Finding Nemo: The Musical... a GRAND SLAM
Another week, another preview of a new attraction at Walt Disney World. The Nemo Musical at DAK is only the latest of new offerings in the seemingly never-ending procession at WDWthere are some advantages to living in a tourist Mecca, after all!
Before the show began, Anne Hamburger came out and announced we were the very first audience to see the show (she said the same thing at the second show of the day, though this time she got much less applauseI think the audience knew better). She cautioned that this was as much a dress rehearsal as anything else (echoes of Paul Pressler and the Light Magic preview, I thought), and then re-iterated what the voiceover warnings had said a moment before: no video, and no photography of any kind. Thus, I didn't take photos until the curtain call, when it's more acceptable and no one would be endangered (I also didn't use flash here). I don't know if this ban on photography will be around forever. It's part of the intro spiel, but Anne Hamburger didn't mention it the second showing when she did her introduction, so that's anybody's guess.
In the interest of full disclosure, let me assure you that I came to this preview fully prepared to pan it. I knew that the Nemo show would in some ways resemble the Voyage of the Little Mermaid show at Disney-MGM Studios, in that they would use puppets animated by hand. But this time, the performers would be fully visible, not hidden behind absolute blackness. It seemed so spitefully avant-garde I was pretty confident that I'd hate it. You might even say I wanted to hate the visible-puppeteer element, partly because this gimmick is so beloved from the "Avenue Q" production, and such things always seem so overrated that by the time I get to them, they never live up to the hype.
Not so. The show knocked my socks off. I'll get that off my chest right now. I liked Nemo the Musical several orders of magnitude more than I thought I would. Not only will I go back, I'll do so often and frequently. I'd be there right now, but for the fact that it's not open this late at night. This show is going to drive attendance at DAK.
In the first scene, Marlin and Coral establish that they've just moved into a new house. The audience sees the puppets maybe three feet long each and held up on a single hand (so they must be lightweight) and instantly sees the puppeteers too. Dressed to match their characters, they are not only holding the puppets up, they animate their mouth movements (and eye blinking?) via a trigger near the base of the puppet, operated with their free hands. These are some talented performers, for they must not only give life to a minimally-moving puppet, they are also singing the songs and voicing the dialogue live.
For the first minute, I found myself eying the actors as much, if not more than, the puppets. At this early stage, it flitted across my imagination that my worries had been vindicated, and that I was going to be far too distracted by this new theater presentation to really enjoy the story or indeed enjoy myself. But that didn't last, as I was soon sucked in. I think it was the immersive scenery (mostly humans wielding elaborate costumes that reached into the sky, and made them into giant coral fans and the like). Or maybe it was the inventive choreography. Or it could be the singing, which started almost right away after Coral is killed by a barracuda (just a projection) and Marlin leads Nemo out into the big blue world, our first song, and a duplicate of the one in use at the former Living Seas pavilion in Epcot.
The song forms a bit of a musical underscore for the show, though it's only in heavy use at the beginning and at the end. Marlin sings to it, sort of, as he chides Nemo that sharks aren't your friend... didn't [Nemo] see Jaws?
Apparently there is to be a CD of the show released soon. Sadly, this was recorded using professional talent in New York, not the Orlando cast. That makes me sad. It's not as if the Orlando cast are slouches. The actors come from all over. They cast top-quality folks here, and they would have done fine on the CD.
After the big scene in the corals, which also features a large Mr. Ray puppet (so big it has to be brought out on a giant tricycle), the set transitions to the drop-off, where Nemo defiantly swims out to the underside of a boat (courtesy of a very long puppet stick). A huge projection on the back wall of the theater shows us the scuba diver's face, as an oversized net scoops up Nemo. Marlin panics, and the actor races with him up into the audience. The old runways from Tarzan Rocks have been preserved, and in fact the benches are similarly placed too (though the actual equipment is new). Up in the audience, Marlin meets Dory, similarly played by an actor holding a puppet on a stick. They cavort briefly, playing with the theme of Dory's poor memory, until suddenly Bruce the shark appears.
udging by the audience's reaction, I was not the only one blown away by this scene. Bruce and his shark friends sing "Fish are friends, not food," a show-stopping number that is jazzy, boisterous in its energy, and overall fun. The singer-puppeteer for Bruce in particular was marvelous in his ability to chew the scenery.
Sometime after the fact, I realized that this scene marked a turning point for me: I was no longer watching the actors, and focused solely on the facial expressions of the puppets. For the rest of the show, I looked back and forth from the actor to the puppet, and rather than being bothered by the disconnect, it started to fascinate me. I was intrigued by the way the singers-slash-puppeteers were also, in a very real sense, stage actors, providing full facial expressions to match every scene. This was not an off-putting avant-garde experience, and it wasn't exactly Brechtian "epic theater" either, but it was enthralling nonetheless.
