SpongeBob’s stage chance

There’s a particular style audiences have come to expect from Broadway musicals adapted from animated properties. From Beauty and the Beast’s dancing candlestick to Shrek’s prosthetic ogre antennae, the tendency is to try to recreate the look of the screen characters onstage in all-singing three-dimensional glory.

So when you hear that Nickelodeon is getting into the stage game with The SpongeBob Musical, debuting in Chicago this month ahead of a planned Broadway bow, you might well assume some poor actor will be suited up in a square-pantsed block of foam with a hole in the center for his yellow-painted face.

Tina Landau would like to disabuse you of that notion. “I’m not interested in putting on a theme-park show,” says The SpongeBob Musical’s director and co-conceiver. “No ‘SpongeBob on Ice,’ no characters in big prosthetics and no dumbing material down.”

Landau became an ensemble member of Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1997, not long after she wrote the musical Floyd Collins with composer Adam Guettel. At Steppenwolf, she’s directed shows like Tracy Letts’s Superior Donuts (which transferred to Broadway) and 2009’s The Tempest. And she literally wrote the book, with coauthor Anne Bogart, on the popular actor-training technique known as Viewpoints.

But Landau’s never worked on something quite like SpongeBob; her only previous Broadway credit, aside from Superior Donuts, is a 2001 revival of Bells Are Ringing that came and went quickly.

When asked to pitch a SpongeBob concept to Nickelodeon, her first reaction was “Oh, come on!” and her second reaction was just to say no. “My third reaction was, ‘Let me think about it till tomorrow.’ And somehow in that 24-hour period, as I started with the notion that it was an impossible idea I wouldn’t want to go near, it was those same challenges that started to wake something up in me.”

The pitch was for a plot that used the characters and setting from the cartoon but no recycled storylines. The actors would look like normal people, with costume elements subtly suggesting their animated counterparts. And rather than a single composer, Landau wanted to recruit a roster of popular musicians to contribute songs.

Nickelodeon execs responded enthusiastically; it was in-line with SpongeBob SquarePants creator Stephen Hillenburg’s thinking. “Steve had said to [Nickelodeon], ‘I could see SpongeBob as a musical if it was an indie musical.’ That’s the world he comes out of: independent and experimental filmmaking,” says Landau.

The musical depicts the residents of Bikini Bottom in crisis mode when a volcano is expected to erupt. Playwright Kyle Jarrow (A Very Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology Pageant) has fleshed out the book, and Tony winner Tom Kitt (Next to Normal) has arranged and orchestrated the eclectic score. Kitt compares his job to his role on 2010’s American Idiot, “where I was making sure I was faithful in serving Green Day but also allowing the piece to ebb and flow based on what the writers were doing.”

Tony-winning choreographer Christopher Gattelli (Newsies) is working with a cast of mostly young unknowns—including Ethan Slater as SpongeBob, Lilli Cooper as Sandy and Danny Skinner as Patrick—on using movement to suggest their characters. “We’re not being literal with them. We’re embodying them in essence and physicality,” says Landau. No sponge costumes required.

The SpongeBob Musical runs June 7–July 10 at the Oriental Theatre.