When director Tina Landau got the call from her agent asking if she’d be interested in pitching herself to Nickelodeon for a SpongeBob SquarePants musical—now in previews at Broadway’s Palace Theatre and officially opening December 4—she didn’t know much about the animated character who lives in a pineapple under the sea. “I guess I would say I liked it,� she says now of the show. “I didn’t watch it often. When I did, I could only watch one episode. Eleven minutes was all I could bear.�
Landau’s initial reaction to adapting the series? “I’m not interested in a theme park show.�
But what ultimately piqued her interest was the opportunity to divert from the familiar SpongeBob aesthetic and channel the “indie spirit� creator Stephen Hillenburg originally embraced. “I thought if I could pitch exactly the kind of show that I want to do and would be interested in seeing, why not give it a whirl?�
She describes the process as extracting the �SpongeBob DNA.� The identifying feature: the celebration of the surreal. Years later, when meeting with the series� writers, she’d learn she wasn’t far off. They approached the show with a similar theatrical sensibility, telling her, “We worship at the altar of Dada.�
As Landau signed on, there was still no script. With a focus on physicalizing her vision, she worked with an array of collaborators, including clowns and circus performers, to create a set of laws for the SpongeBob universe.
Contemplating her childhood, Landau recalls her early ambitions: director (check) or, fittingly, oceanographer. She now realizes the unifying factor of the two: “You can be in a world other than our own everyday, walking, breathing one. Laws are different; sound is different.� Creating a SpongeBob musical became an absurdist composite of both.
Landau’s Bikini Bottom (where SpongeBob resides) exudes a DIY mentality: “We made a tunnel out of hula hoops. There’s a mountain made out of cardboard boxes. It’s a whole world created out of scrap metal and a chum bucket.�
Landau then found actors to inhabit her world (led by Ethan Slater, whom she asserts has “that eau de SpongeBob�), a story to share (an apocalyptic Everyman tale), and a musical language to tell it. (Like Bikini Bottom, the score is a hodgepodge of elements from various sources; among those who contributed are Sara Bareilles, John Legend, and David Bowie.)
The end result is a show that creates new life with the SpongeBob DNA. As a young audience member from a workshop recalled, the series shows how SpongeBob looks while the musical shows what SpongeBob feels.
And Landau believes the world needs a SpongeBob musical. “In a world that can feel like it’s crashing into some horrendous ending, SpongeBob has a different spin. He says, ‘No. Let’s not give up. Let’s find a way to make this better.’�
