What’s small and dreams big? ‘Ratatouille,’ a TikTokmusical
As bad as the pandemic has been for plays, it has been even worse for musicals, which are not only intensely collaborative but also inherently unhygienic. The next “A Chorus Line” won’t emerge while everyone is standing 6 feet apart. No new “Hamilton” can spit its rhymes from behind a wall of masks.
But the urge to tell stories in song and dance does not go dark just because theaters do; it finds new mediums. And so we now have “Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical,” a show that turns crowdsourcing from a danger into an aesthetic. Compared with the excellent 2007 DisneyPixar film “Ratatouille,” it’s a trifle, but I mean that in the culinary sense: It’s a silly, multilayered delight.
No people, or even rats, were harmed in the making of the show, which premiered on New Year’s Day as a benefit for the Actors Fund and streamed until Monday evening.
Its mostly online creation allowed contributors from all over the country, many of them young and apparently stuck in their parents’ basements, to collaborate with old hands. Whether the novel development process will change the way musicals are made in the future remains to be seen, but “Ratatouille” serves the moment admirably.
Credit that in part to how fast it happened. Just this August, Emily Jacobsen, a 26-year-old teacher, posted a 15-second ditty called “Ode to Remy” on TikTok. Remy is the animated feature’s rat protagonist, dreaming of becoming a fine Paris chef despite his family’s doubts and the logistical problems of rodents in kitchens. Operating from inside the toque of a bumbling garbage boy named Linguini, he eventually succeeds.
“Ode to Remy” doesn’t get into all that: Just a squib, it draws its brief humor from the contrast between its high-flown lyrics (“may the world remember your name”) and its small, squeaky, hairy subject. It is sarcasm set to a tiny tune.
But then the hive mind of TikTok swarmed, as fans and collaborators contributed extensions and overlays to a project that wasn’t yet a project. Soon a burgeoning meme’s worth of material accumulated: songs, arrangements, set designs, makeup concepts, choreography and even key art — everything except an actual show.
It still lacks the “actual show” part; the haste that gave “Ratatouille” its moxie has also kept it shallow. Only slivers of the TikTok material made it into the hourlong piece, and even less of the movie’s richer action. Most of what passes for the book, “adapted for the stage” (though there is no stage) by Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley, is bald narration delivered directly to the camera to get as quickly as possible from number to number. Luckily, the job of delivering it falls almost entirely on Tituss Burgess, playing Remy in a ratgray turtleneck; he finds the right throwaway tone for the throwaway material.
The rest of the cast — all the leads are pros — is pointed and stylish enough that you wish they had more to do than sing numbers culled from TikTok and enhanced by the show’s musical team. As Linguini, Andrew Barth Feldman, a recent Evan Hansen, seems to have animated his face to match Pixar’s version: He’s instantly adorable while looking like he still might gnaw your toe. Adam Lambert as Remy’s chill brother, André De Shields as a forbidding food critic and Mary Testa, in a magic-marker mustache, as the suspicious head chef, all prove expert in the art of the one-song performance.
So maybe the hive mind is on to something. Certainly it would be healthier for the theater if Broadway musicals could be built, like “Ratatouille,” in just a few months, by individuals, not conglomerates. Our current process, which takes years and more money than anyone but a corporate behemoth can muster, too often squashes idiosyncrasy and cuts off artists from their communities of inspiration.
In “Ratatouille,” those sources are live and potent: There may be too many chefs, but they offer, as one character puts it, “just the right amount of cheese.”