As I walked out of the theater after seeing Disney's animated musical Frozen for the first time in November, the first thing I said was, "I can't wait to see the Broadway version of this in 10 years."
I may not have to wait that long. Disney CEO Robert Iger told Fortune the company is "in discussions to develop a show" (Fortune's paraphrase). "We're not demanding speed, we're demanding excellence," said Iger, which suggests aspiring snow queens should not expect to line up at open casting calls anytime soon. That said, it's clear Disney is not waiting around to make sure Frozen becomes a perennial classic like The Lion King or The Little Mermaid – it's planning to move the franchise to Broadway while it's still hot. This is a great idea. Here's why.
- Frozen Is a Huge Success
(Very) loosely based on the Hans Christian Andersen story The Snow Queen, Frozen has been putting up box office numbers of the sort Walt Disney Animation Studios hasn't seen since the gilded age of the early 1990s. Disney's last animated musical, 2010's Tangled, did well, but as Fortune noted, Frozen already has eclipsed its worldwide box office draw and still hasn't been released in all markets yet. The Wall Street Journal adds that, without adjusting for inflation, it's already the highest-grossing Disney animated film at the North American box office – and the first released in the same year as a Pixar film (Monsters University) to actually outperform it.
In short, Frozen is kicking ass, and that is in great part because...
- Frozen Is Built Like a Broadway Musical
There's more to a musical than taking a play and dropping songs in between all the talking. I like Tangled, but that's what its structure felt like – a movie with intermittent pop songs. Frozen's musical numbers are more dynamic, advancing the plot, establishing the personalities of the characters. They're shot through with laugh-out-loud moments and cleverly written rhymes. They feel like they came out of a Broadway musical, which is not surprising since they were written by the married songwriting team of Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, the latter of whom was the co-creator of Avenue Q and The Book of Mormon.
Having tapped successful Broadway talent to write the songs, Disney then brought on Broadway talent to perform them – Idina Menzel (Wicked), Jonathan Groff (Spring Awakening) and Josh Gad (Mormon). So while it's still not a matter of simply cutting and pasting the dialogue and songs into a musical theater script, Frozen already is closer to being a live performance piece than other Disney musicals that successfully made the shift.
- Broadway Has Been Very Good to Disney
In 2012, Disney's The Lion King surpassed Phantom of the Opera to become the highest-grossing Broadway show ever. In 2013, it continued its dominance as the highest-grossing show of the year.
But it's just one of many successes – Beauty and the Beast was on Broadway for over a decade, and Mary Poppins hit big as well. Most recently, Newsies turned a flop of a movie into a sleeper hit of a show. (But great source material is not a magic bullet, since Disney has had high-profile flops as well. The Little Mermaid should have been a huge hit considering the strength and popularity of the 1989 movie, but it closed in less than two years after mixed reviews and declining revenue.)
- The Kids Think Broadway Is Cool
I first saw the musical Wicked in 2007 and saw it again in 2011, and the demographics of the people around me was quite different the second time around. I wasn't the only one who noticed; the The Los Angeles Times called it the "official girl-power show of the millennium." Wicked had picked up an audience outside the middle-aged theater-going type, thanks to teenaged girls flocking to performance after performance. Musicals were in, followed closely by the emergence of Glee and other movies and TV shows themed around college a cappella. (I'm still waiting for Rockapella to become cool again.)
If I came out of that first viewing of Frozen with any niggles, it was that certain elements of the plot seemed a leeeeeetle bit too close to Wicked. The central songs of each show, "Defying Gravity" and "Let It Go," could be accurately summarized as "Everyone thinks that I'm am a witch, but screw 'em: I will stop holding in my supernatural powers and instead crank them up to 11, and also these lyrics are a metaphor for female empowerment."
Of course, what these similarities really mean is that Frozen is hitting the dead center of Wicked's target market, making it a particularly strong candidate for transition to live musical theater.
- There Already Are Good Extra Songs to Include
"Let It Go" and the rest of the Frozen soundtrack are strong, singable tunes that are so sticky that they propelled the film's soundtrack to number one on the Billboard charts last week. It's the first Disney soundtrack to accomplish this since 1995's Pocahontas.
If you bought the deluxe version of the soundtrack, you got an extra disc of songs that were finished, but cut from the film. These were cut not because they weren't strong enough for the final cut, but because the film's protracted development (more than a decade) meant that the story went through many iterations. With a few tweaks, some of the cut songs could still work as additional tracks for the musical. Broadway shows need much more music than a 90-minute film, so hopefully Disney can retain the Anderson-Lopezes for this. (Imagine an Avenue Q or Book of Mormon to which you could actually take the kids.)
- The Inevitable All-Singing, All-Dancing Chorus Line Version of "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People"
Self-explanatory.
