While the cartoon is beloved of children, stoners and children who grew up to be stoners during its two decades on air, I confess I had never been drawn to linger long in Bikini Bottom, the character’s underwater home. That’s what comes cascading down on the audience during the ebullient finale of SpongeBob SquarePants, a splashy $20 million bid by Nickelodeon to add a new monster tentacle to its lucrative animated media franchise - giving the yellow porous one his very own Broadway musical. And hey, look, the merch stand has keychains! It seems telling that the show’s most jubilant and unreservedly satisfying moments are those found in its curtain call, when the air is thick with bubbles and streamers and beach balls and music and color and light and any question of story has subsided back under the waves.Bubbles, streamers, confetti or beach balls? Duh, all four, obviously. Will the friends subdue the volcano? Well, yeah, of course, sure.
#SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS THE MUSICAL FULL#
SpongeBob also benefits from cheerfully hyperactive performances, including a grinning and incongruously muscled Slater, who is alarmingly winning in the title role, and Gavin Lee’s Squidward Q Tentacles, who sidestrokes away with the show in a rapturous tap number with full sea anemone chorus, choreographed by Christopher Gattelli to a double negative of a song by They Might Be Giants.ĭesign and performances aside, SpongeBob is as perfunctorily entertaining as it is insistently forgettable. He does it, though often at the expense of narrative drive and character development, elements that more conventional book musical songs would supply.īut more conventional book musicals don’t have David Zinn’s blissfully eye-popping set and costume design, an almost indescribable riot of kelp, seashells, balloons, tinsel and marine detritus that begins in the lobby (where an unusually bounteous merch stand sells T-shirts, CDs and $20 neon socks that say “Life Smells Weird”) and doesn’t quit from there. And with the exception of the purpose-built introductory song by the comic folky genius Jonathan Coulton, the ragtag score has the book writer, Kyle Jarrow, swimming full out to work the songs into the story.
This raw bar of composers makes for a lack of musical cohesion. John Legend nails it with lyrics featuring couplets like: “Now what’s a macaroni without the cheese/ Or peas in a pod without the peas.”
Some of the acts connect with the high-energy dopiness better than the others. In place of a traditional score, Landau has commissioned a range of musical acts – everyone from Sara Bareilles to Panic! at the Disco, Cyndi Lauper and Rob Hyman to members of Aerosmith – a move in the spirit of the eclectic soundtrack assembled for the 2004 film.
There’s also satire aimed at politics and the media a brief subplot involving Krabby Patty profiteering and something about a concert – all of it roundly ignorable. But the bitsy supervillain Sheldon Plankton (Wesley Taylor) has other plans. SpongeBob (a gleeful Ethan Slater), his best friend, Patrick Star (Danny Skinner), and his squirrel pal, Sandy Cheeks (Lilli Cooper, and yes, there’s a squirrel under the sea), devise a scheme to keep it from erupting. That plot, which is meant to be high-stakes but comes across as bottom-feeder low, kicks off when the volcanic mount located inconveniently close to SpongeBob’s hometown, Bikini Bottom, threatens to erupt.
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