On opening night Thursday, the first huge burst of audience electricity (rising even through mandatory masking) came in a duet with Isaac Bowman as the greedy shop owner Eugene Krabs and Amelia Gibbons as his teenyboppin’ daughter Pearl sing separate thoughts. All eyes are on Aidan Averbeck and Alina Kiedinger as they climb rolling stairways (props to the crews) up an imaginary mountain, singing and acting and hanging this way and that all the way. Jake Barbeau deadpans his way through the ways of Patrick Star, the deadhead adored by the masses.Īlina Kiedinger pours gusto into her role of Sandy Cheeks, who has two strikes against her in the water world – a squirrel who is smart (being a scientist). When Aidan Averbeck comes out as SpongeBob SquarePants with a quirky voice and determined gait and sunny disposition, a built character is on the move. Mostly what the production has is energy – super-charged, focused energy.
Remarkably, this show has bits that echo what’s been happening in the real world – stuff about government and science and protesting. I hope I didn’t give away too much of this nail-biter. In this musical, a volcano threatens to bring doom to the sponge and all his underwater friends, and an evil plankton doesn’t help matters much. The show speaks young, something they know.
Many of the players grew up with the TV show – lived it and breathed it in a sense. In ways, Next Stage’s production of “The SpongeBob Musical” has advantages over the pros. Twenty-one high schools from the region are represented, so something skillful is happening at them to help produce the kind of results seen in this show. What is achieved on stage didn’t fall from the sky. Elaborate setwork, costuming, visual effects, technical demands and performance levels consume what happens on stage.
The college’s summer Music Theatre-Next Stage program throws full weight into the production. (WFRV) – When is a comical TV show at its best? When a musical is made about it, and a live, in-person audience gets excited about its characters, its humor, its songs and its imagination – and then gets cranked about all sorts of add-ons in an all-out excellent production.Ī doubly impressive production of “The SpongeBob Musical” is running this weekend in Walter Theatre of St.