San Francisco Chronicle

Dancing sea creatures are all of us

- By Lily Janiak

A great director doesn’t merely interpret text, move actors’ bodies around onstage and work with designers to build a world. A great director can look at a story and empathize with it, almost as if it were another human. A great director’s production­s seem to proclaim, at every instant, “I feel so seen right now.” They are their full, undiluted selves. And by that strange alchemy of theater — which somehow makes you and what you see onstage the same, interchang­eable — you then feel seen, too.

It might sound odd to say all this about “The SpongeBob Musical,” which was inspired by the longrunnin­g Nickelodeo­n cartoon series about a chipper yellow sponge. But director Tina Landau not only does the material the honor of taking it seriously; she also shows that in SpongeBob’s pineapple under the sea, there are many mansions, maybe one for each of us.

The show, whose criminally short run opened Wednesday, Feb. 12, at BroadwaySF’s Golden Gate Theatre, invites

you in as an attic trunk promises makebeliev­e. David Zinn’s set and costume designs find inventive new registers for the series’ loving, punfilled, “Hey, why not?” vibe, its beachcombe­r aesthetic.

Pool noodles cluster to form kelp; Solo cups become coral; boxing gloves, a crab’s pincers. Need to show how a lazy starfish has found himself the leader of a cult of sardines? Lop off the top of a plastic Clorox bottle, paint it pink, turn it upside down, and voila, don your bishop’s miter.

The original series takes unrestrain­ed, childlike glee in undersea oddities, how it might as well be outer space down there, and that wackadoodl­e spirit finds delightful new life onstage — the way a topheavy bivalve towers like one of those inflatable stick figures outside a used car dealership, the way a squid selfactual­izes through tap dance, the way a school of sardines does a rapidfire hand jive in unison or how a sea slug might need to collapse to the ocean floor to start wriggling maniacally.

Slide whistles and all manner of noisemaker­s — operated by two Foley artists, one (Ryan Blihovde) onstage — convey the flops and boings of cartoon sound effects, including the series’ patented sound, which never stops being funny, in which every step taken on the mucky sea bed creates a vaguely flatulent halfquack, halfsquelc­h.

Yet outside of the songs’ creative staging, music itself (by a variety of artists: from Sara Bareilles to John Legend, from the Flaming Lips to David Bowie and Brian Eno) feels stuck in the doldrums and occasional­ly make the musical feel more pat, tidy and full of life lessons than the cartoon ever did.

As SpongeBob (Lorenzo Pugliese) and his pals seek to save Bikini Bottom from an eruption of the volcano Mount Humongous, not every cast member rises to the springload­ed, eyepopping zaniness the world around them seems to require. As Texan squirrel Sandy Cheeks, Daria Pilar Redus almost seemed to be merely marking her performanc­e, as if it were a tech rehearsal rather than opening night, an effect heightened by wildly uneven sound levels throughout the evening.

But some performanc­es transcend. As villain Sheldon Plankton, Tristan McIntyre speaks as if his very salivary glands and sinus cavities brim with dastardly schemes. He and Caitlin Ort as Karen the Computer, his digital wife, forge a strange, erotic chemistry that shows how there’s always something carnal, lusty, unfulfille­d about bad guys whose Rube Goldberg plans never reach their deviant ends.

As the grouchy Squidward Q. Tentacles (whose costume ingeniousl­y conjures a cephalopod’s tangle of legs), Cody Cooley seems to cast an inky pall wherever he trods, daring your dislike and your like at the same time. He’s a walking wompwomp, a grouch with a heart of gold, a wet blanket that’s still cuddly.

When he gets his tapdancing moment in the sun, declaring that he’s not a loser after all, accompanie­d by a magentapin­k chorus of Muppetlike sea anemones, he stands for all of us. Behind every crank, “SpongeBob” says, might be a secret showman’s flair; behind every sourpuss’ gripe, a bringitonh­ome number wells, waiting to be belted out.

 ?? Jeremy Daniel / BroadwaySF ?? Beau Bradshaw (left), Lorenzo Pugliese and Daria Pilar Redus in “The SpongeBob Musical.”
Jeremy Daniel / BroadwaySF Beau Bradshaw (left), Lorenzo Pugliese and Daria Pilar Redus in “The SpongeBob Musical.”
 ?? Jeremy Daniel / BroadwaySF ?? Tristan McIntyre as Sheldon Plankton (left) and Caitlin Ort as Karen the Computer.
Jeremy Daniel / BroadwaySF Tristan McIntyre as Sheldon Plankton (left) and Caitlin Ort as Karen the Computer.

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