EXHILARATING’’

and sense of Bikini Bottom,” says Landau.
“It’s accessible to children, but there’s
something a little trippy and psychedelic
and topsy-turvy about this world. I just
loved the idea of creating a universe
from scratch.”
It’s been eight long years of development
for Landau and Nickelodeon, which
was intrigued enough by the possibilities
of a cross-demographic stage musical to
fund the ongoing work , but wary enough
to need to be convinced that it would be,
in Vargo’s words, “surprising, inventive, and
exciting to a ‘SpongeBob’ fan of any age.”
According to Cyma Zarghami, the head
of Nickelodeon: “There was never a financial
imperative. But as a franchise manager,
you have to continuously think about ways
to reinvent.” The discovery that one quarter
of “SpongeBob” watchers are adults without
children encouraged Nick to believe
that the property might be a good fit for
the multigenerational Broadway audience.
Landau’s audition for the network began
with a series of collages focused on casting
or design or the mood of the show, progressed
into an initial movement and physical
comedy session (during which they
discovered their 24-year-old SpongeBob
actor, Ethan Slater), and then moved into
the development of the script and score by
adding book writer Kyle Jarrow (“A Very
Merry Unauthorized Children’s Scientology
Pageant”) to the team.
Landau and Jarrow pitched a handful of
potential narrative choices to Nickelodeon,
which settled on the one with the highest
possible stakes: the end of the world.
In “The SpongeBob Musical,” an underwater
volcano threatens to destroy Bikini Bottom,
sending the town’s residents into a
panic — and SpongeBob on a quest to
avert disaster.
For Jarrow, the work lay in discovering
two hours worth of high stakes in a world
that mostly exists in 11-minute snippets.
“What felt like the hardest thing for me,”
he says , “was figuring out, for each of these
characters, what’s an emotional arc that
feels true to who they are , but also feels
like we get to see them change over the
course of an evening.”
It was Landau, inspired by the varied
soundtrack to the 2004 “SpongeBob
SquarePants Movie,” who came up with the
idea of asking different musicians to each
contribute a song to the score. She and Jarrow
plotted out precise story beats where
tunes should go, and which artists might
match each mood. The diversity of the
music, she reasoned, would gel with the
animated series’ non-sequitur spirit.
Co-producer Sony Music Masterworks
helped connect the show’s collaborators to
the artists on their musical wish list. The
result could make for an orchestrator’s
nightmare, but Kitt (“Next to Normal,” “If/
Then”) counters that his job is to preserve
each artist’s unique sound, not sand off the
edges. “T.I. wrote a great song; I want it to
sound like T.I.,” he says. “Aerosmith — Steve
Tyler and Joe Perry — I want it to feel like
a song they would be in the studio making.”
In that basement studio at the Oriental,
it’s certainly true that Bowie’s tune sounds
like it could have been written by no one
else, even when performed by a cast of
actors and an orchestra. The song, lifted
from the 1995 album “Outside” and given
new lyrics (by Jonathan Coulton) with
Bowie’s blessing before he died, is called
“No Control.” It’s full of broody anxiety over
the eruption that threatens Bikini Bottom
— but it also serves as a reminder of the
variables over which Team SpongeBob has
no control, ranging from critical response,
to which theater owner will commit a
Broadway house to the project, to exactly
when the musical will debut in New York.
Can SpongeBob save the day in Chicago
and on Broadway? Stay tuned.
Family Fare
Nickelodeon
joins a crowd of
mega-producers
in making a play
for an all-ages
audience with
“The SpongeBob
Musical.”
Disney
Theatrical Prods.
Chief: Thomas
Schumacher
Banner titles:
“The Lion King,”
“Aladdin”
The Dodgers
Chief:
Michael David
Banner title:
“Matilda”
Warner Bros.
Theatre Ventures
Chief:
Mark Kaufman
Banner title:
“Charlie and the
Chocolate Factory”
(upcoming)
Not-So-
Square
Tunesmiths
David Bowie, John
Legend, and T.I. are
among the popular
songwriters who
floated tunes into
Bikini Bottom.
Sara Bareilles
The Flaming Lips
Lady Antebellum
Cyndi Lauper
They Might
Be Giants
Panic! at the Disco