Reviews

Today I went to the theatre for the first time in forever, for the Frozen musical. I am pleased to report it is exactly what it should be.

You secretly want it to feel like Disney did when you were a child, when stories and reality still overlapped, and all was wonder and wide-eyed excitement. This is obviously a tall order. Nostalgia can get you partway there, and that’s usually dandy. But a bit of you still yearns for a touch of that breathlessness.

Frozen gives this a pretty good shot. It is not an easy cash-in. It has put the effort in, and it pays off.

It does this by being a real spectacle. It is proper dazzling. It fuses beautiful set design with pixel-perfect digital projection mapping, but the two are blended so smoothly that it never feels like a special effect. It’s just Elsa getting emotional and remodeling the entire set in seconds. Wood cracks, snow falls, the temperature seems to drop 10 degrees. Ice radiates perfectly from her hands in choreography that must have taken intricate practice, creating a palace that is honestly visually better than the one in the film. Northern lights shimmer, objects gracefully fly to the wings, and all the time snow swirls in the background. It might have been actual particles of something, it might have been digital: I honestly couldn’t tell. I am a sucker for this kind of ambient magic.

Olaf is particularly clever. He really shouldn’t work on a stage. He’s a three foot walking talking snowman with a very specific non-human bearing. How do you do that and not have him look like someone in a suit? I will not reveal this secret, but they pull off quite the trick here. I am amazed it worked, but after 10mins I was cheerily watching and believing the walking, talking, non-CGI snowman.

The above is very much my kind of thing. I very much enjoy appreciating visual skill and hard work. But I also wanted them to play it straight. Plenty of stage shows go meta for an easy laugh or to paper over a difficult segue. That’s even easier to do in shows nominally for children. But Frozen doesn’t. It tells the story, with minimal adaptations for the stage. It retcons it a little in light of the sequel, and adds a fair few new songs as the second half is a bit sparse otherwise (fans will note the odd inspiration from the unused Anderson-Lopez demos on the Frozen Deluxe album). But it’s the right story, well-told, and they don’t shy away from the tougher parts. They don’t attempt the snow giant, but everything else is intact.

Also: there is a dress. I have been to enough ballroom dances to know a sparkly dress from a holy-wow sparkly dress, and this was a cut above. It was the talk of the interval.

I haven’t mentioned the music, singing, and dancing because they’re what you expect and enjoy in a west-end production. Impressive bordering on ridiculous. Elsa is played by Samantha Barks (Éponine from Les Mis), who seems to be enjoying herself immensely.

It’s bright, it’s clever, it’s a bit like being a kid again. And when they play the first two bars of Let It Go there’s a quiet happy sigh from every child in the room. And not a few of their parents.

Thank you very much to the friend from work who donated the tickets – it was very much appreciated!

This pulled me into another world for a couple of hours. Just lovely.

Imagine staring into a fresh coffee on the first proper day of spring, and in the swirls it’s all sun and youth and dreams and salsa and at the bottom, just for a moment amongst the foam, a little hope for the world. That, plus some thoughtful storytelling, a real sense of place, and enormous musical numbers that fill the neighbourhood – but not so much they don’t fit.

Also: Brooklyn Nine-Nine fans get some extreme cognitive dissonance. You’ll know it when you see it.

Here are the first 8 minutes:

(Very minor spoilers for the first 10mins)

Have you seen the meme about Cruella? The one that says ‘Turns out dalmatians killed Cruella’s parents, how are they so obvious, why am I not a scriptwriter lol’? Let me be 100% clear: none of these people have watched Cruella. Block them on sight.

These people have gone for a cheap gag, for the retweets. Never mind that Cruella itself never sinks to their level. Never mind that it’s a delightful reworlding, full of wit and craft. Never mind the hard work that bursts from its every frame. Never mind that it’s barely about bloody dalmatians. No, these people are connoisseurs of the arts, don’t you know. They’ve memorised tvtropes.org. They don’t have to spend two hours actually engaging with something to know it’s beneath them. I’m glad they’ve been able to signal their superiority and establish standing in their apparently-terrible social circles. They’ve got what they wanted. Now let’s ignore them and speak of things that actually make the world better.

You might indeed wonder how or why you would make a prequel about one of the most properly-evil villains in Disney history. I mean, she tries to kill 101 dogs. Dogs. She wants to kill dogs. This is a thought crime in all civilised countries. She doesn’t even come good at the end. We can all agree there is no redemption here, so are they really going to try and make her a sympathetic character? This is surely unconscionable.

I won’t spoil the plot. I will just say this: they have thought of that.

Cruella knows the story it wants to tell, and goes about it with professional care. There is *work* here. It feels rich. Almost every moment has an insight, or a progression, or a nod, or a spark of the unexpected. Every shot is frameable, every twist a jigsaw piece, every set months in the building, many lines wittier than they could have got away with. And its world is a swirl of impossible one-shot-steadicam dances.

Indeed, its visual style reaches out of the screen and insists on your attention. It successfully builds a large world with a coherent feel – something that’s especially tricky as it needs to make internal sense even when it shouldn’t. The cars are from the ’50s and the security cameras are very not. Does this matter? I didn’t mind, and still wanted to live there.

I liked that the characters weren’t stupid. The bumbling comedy sidekicks do not, in fact, bumble. The fashion people are not weighed down by luvvie. The dogs are clever, but not magic. The security guards are competent, and have to be defeated by cunning rather than slapstick. And the set pieces are spectacular, extravagant, and occasionally mad…but not silly. They tread the fine line between fun and ridiculous with a delicate style.

And the much-maligned plot didn’t go where I expected. It knew what it was doing. Every time I thought it was about to be a little too convenient, there was a reason. My prevailing reaction was ‘huh, clever’.

I enjoy anything full of inbetween moments, too. Half-second visual gags. Neat turns of phrase. Wit from unexpected quarters. Emma Thompson being Emma Thompson. There was no plot reason to go to the effort of Emma Stone stealing a postal bike rather than a regular bike, but it meant she got to ride over a stormy London bridge with envelopes flying in her wake. Just for a couple of seconds. They put in *so much effort*. Like I said, craft.

I suspect you can appreciate it from a fashion perspective too, although this is rather outside my area. But also if you finished The Devil Wears Prada feeling that these awful people did not get sufficient comeuppance, there is comeuppance to be found here.

I’m not saying it’s perfect. You could pick things out, if you wanted to. But there’s so much that’s done so very well that I feel it’s well worth your time. It is put together by competent people, who worked hard. It is never cheap. It is never easy. It is too classy to be meta, and too thoughtful to be dull. Worth a go, if this has piqued your interest. And you’ll see what’s actually going on with the dalmatians.