The shark scene ends with a bang, predictably, and the show proceeds to move through most of the scenes of the movie: the tank gang are represented here, and the impressively enormous neck and head of the pelican Nigel poke in from one side. Gil sings a song that seems to be titled "We Swim Together," a ploy that will later be used to escape from nets by swimming downward. Crack comedic timing turns Gil's plan of escape into a scatological joke. It's balanced out a few minutes later, back with Marlin and Dory, when Dory makes a hilarious reference to Marlin's son "Tivo" (a joke that may not make it past the company lawyers for long).
Dory sings "Just Keep Swimming" while flipping around on high wires, a scene that leads to the crowd-pleasing sequence with the choreographed fish giving directions to the EAC (and mimicking the Sydney Opera House). This is accomplished by a dozen or so actors, each with a silver fish on a mitten, and some fun choreography. Dory and Marlin, still on high wires, bounce into the air and through the jellyfish, given form here via really large puppet props they seemed to be 20 or 30 feet tall, and there were a lot of them.
The first real plot point to be skipped occurs here, and rather than see Nemo's first try with the filter, we only hear about it. We return to Marlin and Dory, not with Crush and friends. Crush is another really giant puppet, and he sings a song possibly titled "Go With the Flow," a ditty about taking a stress-free approach as a parent.
As in the movie, this marks the emotional turning point for Marlin, who realizes he needs to grow as a parent before his relationship with Nemo can be fully realized. While the actor playing Crush got this temperate voice just right, he had very little of the exuberance I remember from the movie version of Crush. He just seemed less fun somehow.
That's not to say the show lacks fun or funny elements. In addition to the jokes mentioned above, several come in quick succession, during the "tell a friend" sequence of animals relating the Marlin story. Swordfish fence in the walkways, an octopus complains that she "only has eight arms," and a lobster hears the story and tells her partner "nice tale," to which he puffs up in pride, thinking she had said "nice tail." The audience seemed to like one particularly silly point, when two penguins tell the Marlin story and realize in mid-sentence that they can't fly, and promptly fall to the stage.
Back at the tank, Darla arrives via rear-wall projection, and pokes at the supposed glass wall in syncopation with the chime from "Psycho" used to herald her arrival in the movie as well. Nemo gets captured and pretends to go belly-up, at which point the scene shifts to Dory and Marlin finding Nemo in the Sydney harbor. We've skipped the whale, the mine-mine-mine seagulls, and the second filter escape attempt. A goodly chunk of plot was sacrificed for time, but I'm not sure what else could have been done. The show is long enough as it is.
The key scene in the movie, when Dory is trapped in fishing nets and Nemo convinces Marlin to let him help, sees a strange moment: the actors hand off the Marlin and Nemo puppets, and walk toward the front of the stage, alone for the first time, and belting out their songs. It's a touching moment, and the desired effect is achieved: the audience is aware that the scene, though busy in its details, really boils down to the relationship between Marlin and Nemo, and their emotional connection reaches its apogee in this one gesture of actors leaving the puppets. Their action seems to imply the characters are speaking only to each other, and the rest fades to meaningless background.
We briefly see Marlin and Nemo (and Dory) back at the coral reef, again at school with Mr. Ray, and again singing the song "In the Big Blue World."
Bubbles cascade from the ceiling out into the audience, and the general activity on stage evokes the life and rhythm of the reef in the movie. Then, as the final moment in the show, Nemo and Marlin say good-bye for the day. I found it unaccountably touching that this was staged by having the two actors lower the puppets upside-down and just leave them danglingthe actors raise their real hands and wave good-bye to each other as they slowly and meaningfully say "good bye, son" and "good bye, dad."
You'd think that departing from character like that would rip away the illusion, but in point of fact it drives home the emotional message, and renders material that could be "cloying" into something more approaching "profound." Good show. Those moments gave me chills.
The theater can hold 1,700 patrons, so they will need to offer multiple shows per day if they hope to meet the needs of the entire DAK audience. If they have any major problems to work out, it's operational in nature. How are they going to schedule enough shows to satisfy the masses? Because, you see, I think this show is a runaway hit, a bone fide Broadway-quality show in a theme park setting, and it's going to drive attendance. Not many people will schedule a trip to Epcot only to see the Nemo dark ride (nor should they), but this stage show is something different. It's exciting, invigorating, and fun. It's also right next door to Expedition Everest, and the two of those attractions together is easily going to be enough to make DAK the third-best attended park, leapfrogging over MGM (if it hasn't already).
Which leads me back to the numbers. If they have hordes of people wanting to see the show, they may risk alienating others who would have watched the show but didn't want to stand in line. Compounding all this, I believe this show will become the East Coast equivalent to "Festival of Fools," the Hunchback of Notre Dame stage show at
Disneyland which drew locals and regulars very often to repeat performances. If that happens in DAK, even fewer tourists may get to see it.
No worries (or, since this is DAK, perhaps I should just say hakuna matata). The solution is simple. Just keep the park open later, running a few select rides, and schedule Nemo performances deep into the evening. Couple that with some nighttime entertainment (like a water-borne Electrical Parade in the former water taxi rivers, for instance), and you've got a winning formula.
