity about how you look when you’re not on camera — and the opportunity to collaborate with a project’s producers while also following one’s gut.
When recording Anna’s song, “The Next Right Thing,” for “Frozen 2,” Bell said the song breaks into two portions with the first part requiring “inner turbulence which needed to be very quiet and tight” and a second part, after Anna’s made the decision to do the next right thing, that needs to soar.
The first day Bell went in to record the song, she requested to do the second half another day. She wanted to keep her voice small and tight for the song’s first half.
“I didn’t do a vocal warm-up ... and I said, ‘I think it should be a little bit offkey and we should not pay attention to tempo as much,’” she recalled. “And it worked so well that I came back a couple days later to record the last half of the song, and we actually went back and rerecorded the first portion to make it even more so. … I just sort of spoke-sung it, and there was an intimacy and a vulnerability about that.”
For Gad, an active imagination helps with vocal performance.
“Animation is most akin to being a young kid and playing with your G.I. Joes or your Barbies and creating a world that’s based on nothing but your imagination,” he said. “You have nothing to tap into other than your voice, right? You can’t emote with your facial expressions. You can’t use any body part to gesticulate. You have nothing but this one thing to access, and when you access that, it forces you to have to really use your imagination to create a journey for the audience and also a journey for your animators. The medium to me is so exciting because I love collaboration.”