Frozen
Opening Night: March 22, 2018
Theater: St. James Theatre
You’re invited to discover that love is a force of nature… at Disney’s new musical, Frozen. Frozen comes to life on Broadway in an all-new production created for the stage by an award-winning team. Featuring twice as many songs as the original film, the show’s expanded score is written by Academy Award® winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Tony Award® and Oscar winner Robert Lopez, and the book is by Oscar winner Jennifer Lee. The sound design is by Tony nominee Peter Hylenski, with video design by Tony winner Finn Ross. The scenic and costume designs are by Tony winner Christopher Oram, the lighting design is by Tony winner Natasha Katz, music supervision and arrangements are by Tony winner Stephen Oremus, and the choreography is by Tony winner Rob Ashford. The production is directed by Tony Award winner Michael Grandage. This is the timeless tale of two sisters, pulled apart by a mysterious secret. As one young woman struggles to find her voice and harness her powers within the other embarks on an epic adventure to bring her family together once and for all. Both are searching for love. They just don’t know where to find it. Playing 8 times a week at Broadway’s legendary St. James Theatre.
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March 22, 2018
Forget girl power, sisterly love and the high-belt clarion call of “Let It Go.” Anxiety over the handling of a precious gift is the theme that comes through loudest in “Frozen,” the sometimes rousing, often dull, alternately dopey and anguished Disney musical that opened on Broadway on Thursday.
The precious gift is not, I hasten to add, the freeze-ray of Queen Elsa, which threatens her kingdom without any corresponding benefits. (Couldn’t they at least hook her up to a gelato machine?) Nor is it the warmheartedness of her sister, Anna, which puts her at constant risk of unelective cryogenesis.
No, the precious gift causing so much anxiety at the St. James Theater is the 2013 blockbuster film from which the stage musical has been adapted. After all, $1.3 billion in box office is a lot of ice.
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March 22, 2018
Just before the start of a recent performance of Frozen, Disney’s winter blast in a two-decade flurry of remaking Broadway in its own animated image, a tiny girl a row back explained to the adult next to her that the blue and purple lights washing the stage weren’t just any blue and purple lights. “They’re the Northern Lights,” she explained with considerable authority. “It’s in the movie.” Talk about expectations. More than a billion of ’em, if you’re measuring by revenue generated from the massively successful 2013 film, a movie that rewrote at least one Disney convention — no kissing prince needed to wake up any Frozen beauty — and, in “Let It Go,” gave our showtune songbook an anthem of self-acceptance and defiance powerful (and catchy) enough to muscle its way next to Dreamgirls‘ “And I’m Telling You I’m Not Going” and La Cage aux Folles‘ “I Am What I Am.”
READ THE REVIEWMarch 22, 2018
Full disclosure: “Frozen” is not my favorite Disney princess movie. Loved the message and the song, but the story seemed pretty convoluted even by Disney standards. As a musical, the plotting remains weak, but there is a special magic that only live theatre can produce, and it’s working a charming spell on the Broadway stage. There is, of course, Elsa’s magic, but I’m speaking of the thrill that comes from experiencing familiar material beautifully honed up close and personal. And this one was quite a challenge. How to recreate the G-rated spirit of the animated film while delving into the characters’ personal conflicts, which are pretty psychologically deep.
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March 22, 2018
As Princess Elsa says in this snowy, showy stage adaptation of the popular Disney movie, “I’m not as cold as I seem.” Credit the thawing trend in Broadway’s “Frozen” to the lovable characters of Jennifer Lee, who wrote the film and now writes the book for the stage musical, and to the warmly human cast assembled by director Michael Grandage. Caissie Levy is stunning as Elsa, the beautiful princess with the cursed gift to turn her kingdom into ice, and Patti Murin makes a darling Anna, the earthbound princess whose love for her sister is the only thing that can set Elsa free. The theater’s legendary powers notwithstanding, there’s no way that the all-too-solid stage of the St. James Theater can approximate the technical virtuosity of a movie setting. Rather, the magic of the theater comes from its power to open up the world of the imagination. Emerging from the dancing lights of the aurora borealis (as fashioned by lighting designer Natasha Katz) projected on the scrim (by video designer Finn Ross), Christopher Oram’s sets are highly stylized and very theatrical, if not transporting.
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