THEATRE PREVIEW

NOVEMBER 2025 | Volume 257

 

Frozen, the Disney animated movie, was a phenomenon in the teens, winning Academy Awards and grossing over a billion dollars. Its big song, “Let It Go,” was everywhere. For about a year my granddaughters, both under ten, lived and breathed the story and its characters. The stage musical, adapted from the movie, premiered on Broadway in 2018.

Because this show is aimed primarily at kids and young families, I’m not its ideal reviewer. So take what I have to say here about Ashlie Corcoran’s Arts Club production with more than the usual grains of salt. It’s likely to be a holiday best-seller, but I found it underwhelming.
Its fairy tale plot (it was originally a Hans Christian Andersen story) involves sisters Anna (Synthia Yusuf) and Elsa (Chelsea Rose Winsby) of Arendelle. Princess Elsa has the power to freeze things, a power she can’t easily control. When she becomes Queen, and Anna asks her permission to marry Hans (Daniel Curalli), Elsa has a fit, inadvertently injures Anna, and encases the kingdom in ice.

The enraged populace, led by the comically villainous Duke of Weselton (Kayvon Khoshkam), pursues Elsa into the mountains. Anna also tries to find her, assisted by ice delivery guy Kristoff (Kamyar Pazandeh), his reindeer Sven, and Olaf (Joaquin Little), a wisecracking snowman.

The play focuses on Anna and her group of comic characters. Anna has always been the wacky sister whereas Elsa is serious, troubled by her gift, which she has had to suppress. “Conceal and don’t feel” is her father’s mantra for her. So while Rose is a fine actor and singer, her Elsa has relatively little to do except for a big solo scene at the end of Act One, where she sings “Let It Go,” conjures some special lighting effects (lighting by Michelle Ramsay, projections by Sean Nieuwenhuis), and experiences Alaia Hamer’s truly magical costume transformations; and again at the end of Act Two, in the play’s most powerful adult moment, where she and Anna re-bond (“I Can’t Lose You”).

Yusuf’s Anna has a nice courtship scene with Curalli’s Hans, where they both get to showcase their lovely voices in “Love Is an Open Door,” but she’s mostly a spectator for the cute cartoon characters: Little’s charming Olaf, the voiceless Sven (Jeffrey Follis and Jaren Guerreiro alternate), and especially stage-Scandinavian Oaken (Jacob Woike), purveyor of Oaken’s Trading Post & Sauna, whose superbly performed, very funny “Hygge” is the evening’s showstopper.

I wanted more of Khoshkam’s funny Weselton and a more animated Kristoff from Pazandeh, one of the city’s best performers. I also craved a more interesting chorus, and more dynamic choreography from the usually spectacular Shelley Stewart Hunt.

I very much enjoyed seeing the power of sisterhood trump the usual fairy tale boy-girl romance. But ultimately, Frozen is a special effects show and the stage simply can’t do what the movies can, especially on an Arts Club budget.

 

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