Hot stuff: ‘Frozen’ comes to Broadway
Disney’s film gets more music, a more grown-up story and inclusive cast
NEW YORK – The curtain goes up and the opening number of the new Broadway musical Frozen kicks off with little Disney princesses Anna and Elsa on stage in front of a packed house. Backstage at the St. James Theatre, their grown-up counterparts are letting loose for an audience of two.
The second-floor dressing room of Caissie Levy, who plays ice queen Elsa (she of the empowerment anthem Let
It Go), is the scene of a nightly dance party co-starring her theatrical partner Patti Murin, aka Elsa’s loving younger sister, Anna. Since they don’t have to come out right away, the two use the first 10 minutes of Frozen to bust a few moves to the downstairs show tune.
“Sometimes there’s some jumping on the couch, sometimes there are some ballet moves that are truly heinous that no one should ever witness,” Levy says, laughing. “It’s always done in our nude undergarments, which are really unattractive: a whole lot of Spanx and tights, and we don’t look cute at all.”
It’s all business and belting once the Broadway veterans inhabit their characters in Disney’s next big musical extravaganza, now in previews (the show opens March 22). Producers could have done a note-for-note staging of the 2013 Oscar-winning animated movie and been just fine, financially: The film spawned a cultural phenomenon that continues to this day.
Fans at Disney World wait hours to meet Anna and Elsa or to get on the Frozen Ever After ride. They can buy a litany of stuff — from hoodies to toothbrushes — featuring the sisters or that lovable goofball snowman, Olaf, and they’re probably already planning to
visit their nearest cinemas on Nov. 27, 2019, for Frozen 2.
The movie’s creative team has devised a musical that honors and also adds to Frozen’s legacy while making it more socially relevant than ever. Songwriting couple Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez crafted 12 new tunes for the show, and movie director Jennifer Lee wrote the book, which expands Anna and Elsa’s back story.
Add theatrical director Michael Grandage, who “has taken this story that people think is for little kids because of the branding, and he’s made it this very rich, Shakespearean, lush adult story,” says Anderson-Lopez.
Inspired by Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen, Frozen at its warm heart is about a pair of sisters who grow up in isolation and find their way back to each other. Because of an accident involving Elsa’s ice powers, she’s kept apart from her sibling for much of their childhood, even as they each harbor a yearning to be close to one another.
After their parents die, Elsa is crowned queen of the kingdom of Arendelle. And after a lifetime of keeping her snowy abilities bottled up, she accidentally lets them loose and turns Arendelle into an icicle. Elsa leaves Arendelle on a mission of self-discovery, while Anna hooks up with hunky ice deliveryman Kristoff (played in the musical by Jelani Alladin) and Olaf (singing puppeteer Greg Hildreth) to find her sister.
Murin, a New York native who has done Xanadu and Lysistrata Jones on Broadway, is a “Disney kid” who connected with Anna when she saw Frozen in a movie theater five years ago.
“Anna was the first one where I was like, ‘Oh, that’s totally my princess,’ ” Murin says. “She doesn’t quite have the poise that a lot of the other Disney heroines have. She is a true heroine. With others, it’s a lot of women waiting around for men to come and kiss them. And she doesn’t.”
Levy says she was an early adopter of the Frozen franchise, taking in a screening with her girlfriends and thinking it would be “a perfect musical.”
The most glaring difference between Frozen and many of Levy’s other Broad- way productions is the lack of a romantic love interest. “It’s colored the entire experience in a different shade,” Levy says. “It’s been a really cool thing to explore as a woman and as an actor to be doing a show that centers around the love of two sisters. ... What that tells the world is it’s a really exciting time to be doing a show that’s not about a man.”
That non-romantic take on true love hit a nerve with women when the movie came out, Murin adds, and now with the Me Too and Time’s Up movements, “it’s re-establishing that, but it also explores the complex relationships of sisters and women with each other. It’s not the easiest relationship. We have not been raised as of yet in society to fully support other women, so we’re figuring it out how to do it ourselves.”
Disney is showing its progressive side with another of Frozen’s core dynamics: In the movie, Kristoff is a blond white guy who falls for Anna, and in the musical it’s Broadway rookie Alladin, an African-American Brooklynite.
Alladin wanted to bring an emotional quality to Kristoff. “Someone called me an action figure the other day (but) to then have these moments in Act 2 where he opens up — you see the warmth, the tenderness, the heart.”
Not everybody was a fan at first. During a pre-Broadway run in Denver last year, Alladin received hate mail regarding his race and the onstage interracial romance. (African-American actor James Brown III plays Anna and Elsa’s father in the Broadway production, and Asian-American actress Ann Sanders is their mother.)
“I had to take a moment to say, ‘You know what, if this is what being a pioneer in this type of thing has to be and what I have to deal with, I will deal with it,’ ” Alladin says. But toward the end of their Denver days, he says, “people didn’t say, ‘Oh, there’s a black man play- ing Kristoff.’ When I came on stage, they just saw Kristoff.”
Kristoff and Anna get a new duet, What Do You Know About Love?, and Elsa sings both the interior monologue Dangerous to Dream in the first act and Monster in the second.
The Oscar-winning Elsa anthem is, unsurprisingly, the biggest in the musical as it ends the first act.
At a recent performance, with the Broadway casts of Aladdin and The Lion King in the house, a buzz starts as soon as the opening piano notes signal Elsa’s appearance. Little girls shush each other, then everybody erupts in cheers once Elsa literally lets her hair down and closes with the iconic line “The cold never bothered me anyway.”
It’s Levy’s favorite part of the show: “It’s such a nice turn for the character to go from spending most of the first act in fear and anxiety to then just letting herself be who she is and celebrating it.”