Patrick Star (Danny Skinner), the town dummy, finally crawls out from under his rock (again, literal), shorts, Hawaiian shirt, blank stare and all, hoping to finally be held in some sort of high esteem for once in his life, only to be worshipped by an end-of-the-world salmon cult. SpongeBob (Ethan Slater) remains ever the high-pitched optimist, illuminated constantly under a golden spotlight even when the rest of the cast is lit with a wash of haunting red. Amid the scramble, our eight main characters become the most extreme versions of their cartoon selves. Who is SpongeBob without his job? Is he anyone at all? Anyone beyond his constant, indiscriminate, garish optimism about absolutely everything? What good is he when the world itself is about to end, and will he yield to the cynics telling him his hope in the face of certain annihilation is useless and naïve?Īs the news, the radio and every conversation turn into terrified screeds and a massive doomsday clock counts down above the characters’ heads (literally it’s part of the set design), Bikini Bottom descends into utter chaos after the repeated failure of its leadership. SpongeBob hands his signature spatula to the orchestra conductor during the opening minutes, preventing him from falling back on the one thing he’s good at. In fact, that singular element that binds together perhaps the majority of the series’ best episodes finds itself entirely and intentionally absent. It’s our simple fry-cook’s last chance to prove his managerial worth – only this isn’t a story about SpongeBob being the best fry-cook under the sea. It deals with the end of Bikini Bottom itself, a volcanic event having been discovered to be a mere thirty-six hours away. The story centers, as always, on SpongeBob Squarepants, absorbent, yellow, and obnoxiously enthusiastic, only it may very well be the final SpongeBob story. Puff to Old Man Jenkins to Larry the weightlifting lobster get their introductory moments, each long enough for you to recognize them through their winking design, but anything you might consider ‘fan service’ is left until the very end of the show’s surprisingly breezy two and half hours, and they each have explosive payoffs. Krabs has Hellboy-like gauntlets for pincers, while Gaving Lee’s standout Squidward Tentacles (his hair is bright green) struts on stage with an extra pair of legs. SpongeBob, the schoolboy, has yellow hair. The show makes no attempts to make its lead looks remotely square (or his starfish best friend remotely star), but instead creates human versions of its fish and crustaceans with a touch of cartoonish flair.
Everything from the innocent to the surreal, ripe with a meta-textual intro from #1 SpongeBob fan Patchy The Pirate ( “Arrrr ya ready, kids?”) right from his dedicated box seat decked out with SpongeBob merchandise.
The production doesn’t translate episodes of SpongeBob, but rather, it translates the sensation of watching them. Before the show has even begun it’s a blast of child-like creativity, because in SpongeBob’s world, even trash can be used to build something beautiful. The sets that make up SpongeBob’s undersea city may as well have been shipped in from a kindergarten crafts class – the corals are made of solo cups and aqua-coloured pool noodles, the jellyfish are decorated umbrellas – as if the citizens of Bikini Bottom had constructed their dwellings from humanity’s discarded refuse. Distinctly “children’s band” jazz underscores the sensation of having walked into some sort of carnival, with enormous, intricate Rube Goldberg machines dropping down from the ceiling. A live band dressed in floral shirts flanks one end of the stage with something akin to a Foley-studio flanking the other. The production is a top-to-bottom experience, and writing about it would feel incomplete without beginning the process of finding your seat. SpongeBob SquarePants, The Broadway Musical isn’t just a timely surprise. Well, consider this skeptic turned into an unabashed lover of Broadway’s most moving new production, an audacious blast of joy and enthusiasm that ends with a beach-ball party after earning it tenfold. SpongeBob SquarePants is after all a children’s cartoon, despite its occasional stealthy adult innuendo, so it stands to reason that a stage musical built around a talking bath-sponge might garner skepticism, even from those of us who grew up with the series. The kind of gimmick you’d expect to find molded into an attraction at Disneyworld or Universal Studios. Sandwiched between Kinky Boots and a perpetually crowded McDonald’s stands the signage for a new Broadway oddity that at first glance seems as nakedly commercial as the golden arches. Lights and billboards accost you from every direction in Times Square, so it might be hard to spot the Palace Theater’s marquee. “The world is a horrible place, SpongeBob.”
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