Disclaimer: This was written on the same day of a family tragedy. I intend to press on with this, for my own distraction, and because I want to. However, if it's evident my heart is not in the next few posts, please bear with me, and I apologize.
What I think is very interesting about Finding Nemo - The Musical is the film it's based on isn't at all a musical.
In full disclosure, Avenue Q is my favorite musical. The fun, bouncy music is just the right style to stick in my brain, the irreverent comedy is perfect, and the use of puppets as part of the performance without removing the presence of the puppeteer is imaginative as heck. It was already my favorite musical when I first saw Nemo, which I immediately loved.
At first viewing, I -- an ignorant plebian -- had no clue the two were connected.
Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez are geniuses. I could write a second post about how ridiculously clever I think every part of Avenue Q is, but it won a Tony so I'm obviously not on a limb here. Frozen's soundtrack was obviously a cultural moment, and Coco's soundtrack probably should be. The fact that the two produced a condensed Broadway-style production that played every single day multiple times in a theme park is really hard to appreciate, especially given how fantastic the results were. I go to a theme park for rides, and maybe some cool walk throughs; great theming, sites, stuff to see and do while moving. I lack the patience to sit and watch a show, but this amazing show was just there, sitting in Animal Kingdom, to be appreciated on any day, at any number of times, and that's pretty special. And absolutely worth trying my patience.
For a film that wasn't a musical, the Lopez's did a really great job of distilling the themes of the film into a collection of catchy tunes that quote the movie, and move its plot along quickly. Each manages to be different from the last, allowing freshness and variety in each scene. I am not a music expert, so I won't be able to dissect why each song works, but I know that they do. At every show I've been to, they were performed professionally, and they're an awesome collection of earworms.
There was an Orlando Sentinel article about how Finding Nemo was one of Anderson-Lopez's favorite films. In there, she talked about how seriously she wanted to take making a Broadway level production, and how they felt the film could be distilled down to a single idea of the world being dangerous and also beautiful. The article doesn't exist anymore so now I can't cite it! That's annoying! But they obviously took the project to heart, and did such an incredible job bringing it to life.
What I love most, though, is not the music, or the story: it's the puppetry. When you sat in the theater and watch Nemo, you get to see so many varied ways of representing the creatures and characters, each uniquely imaginative.
Our main fish are "merely" puppets with moving tails and eyes and mouths. As with Avenue Queue, the puppeteer is still a part of the show, and their performance part of the character, and it is a really fun effect for a stage show. Unlike Avenue Queue, we get a ton of wild creations beyond that.
The school of moonfish is a group of performers with sparkly fish gloves. They move and wriggle their hands in unison to recreate the shapes needed in a performance that would honestly be fun to watch on its own; here it's just one small part of the show.
Mr. Ray is a bicycle with a giant flapping ray on top. There is no more to say about it, that's just cool.
Nigel the pelican is jaw dropping on his first appearance, a massive bird puppet as tall as the theater popping up from off-stage.
The bale of sea turtles is one of the best parts, with no less than five different designs to represent them. Crush the is like his own ride vehicle, with his performer riding on top fittingly like a surfboard. His kid Squirt is performed in a bouncy trapeze, with the chair as the body and the kicking legs as fins. There are puppeteers with adult turtles suspended high above their shoulders to give the effect of swimming out in open water, full turtle costumes for adolescents, and still more performers hold up armfuls of baby turtles.
The sharks are extra-long, requiring a second puppeteer for the tail. The jellyfish are like billowing umbrellas high above the stage. Eels are represented by flag dancers running through the audience. Swordfish are represented by performers wielding them like actual swords across the center aisle. Penguins learn they can't fly via collapsible poles that are retracted just as they remember gravity, a really simple gag that I enjoy watching the mechanics of every time. Then through it all, even the sets -- the seaweed, the coral, the plankton -- is performers moving objects.
It manages to just be so cool, like somehow watching animation made physical, while still seeing a musical recognizably performed by people. There is nothing else like it you can see in the parks. Yes, there are other stage shows with great music -- we just had one a few entries ago -- but none of them have the sense of wonder, whimsy, and imagination that the designs of Finding Nemo - The Musical display.
Next, we'll talk about my personal dream of an Australia expansion to Animal Kingdom, where you enter through the Great Barrier Reef, with Nemo fitting in on the border of the transition space. . .
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