Hello & welcome back to Return To The Theater and today, we kick off this event as we look at not one but two recent stage adaptations of the worldwide hit that is Frozen as we look at both Frozen: Live at The Hyperion from Disney California Adventure and Frozen: A Musical Spectacular from the Disney Wonder from the Disney Cruise Line. Now, I will tell that with the latter being so new, I wasn't able to watch it whereas I was able to watch all of Frozen Live at The Hyperion on YouTube. And we will start with my brief thoughts on that one.
It's not bad and it is about what you'd expect from a Disney Theme Park musical. Overall, it's faithful to the animated film. There are some omissions such as Marshmallow. Which I can get as that'd probably be hard to figure out how to properly do that onstage. One of the things that I find interesting is that the musical closes with a reprise of Love Is An Open Door sung by the entire cast.
Perhaps, one of the biggest things that this production is known for is it's color blind casting as they have people of different ethnicities playing the roles such as in the version, I watched had an African-American Elsa and Hans.
Now, the musical never actually draws attention to this and just lets the actors do their job and I will say that once you get into the musical, I was able to buy these actors as the characters from the films. However, I had an issue with that in the beginning as well, the same actors that play adult Anna and Elsa also play Little Elsa and Anna.
And well... I don't know if there was a workaround for this but something about having the same actors that play the adult versions of Elsa and Anna play the children versions just feels off. And I noticed that while watching this on YouTube, that it felt rather condensed. They still hit all of the highpoints of the story but it felt like the cliffsnotes version of Frozen. Overall, if I ever went to DCA, I wouldn't be opposed to seeing this in person. Now, let's move onto Frozen: A Musical Spectacular from the Disney Wonder.
You can check out highlights from this version on this YouTube video. Now as I said up top, I wasn't able to watch this as it just debuted last month but I am impressed from what I have seen as it seems compared to Live at The Hyperion, they seem to have more elaborate numbers and backgrounds.
Though, I am not a fan of the puppeteer's costume that is performing Olaf. I think it's a case of less is more as Live at The Hyperion just the puppeteer with Olaf and didn't try to make the puppeteer look icy. And well, they took a different approach to little Elsa and Anna.
I don't know all well, the puppet versions of the children versions of these characters works but I have a feeling that I'd prefer to having the adult actors play the child versions as to me, that just felt weird. Yes, I know there are musicals where adults play kids such as You're A Good Man, Charlie Brown but the difference I feel that is that musical has them play those child characters throughout the entire musical whereas with Live at The Hyperion, it's just for the beginning and they switch to the adult versions.
Overall, that is really the only complaint that I have and from everything else that I saw, I was pleased with it. Again, I wish that I could have seen more of the Disney Wonder version but that one looks quite good as well.
This brings our to visit to Arendelle to a close but we aren't done with Disney California Adventure as we look at the musical that preceded Frozen Live at The Hyperion for our Screen To Stage as we look at...
Aladdin: A Musical Spectacular
No comments:
Post a Comment