Frozen Musical will not return to Broadway

[MeridaAnn]

As the above said: The tour is NOT cancelled. They still plan on restarting the US tour of Frozen whenever theater is able to resume.

@maverik85 I think they made a mistake regarding that catalog with Frozen, and I hope this teaches them not to repeat it. They assumed folks would flock to Frozen because it was such a giant success on film and became this huge zeitgeist thing. But because it was such an enormous property, they played it SO safe with the stage adaptation. This included firing Alex Timbers shortly before previews...and I firmly believe he would have given us a better version of the show. As is:
1. There is not the same excitement of seeing a Disney musical on Broadway as there once was. Beauty and the Beast was the first, so it had buzz. The Lion King was such a dramatic departure style wise, so it also got buzz. But now we expect Disney to adapt their films.
2. There is simply not enough spectacle and stagecraft in this show. Imagine if Elsa actually built an ice castle on stage during Let it Go?? Frozen lacked that "wow" moment that gets people talking and makes them want to buy tix. B&tB had the huge rotating castle brawl between Beast and Gaston (plus massive showstopper Be Our Guest). Lion King had the majestic puppetry in Circle of Life and the dramatic stampede sequence. Mary Poppins had the title character fly out over the audience and had Bert tap dancing upside down across the proscenium. Heck, even Little Mermaid (a terrible stage adaptation) had the cool underwater shipwreck scene. Frozen did far too much with screens and projections (again, Alex Timbers would have crafted something different and likely, better).
3. Their desire to present the movie on stage as close as possible did a disservice to the stage version. The first act of the movie has a musical structure, but the second half does not as it becomes more of an adventure story. Indeed, most of the songs in the film are frontloaded. The book for the stage version doesn't do enough to fix this problem, so the second act simply doesn't work as well as the first. If the last thing you are left with upon exiting the theater is "that was just ok" then you arent going to run out and tell your friends they must buy tickets.

Ultimately, I just hope they allow the artists of their next stage venture to give audiences something DIFFERENT in the stage adaptation.

I agree with all of this. I actually saw it in previews, so they might have changed a few things, but I definitely left feeling like they had played it too safe. And I was sorely disappointed when there was no vertical element to the ice castle in Let it Go (I could even see something in the floor that I had assumed would be a lift, but turned out to be the turntable for the snow scene instead - a good effect, but not as impressive as what I was expecting).

What's sad is, I adore the new music. I listen to the cast album way more than the original soundtrack. And there were some promising ideas (one of which was actually reused and expanded on in the Frozen II movie, which I thought was a cool progression). There were some good ideas. And the costumes were stunning! But it was still too close to the original movie without enough to make the Broadway different from the stage shows at Disneyland or on the Disney cruise line.

They could have done so much more to make the storyline stronger. Replace the Duke of Wessleton with a Regent who has been in charge of Arendelle while Elsa was underage and then it turns out that he's linked to Hans somehow and has been feeding him information to help him take over so that Hans' plan makes more sense. Have some sort of consequence to Anna finding out about magic, since Grandpabby made such a big deal about how she couldn't know (or just cut that line entirely, because it's dumb and doesn't add anything to the plot). Things like that. They did a great job expanding the relationship between Kristoff and Anna and giving that some real depth, but they needed more of that sort of reinvention and expansion to really make it deep enough to make it last.

 

[DisneyPigFan]

They couldn't stray TOO far from the movie, because that's what everyone was coming to see, especially all those girls who came dressed up. They already took some liberties and made some minor plot changes -- some that seemed to transfer over to Frozen 2, yes. They also added songs.

I saw it after it had officially opened. I've read that they did make some changes from previews and even more changes from their Denver performances (where the show first opened). It was fun, but didn't leave much of an impression.

Hercules is probably largely ready to go. They already did a short run of a live stage production of it in August 2019 at the theater in Central Park.

 

[FeralCatRogue]

They actually ended up changing it more when the new cast took over. They removed First Time in Forever (Reprise) and replaced it with an Original song.