Let it snow! Let it snow!
Broadway musical ‘Frozen’ finally arrives at The Bushnell in Hartford
The stage version of “Frozen,” Disney’s adventurous snowbound take on the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” slides into Hartford at the perfect wintry time of year.
In the show, it’s winter all year round. Anna, princess of Arendelle, has to track down her sister Elsa to reverse the spell. To say their sibling relationship has grown cold is an understatement. Anna is joined in her heartwarming expedition by the buff iceman Kristoff, his noble steed Sven and the goofy snowman Olaf. The show is at The Bushnell from Feb. 8-18.
Anticipation has been high for “Disney’s Frozen,” for its journey to Hartford has happened at a glacial pace. The national tour began in 2019 and was around for a few months before it had to take a yearand-a-half off due to the COVID19 pandemic. The tour is finally in Connecticut after restarting in September 2021, and it will be put on ice following the final show on Sept. 1 in California.
The original Broadway production, meanwhile, never reopened after the COVID shutdown, having had its last performance in March 2020.
Like all the Disney stage musicals, “Frozen” has been adapted for maximum theatrical impact, whether or not that means following the animated original super closely. The memorable songs and lines are in there, ready to be cheered at when they are uttered, but there are also new routines and new songs.
Where elaborate costumes have often been the best way to bring the color and glory of cartoons to the live stage, “Frozen” follows “The Lion King” in also using complex puppetry to enliven key characters. That approach gives “Frozen” a whole other attraction for Connecticut audiences. Puppetry is a highly respected art form in the state, thanks to such institutions as the National Puppetry Conference at the O’Neill Theater Center in Waterford and the graduate puppetry program at the University of Connecticut in Storrs.
In “Frozen,” Sven, the mighty reindeer ridden by Kristoff, is a larger-than-life animal puppet manipulated by a person contorted inside it.
For Olaf the jolly snowman, the show has come up with a modern variation on the centuries-old Japanese Bunraku style of puppetry, in which the puppeteer stands onstage next to the puppet rather than hiding behind a wall or table.
“It’s daunting,” said Jeremy Davis, who plays Olaf, “It’s not just
any puppet. It’s a beautiful work of art. Presenting him this way makes it more theatrical.”
Davis has had a long career in musical comedy, including a couple of shows (“George M!” and “Babes in Arms”) at the Goodspeed Opera House in East Haddam. He made his Broadway debut in “Dirty Rotten Scoundrels” in 2006, and has since appeared in Broadway revivals of “Annie,” Cats” and “South Pacific” to name a few. He was in the tour of “Thoroughly Modern Millie” that came to The Bushnell in 2003, and the “South Pacific” tour that played there in 2010.
“I’ve been with ‘Frozen’ a long time,” Davis said. “I was in two developmental workshops. I understudied Olaf and the Duke on Broadway. When shows started ramping back up after COVID, they needed someone and they gave me a call.
“What’s been very cool about this company is that it’s an immensely positive group of people,” he added. “It has built that reputation of making new people feel comfortable when they join.”
Davis is charged with keeping the mood light and breezy onstage as well. In a live theater situation, Olaf can’t fling parts of his body over mountaintops, but “I do have a bit where I make his butt move and down,” Davis said. Other than that, Olaf may be able to express himself more grandly than a lot of puppets, but it is still a limited palette.
“He can blink. He can move his eyebrows. He can change the direction of his face. He can move his arms. But he has a set expression,” Davis said.
“One of the things puppetry teaches you is how important external things are,” he added. “As an actor, I was always asking ‘What’s my motivation? What’s going on inside?’ But it also goes the other way. What’s on the outside?”
To ensure that those external elements — the pointy nose, the shiny snowball exterior and the bendy limbs and eyebrows — can weather eight or nine performances of “Frozen” a week, the tour travels with a puppet supervisor.
Sue McLaughlin said she has loved puppets since she was a child in New Hampshire but came to this job in a roundabout way. “I came to it through wardrobe. When Disney put ‘Lion King’ together, they weren’t sure who was going to take care of the puppets. So it was decided that if the puppet was worn like a costume, the wardrobe department would be responsible and if the puppet was carried it would be the props department,” She said. “I was doing wardrobe, and it was a big new skill set for me to learn. When ‘The Lion King’ toured, it traveled with a puppet shop so the puppets could be fixed.”
She enjoyed her work on “The Lion King” both on Broadway and on tour and was looking for other opportunities when a remarkably similar one came up. “I saw one of the early dress rehearsals for ‘Frozen.’ When Sven came onstage I was blown away. I couldn’t get over how magical that was. I wasn’t looking for a position with the show, but when they were putting a tour together it came up and I just had to do it,” she said.
“Now I live on the outskirts of Arendelle. I love it there,” McLaughlin added. “It’s my unicorn job. I still always watch for Sven’s first entrance.”
She sees others react the same way. “We hire local dressers in each city, and I see their faces light up in awe.”
Besides a puppet supervisor, one of the tour’s stage managers “has gone to puppet boot camp,” McLaughlin said, and specifically watches out for issues with those characters.
She said the puppets are both cutting-edge and old-fashioned. “They’re all mechanical: no batteries, no projections. They’re controlled by the performers.” Because of the hands-on nature of the art, “there’s considerable wear and tear. Sometimes it’s as easy as lubricating something regularly, but we also use bungee cords that need to be replaced,” McLaughlin said. “Olaf is white and needs to cleaned. I just had to order Olaf some new feet. With Sven, the performer’s entire body weight is on four stilts, so you need to maintain those stilts. Just the foot support can be a lengthy process.”
McLaughlin has been with the tour (including its COVID hiatus) for four years and continues to be energized by it. “We just came from Washington, D.C. The audiences were so enthusiastic and the houses were full. It’s interesting to be bringing such a well-known story in a different way. The children in the theater have seen the animated feature a hundred times.”
Both McLaughlin and Davis acknowledge that the youngest audience members often need to acclimate to Olaf being a full-grown person who is wearing part of a costume and working some parts of Olaf with his hands. “Olaf will come out and children of a certain age might be a little unsure. It takes them a moment,” McLaughlin said.
“Yes,” Davis agreed, “there is a moment for the younger ones where they recognize him immediately, but then it’s like ‘Who’s that weirdo behind him? What’s going on here?,’ But as the show goes on, they see the puppet and me as one. I trust in their love for him.”
“Disney’s Frozen” runs Feb. 8-18 at The Bushnell, 166 Capitol Ave., Hartford. Performances are Tuesdays through Thursdays at 7:30 p.m., Fridays at 8 p.m., Saturdays at 2 and 8 p.m. and Sundays at 1 and 6:30 p.m. with an added matinee Feb. 14 at 2 p.m. $34-$188. bushnell.org.