More than kid stuff
‘SpongeBob Musical’ puts a ‘subversive spin’ on quirky TV cartoon
Tina Landau originally didn’t want to direct “The SpongeBob Musical.”
“When I first got asked about pitching for the show, I declined,” says Landau. “All that came to my mind were big arena shows with actors in large prosthetics and puppet heads.”
The director is referring to the talking starfish, scubadiving squirrels and pineapple housing in the depths of the ocean that define the popular Nickelodeon cartoon “SpongeBob Squarepants” and the surreal setting of Bikini Bottom. Landau had no desire to oversee a verbatim recreation of the lovable, slightly eccentric animated series created by the late Stephen Hillenburg. It turns out, neither did he.
“When my agent said to me, Steve Hillenburg is only interested in doing the musical if it can be done in the ‘indie spirit’ in which he conceived of the whole thing I said, ‘That’s interesting.’ ”
With the right outlook and the right collaborators, including production designer David Zinn, the possibilities for the stage show became bigger than just what was on the small screen. Another factor that made her say yes to the project was falling in love with SpongeBob’s optimistic energy and spirit.
“I definitely have a little SpongeBob in me,” says Landau. “I felt his sense of innocence and play and wonder was really contagious.”
“The SpongeBob Musical” comes to San Francisco’s Golden Gate Theater, from Wednesday, Feb. 12, to Sunday, Feb. 16, after an acclaimed run on Broadway that began in 2017. The show features a book by writermusician
Kyle Jarrow with original songs by pop artists including Cyndi Lauper and Sara Bareilles and bands like Panic at the Disco and Lady Antebellum. The cartoon debuted on Nickelodeon in 1999 and follows the deepsea adventures of the title character: an anthropomorphic sponge with an unrelentingly positive outlook and sunny yellow complexion.
The television series found an easy audience with children and also gained many adult fans with its quirky animation style and grownup wordplay. The “SpongeBob” universe has also served as a kind of vessel for helping contextualize contemporary issues, including samesex relationships, environmental concerns and movements for diversity and inclusion, interpreted through the show’s characters and story lines. It was that fluidity and possibility for expansion that lured both Landau and Zinn to the project. Still, the musical has had an uphill battle finding its fan base.
In spite of that, Landau believes that at its core, the show is built to last. One of the key moments in the creative process for Landau was when she first heard John Legend’s song “(I Guess) I Miss You.”
“I realized very deeply the songs work,” Landau says. “They’re specific ... to the story, these amazing songwriters actually did this. It was a magic moment.”
After extensive workshops and a trial run in Chicago, the show ran for almost a year on Broadway and was nominated for 12 Tony Awards, with Zinn taking home the prize for best scenic design. But in spite of the positive reviews and award recognition (including a Drama Desk Award for Landau’s direction) the show did not recoup its investment.
Landau says that from the earliest workshops of the show, it had to fight audience preconceptions “that this was a show for toddlers.”
“What we tried to do and are still trying to do is educate potential audiences that this is something else, a more creative, adult and subversive spin than one might expect,” Landau says.
In spite of the early closing, the show has been given renewed life with the tour, a cast album and a 2019 filmed version that aired on Nickelodeon.
“Our lesson from Broadway was that people had a hard time wrapping their brain around what the show is,” Zinn says. “No one believed us when we said, ‘It’s super fun; it’s for every age.’ For people who know it as a cartoon and don’t understand what we’ve done, it has been a weirder and more complicated sell than it should be.”
But audience misconceptions of the show and its cartoon inspiration have in some ways helped it find its artistic voice.
“There was freedom from the beginning to have our own rules,” Zinn says. “When you adapt a movie which involves real people and real locations, you have those people and locations to either haunt you or inspire you. As a cartoon, we had to have another way in.”
Like Landau, Zinn wasn’t interested in literally translating the cartoon’s aesthetic; instead he referenced styles that were in conversation with the visual language of the cartoon. Nods to Dadaism appear throughout the show (notably with pink picnic umbrellas transformed into jellyfish) as does a certain “doityourself ” ethos that gives a homemade feel to some sets and costume pieces, including a surfboard band shell and an extravagantly crocheted cape worn by SpongeBob’s best friend, Patrick Star (a starfish), that recalls the kind of afghan your grandmother might have made.
Even with such inspirations as a starting point, Zinn realized that with the show’s three main characters — SpongeBob, Patrick and Sandy Cheeks (a squirrel) — less was more.
“They’re our sort of emotional way into the story and the most human,” Zinn says. “Because their emotional life is more developed in the series and people know them, we had a freedom to go further away from the original character design.”
Ideas like framing SpongeBob with a square headpiece and making Patrick’s body more starfishpointed were abandoned early. While color palettes specific to the characters from the cartoon are referenced in the costumes (bright yellow and brown for SpongeBob, pink and acid green for Patrick) it’s mostly the actor’s performances that convey the characters.
While the costumes will mostly carry over from Broadway to the tour, aspects of the sets have been scaled back for travel. Landau says that although the design was among the most lauded aspects of the musical, seeing it pared down has proved to her that the show’s music, characters and book hold up on their own.
The current tour isn’t the only thing giving the show a second chance at a bigger pop culture life: Landau says a licensing deal is currently being negotiated that will allow community theater groups and schools to mount their own versions of the show. The DIY spirit of the piece easily lends itself to all kinds of smaller, perhaps even quirkier interpretations of the material, say Zinn and Landau: Many of the current production elements could probably be sourced from a town’s local Target, including the pool noodles that become props and set pieces through the show.
“I think there’d be nothing more wonderful and gratifying than to see this show done by all types of groups in all types of ways,” Landau says.
For Zinn, there’s an episode of the “SpongeBob” cartoon series that speaks to his philosophy of future productions: Patrick and SpongeBob order a television, take it out of thebox, then spend the episode playing with the box, ignoring the television. He sees the show as that cardboard box, something that can be endlessly reimagined.
“It’s fun to see people take an idea you helped birth and reinterpret it,” Zinn says. “I hope drag queens do the show drunk out of their mind at 3 a.m. I hope high school kids do it. I hope fifthgraders do it with a cardboard box and some construction paper. The music is great, the characters are great, there’s a tapdance number — what else do you need?”