Do you want to know the real star of Frozen? It would be Sven, the reindeer.

Sven doesn’t speak. He doesn’t sing. If we are being honest, I could use a haircut. But when you stumble across the stage, thanks to dancer Andrew Pirozzi, it’s pure theater and pure magic. Her scenes are some of the rare moments when Frozen, adapted from the 2013 Disney hit, the highest-grossing animated film of all time, not only seems translated on stage, but transformed by and for her.

Frozen from Broadway is a good show. With its music, its dance, its barrage of pleasant tracks, and one snowball after another snowball by sound and light, news, some of which date from the melodrama of the nineteenth century, offer the essence of the pleasures with which we let’s feature in Broadway musicals. Provide. But even with the addition of a dozen new songs by songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez, and improved book by Jennifer Lee, and interventions from director Michael Grandage and set designer and costume designer Christopher Oram, you rarely feel more than a movie and sometimes you feel less.

The story is more or less the same. Elsa and Anna, princesses from the fairytale Arendelle, are best friends in bed until Superstorm’s magical powers part them. Elsa hides these powers until her coronation when an emotional explosion accidentally plunges the realm into uninterrupted storm conditions. Courageous Anna, aided by ice-cream seller Kristoff and her four-legged friend Sven, sets out to find Elsa and save Arendelle before the kingdom runs out of glug.

Frozen, like the recent Moana, is not a love story. Or rather it is a love story, but love is sororal, not romantic. These are two women who find their place in the world: Elsa’s culminating outfit is a sparkling white pantsuit, but even recognizing Murin’s immense charm and Levy’s majesty, these Elsa and Anna get together. feel less like real women and more like storyboards with big wigs. Anna is dizzy and impulsive, Elsa approaches the pathology. The musical theater puts more emphasis on character than most animated works, even fancy works like the movie Frozen, so while that sounds a bit wrong, order a show based on cartoons for more insight. , plus dimensionality is what it takes.

Part of the problem is that women don’t have so much to do. The central action is a research narrative, but it is research that is easily accomplished. Anna climbs a mountain in search of Elsa; Elsa goes downstairs to find Anna. They don’t find many obstacles – there are no wolves here, no snow monsters, no friendly bunraku snowman, and when they receive a blessing it’s almost by accident. Without the magnificent distractions of computer animation, the story seems slim.

The new songs are capable and one of them, Monster, sung by Levy, carefully transfers Elsa from one psychological state to another, but none of them stick with the ferocity of Let It Go or Love Is. an Open. Wear or even want to build a snowman. Anna and Kristoff’s trendy duo, You Don’t Know About Love, isn’t as convincing as their previous duet with Hans. The couple’s other issue, Fixer Upper, has been reassigned to Hidden People, based on Scandinavian Huldufolk, and is too fast for them. If you’re going to take all the time to integrate the Broadway version with characters from true Norse mythology, why load them up with such a stupid song?

None of this seemed to shake the legions of little girls in the audience who had dressed as Elsa or the few who had come as Anna. Frozen could be more inventive, more imaginative, more vital, more necessary. But as these girls would surely say, forget it.

Disney On Broadway is pleased to announce The North American Tour of FROZEN is now playing! Get tickets for the FROZEN the Musical from Tickets4Musical.