Theatre in Review: Frozen (St. James Theatre)

	Caissie Levy and company. Photo: Deen van Meer

It is nearly a quarter of a century since the opening of Beauty and the Beast, and the people at Disney Theatricals are still working out how to transfer their highly stylized animated films to the stage. Believe me, I sympathize: What seems delightful on screen can, in the theatre, degenerate into a hodgepodge of elements. Given their track record of success, I doubt anyone is sitting up nights worrying about it, but if you attend Frozen, it might explain that feeling of cognitive dissonance that won't go away. Michael Grandage's production works overtime trying to please everyone from six to sixty, with the result that it can't commit to a single unifying style. Instead, it heads in a new direction in each scene, ending up ensnared in a mass of conflicting ideas.

The opening sequence, which consists of six numbers -- including the poignant "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" -- establishes the central situation with considerable economy: In the fictional Scandinavian kingdom of Arendelle, two young princesses are torn apart. Elsa, the elder, is gifted with weird kinetic powers that unleash winter storms when she gets upset. When, during a tiff, Elsa unwittingly releases a display that nearly kills her younger sister (and only friend), Anna, their parents take the momentous decision to raise them separately. Elsa is kept behind closed doors, and Anna grows up yearning for her lost playmate.

Apparently, Elsa's powers are derived through her mother, who is related to the troll people -- humanoid characters with tails -- who lurk in the story's background. (The show is rather fuzzy about the human - troll connection.) One of them, Pabbie, uses his powers to save Anna from Elsa's attack and to erase the event from Anna's mind. It's a bold premise; one can imagine Richard Wagner doing something with it. Then again, the same trolls who cast a veil of mystery in Act I turn up in Act II, leaping about in a jaunty little something called "Fixer Upper," trying to make a match between two of the show's ingenues. This is far from the only sign that everything original and challenging about Frozen will, sooner or later, be sacrificed to the gods of musical comedy.

Years later, after their parents have passed on and a sibling rapprochement is in the offing, Elsa is to be crowned queen. But, as the guests arrive, Anna falls fast for Hans, the last of a dozen or so sons in the tiny principality of the Southern Isles; they get engaged after knowing each for, say, two hours. Elsa is appalled, and a dilly of a sisterly argument follows. Elsa's fury leaves the entire kingdom in a deep freeze, causing the citizens of Arendelle to make the not-unreasonable assumption that she is a witch. Elsa flees to the mountains, where she spends her time changing costumes, erecting an ice palace, and belting that mother of all earworms, "Let It Go."

The rest of Frozen follows Anna as, trying to save Arendelle, she chases after Elsa, accompanied by Kristoff, an ice harvester with whom she spars in a romantic-comedy way. Along for the ride are Sven, Kristoff's reindeer, and Olaf, a snowman. All are holdovers from the film and, in trying to accommodate them, the dark central plot keeps getting kicked aside. There is a number titled -- yes -- "Reindeer(s) Are Better Than People," a proposition I am more than willing to accept even without the presence of Andrew Pirozzi in an adorable reindeer suit. This is followed by "In Summer," in which Olaf imagines the delights of the season in which he cannot exist; Greg Hildreth, manipulating a snowman puppet, couldn't be more adept. It's around this point, however, that Frozen begins to feel marooned on its own dedicated ice floe, drifting into high-end children's theatre territory.

Not long after, there's the scene set in the trading post overseen by Oaken, who speaks in a comedy Scandinavian accent, drawing out his u's like they were made of bubble gum. His appearance cues a number called "Hygge," which features a cast of scantily clad -- well, they're in nude body suits -- sauna bathers, coyly using their tree-twig whisks to maintain modesty. Now we've traveled back to the era of pre-Rodgers and Hammerstein shows, when the Act II opener was just a piece of filler to keep the audience amused while stragglers got back to their seats. This is followed by "Fixer Upper," which, admittedly, is a catchy tune with clever lyrics. After all these frivolities, darkness descends again, with Elsa planting a potentially fatal ice shard in Anna's heart while, back in the kingdom, usurpers are plotting to take over the throne.

With a plot that includes young women struggling to understand their potent powers and a community threatened by climate change, Frozen could have been a far more interesting and unusual entertainment; it may have been possible to incorporate all the film's elements to unified effect. But neither Jennifer Lee's book nor the score, by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, is up to such a challenging assignment. The show at the St. James is a wandering, often confused, thing, which coasts on the talents of its cast and design team. All praise is due to the two leading ladies: Patti Murin's Anna is loaded with gumption and charm in equal measure, and whenever she gets the chance to land a laugh, she does it with a minimum of fuss; at the same time, she never scants her character's loneliness and yearning for her lost sister. Elsa, as conceived here, is something of a pill, having little to do besides standing around, belting out ballads, and causing meteorological mayhem; still, Caissie Levy goes a long way toward making her compelling, and she easily blows the roof off the theatre with her delivery of "Let It Go."

Among the supporting cast, Jelani Alladin offers heroic support as Kristoff; it helps that he enjoys a nice chemistry with Murin, but he also sings beautifully and can capably deliver the silliest lines with total conviction. He is a new face on Broadway and one imagines he will be very useful in many musicals to come. John Riddle is solid as Hans -- who embodies everything your mother warned you about rushing into romance -- even navigating an eleventh-hour change of character that is the baldest of the plot's manipulations. Robert Creighton, formerly of Cagney is unrecognizable as an oily, scheming diplomat, speaking amusingly in an accent of uncertain origin. Timothy Hughes and Olivia Phillip are suitably wild, weird, and trollish as Pabbie and Bulda, his wife.

Christopher Oram's set design unfurls one imposing castle interior after another, all of them constructed of wood and attractively painted in the Scandinavian manner, with floral patterns; he has seemingly erected an entire range of mountains backstage at the St. James, all exuding an air of mystery and menace. And keep your eyes peeled for the ice bridge that Anna and Kristoff cross, at their peril, in what may be Grandage's niftiest piece of staging. Natasha Katz burnishes each scene with her impeccable lighting, creating gorgeous candlelit interiors and deploying color effects that add sparkle and flash to the interior of Elsa's ice palace. The video designer Finn Ross adds an array of stunning aurora borealis effects and ice formations that creep across the sets. Oram's costumes are sumptuous in the ballroom scenes, eerie when the trolls appear, and extremely flattering when Elsa, in icy isolation, turns glamour-puss. Peter Hylenski's sound design is both highly intelligible and easy on the ears.

I rush to add that none of this is likely to matter to the show's target audience, namely families to whom the film is a sacred text. (More than one parent has wearily confessed to me having seen the film dozens of times, so mesmerized by it are their children.) For them, the show's creators have fulfilled their duty of delivering all the well-remembered elements with an extra jolt of theatricality. But they struggle to knit the grim central narrative (consisting of family secrets, borderline child abuse, and murderous sibling rivalry) with wisecracking snowmen, cavorting reindeer, and Finnish funnymen. It's a smorgasbord of elements, and not all of them are equally tasty. -- David Barbour