When Disney released “Frozen,” in 2013, “Let It Go,” the signature tune
of Elsa, the movie’s unconventional heroine, was widely embraced as an
anthem. Elsa is possessed of a secret regarded by others to be shameful
and alarming: the ability to conjure ice out of nowhere. In the song,
she accepts her powers rather than continuing to deny them, a theme that
has resonated with L.G.B.T. youth, much as Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will
Survive” did with an earlier generation. “Let It Go,” which was written
by the husband-and-wife team of Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez, has also been seized upon by people with autism, and by
parents of autistic children, who have recognized themselves and their loved
ones in Elsa’s inclination for emotional remoteness, especially compared
with the warmth of her sister, Anna. Inmates at prisons have reportedly
embraced the song, perhaps identifying with Elsa’s sense of
culpability—at the movie’s outset, she accidentally strikes and almost
kills Anna with her gelid powers. But I prefer to see Elsa in another
light—as representing the struggle of an individual to live as an
artist. In this interpretation, she is born with gifts that, as a child,
she is frustrated from developing, being obliged to follow a more
conventional path. She submits to social expectation, but doing so makes
her miserable—cooped up and confined, objectively and emotionally. On
her coronation day, when she is expected to assume her prescribed role
in the community, she realizes that she can no longer endure the stress
of suppressing her vocation, flees, and unleashes her creativity. Her
frigid bohemia isn’t a sad, lonely exile but a place where she belongs,
and the palace she builds (not to my taste, though it might appeal to
collectors of Chihuly) her first real expression as an artist.

I thought about Elsa-as-artist while watching the musical adaptation of
“Frozen,” which opened on Broadway in March, and which has its own
inbuilt tension between the demands of art and those of commerce. The
musical had a somewhat bumpy development period. Originally, Disney
hired Alex Timbers, a young director—he was born in 1978—who first came
to the attention of New York theatre cognoscenti, in his early twenties,
with a satire of Scientology, in the form of a holiday pageant enacted
by children. Timbers is known for making work that is defiantly
original, often with the innovative use of light and video: his résumé
included “Bloody Bloody Andrew Jackson,” a prescient satire about the
dangers of political populism, and “Rocky,” a Broadway adaptation of the
movie. He had already worked, as co-director, on one successful
transposition of a beloved classic to Broadway—“Peter and the
Starcatcher,” a winning reinterpretation of “Peter Pan.” But, still, he
was a bold choice for “Frozen,” a property that earned Disney $1.2
billion at the box office, and which surely Disney is hoping will go on
to earn much more in its stage iteration—perhaps ultimately even
reaching the totals achieved by the musical version of the “The Lion
King,” which, since it opened, in 1997, has earned almost a billion and
a half dollars on Broadway alone, and billions more from international
productions and tours. In the summer of 2016, Disney executives decided
that they had made the wrong choice in Timbers, and he was dismissed
from the project. The company turned to Michael Grandage, the veteran
British director, who is better known for his interpretations of
Shakespeare than for staging Broadway spectaculars.

Grandage has said that his creative interest in
“Frozen”
was piqued by what he saw as resemblances between themes in certain
Shakespearean comedies and in the Disney story, with the parallel
journeys of Elsa and Anna and its unexpected, moving celebration not of
the power of romantic love but of the strength of sibling bonds. After being primed to see such Shakespearean themes in “Frozen,” it’s possible
to discern a pastoral connection if one squints while watching, though
an audience member hoping that the exchanges between Elsa and Anna will
have risen closer to the level of those of Rosalind and Celia in “As You
Like It” will come away disappointed. (The Lopezes wrote a dozen or so
new songs for the stage, which are interleaved with those from the
movie, including “For the First Time in Forever,” Anna’s “I Want” song,
with its unfortunately indelible line “Don’t know if I’m elated or
gassy, but I’m somewhere in that zone.”) The movie’s gaping narrative
aporia—was Prince Hans, Anna’s first, misbegotten love interest, evil all
along, or does power corrupt him?—is, disappointingly, not resolved in
this production, as might have been hoped from a director who has
wrestled with the subtleties of Hamlet’s madness. The fact that the lanky,
floppy-haired Prince Hans, who is played by John Riddle, bears a passing
resemblance to the lanky, floppy-haired Alex Timbers is an interesting
coincidence.

The musical has a longer running time than the movie, which has allowed
its creators to give Elsa and Anna a family backstory, explaining the
origins of Elsa’s peculiar icy gift. Their mother, it suggests, is
descended from the “hidden folk,” a kind of elvish people in
Scandinavian folklore, and Elsa’s ice powers are a genetic throwback. On
Broadway, the hidden folk, who have swishing tails and hair that recalls
Cyndi Lauper’s in her nineteen-eighties prime, fulfill the function
performed in the movie by the trolls. It is to them the family
turns when Elsa first strikes Anna with ice, in childhood; and when, as
an adult, Elsa again accidentally ice-blasts Anna once more, they know
the only remedy, a true love’s kiss. The introduction of the hidden folk
gives the Broadway version of “Frozen” a frosting of mythical gravity—a
sense that the story’s roots may go deeper than is suggested by the
merchandisable reindeer, available for furry purchase in the
intermission. When I interviewed Grandage earlier this year, he said
that the Lopezes had told him that they wrote Anna from fairy tale and
Elsa from myth. This bifurcation helps to explain the story’s tonal
discrepancies. It is why watching Anna’s story unfold is pleasingly
satisfying—of course she’s going to end up with Kristoff, her Prince
Charming disguised as a lunkish ice dealer—while watching Elsa’s course
is so disconcertingly stirring.

Grandage clearly sought to amplify the mythic elements of “Frozen,” and
there is some inspired stagecraft: at the story’s icy dénouement, for
instance, members of the chorus dressed in white winter clothing
transform visually into a mound of ice and snow trailing a fully frozen
Anna, a spectacular and thrilling trick. But there are limits to what
even the most skilled and thoughtful director can wring from the source
material, which relies heavily on Disney cutesiness. In the movie, the
trolls deliver a silly, funny number about Kristoff’s obscure romantic
assets, “Fixer Upper.” It works when delivered by a bunch of squat,
talking boulders, but the song’s goofiness is beneath the dignity of the
hidden folk, or should be. Similarly, the demands of Disney’s
storytelling structure require a comical sidekick—who, in the case of
“Frozen,” is Olaf, the sentimental snowman who is always in danger of
deliquescence. Grandage has opted for a puppet Olaf, with a visible
actor Olaf speaking the lines and pulling the strings. It’s a doubling
effect that was stupendously successful for Julie Taymor in “The Lion
King,” but animating the beasts of the savanna is a more awesome
achievement than bringing to life a portly cartoon snowman. Grandage’s
Olaf is sweet, but never sublime. Even in the newly written parts of the
show, winsomeness mostly wins out. In “Hygge,” an antic number based on
the concept of Scandi-style
coziness,
Grandage and his choreographer, Rob Ashford, manage to deliver a nude,
high-kicking chorus line that is nonetheless entirely G-rated—a
consummate theatrical coup, though not exactly one with Shakespearean
resonances.

If you think of Elsa as the representative of the artist, it’s hard not
to compare Grandage’s efforts to make art under constraints to his
heroine’s struggle to express herself freely amid the social pressure that
she feels to relinquish or modify the form that her self-expression
takes. “Frozen” famously eschews a conventional happy ending, and the
movie has rightly been celebrated for allowing Elsa to stay prince-free
at the story’s conclusion. “Frozen 2” will be released in theatres next year; it remains to be seen whether Elsa will persist unpartnered, and
how Disney will respond to the social-media lobbying effort encapsulated
by the hashtag #GiveElsaAGirlfriend.

But, even with this deviation from the conventional narrative, “Frozen”
insists on a domesticated ending for Elsa. To save her
country from a perpetual winter, she is obliged to relinquish her
creative isolation. She has to return to the social world inhabited by
her more conventional sister, whose discovery of romantic love provides
a fairy-tale ending of sorts. Despite the genuinely moving tribute to
sibling love at the emotional climax of “Frozen,” I do wonder just how
satisfied Elsa will be in the future role that the narrative suggests for
her—that of the cool, slightly weird aunt to Anna and Kristoff’s kids.
Is that really what she wants? At the surface level of the story,
viewers of the movie and the show are led to believe that Elsa is deeply
upset by the peril she twice puts her sister in, and relieved to see the
danger resolved; and surely she is. But Sigmund Freud and Oscar Wilde
might both have something to say about the unconscious motivations of an
individual who on two separate occasions almost eliminates a supposedly
beloved family member, particularly one whose desires are so clearly at
odds with her own.

That “Frozen” insists on sibling reunion as the consummate happy ending
for Elsa is why both the movie and the musical feel compromised to
me—why, ultimately, both fail to fulfill the mythic promise suggested by
“Let It Go.” Under irresistible pressure to conform to expectations
after all, Elsa descends from her ice palace—the laboratory of her
fantastical, awe-inspiring, terrifying creativity. Back among her
subjects, she uses her powers to make cool stuff for them, such as an
ice rink on the castle grounds. She goes from being an artist to being a
product designer: it’s a good enough gig, but a comedown nonetheless.
The skating townsfolk are delighted with the result, just as the
audience at “Frozen” on Broadway seemed delighted by Grandage’s
artistic-commercial compromises. I enjoyed the show, too. But I also
came away wishing that I could rewrite the story—that, after Elsa had
decided to let it go, she had let it stay gone, and that she had chosen
to live ecstatically and authentically ever after.