How’s this for an endorsement: I got totally barfed on during opening night of “Shrek, The Musical” — and I still had a pretty great time.
How can I hold it against that queasy kid from down the row when she took to heart the musical’s call to embrace your inner belcher, your inner farter and, apparently, your inner projectile vomiter?
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“Shrek” turns out to be a meaningful DreamWorks stage musical that’s laden with lessons, without ever bullying you over the head with them. It’s silly, fast-paced and just subversive enough to keep you from ever mistaking it for a precious piece of Disney.
Fast-paced, that is, until a second act that goes from first gear to stuck in the swamp. The problem, confirmed for me by two patrons separated in age by 60 years: “Too much lovey stuff.”
As a book, “Shrek” didn’t set out to become a battle cry for all young misfits and outcasts to “Let Their Freak Flag Fly,” the musical’s anthem. That message is part of its boggy DNA, to be sure. It was first written to say, “fairy tales really need to be updated.” Especially those that encourage girls to passively wait for men to bring meaning to their lives.
The 2001 film was praised for simultaneously embracing and demystifying fairy tales like “Snow White.” The stage musical picks up that flag and waves it like it’s the battle scene from “Les Miserables.”
The musical, with its 19 new songs, clever scenery and eye-popping costumes, is no mere knockoff of the Mike Myers film that grossed $484 million (though our stage Shrek retains the Scottish accent Myers brought to the film as homage to his mother). The stage musical has its own genial lifeblood, and it courses from three distinctive freaks struggling to accept who they are.
Most iconic is Shrek himself (Eric Petersen), whom we see in a very funny opening number getting kicked out of his house — at age 7! — by well-meaning parents who sing gayly, “It’s a big, bright, beautiful world — but not for you!” Most lovely is princess Fiona (a buoyant Haven Burton), who was cursed by a witch as a girl and sent to live in a tower guarded by a dragon. Both were misguided efforts by parents to shield their children from the world’s cruelty.
Most comic (and miraculously crowd-pleasing) is the dwarfish Lord Farquaad (David F.M. Vaughn), who owes his stage existence to Tim Conway’s tiny-golfer character, Dorf. In a subplot both very funny and disturbingly akin to ethnic cleansing, he has expelled anyone not cookie-cutter the same to Shrek’s swamp — meaning all fairy-tale characters from Pinocchio to Peter Pan to the three bears, little pigs and blind mice. The irony being that, at 3 feet tall, Farquaad is the biggest, er, littlest freak of them all.
You know the story: Farquaad will clear Shrek’s swamp of its magical squatters, if he can deliver Fiona from her tower to his wedding altar. Along the way, Shrek learns to accept both friendship from a lovable Donkey, and that he’s worthy of Fiona’s love.
The score by David Lindsay- Abaire and Jeanine Tesori greatly furthers the story’s themes. “I Know It’s Today” shows Fiona transform from a girl to a teen to a grown woman before our eyes, while singing about how a lifetime of waiting for her prince to come has made her a little bit bipolar.
There’s plenty of adventure — Shrek’s battle with a massive puppet dragon will thrill the kids. And it’s fun — like when Fiona and Shrek bond over their mutual talent for expelling bodily gasses … a scene that re-creates pretty much every morning growing up in my basement.
But the slow-to-develop love story will cause the under-12 set to squirm. (Ogres are extremely slow on the uptake.) But the payoff is worth it to see Fiona learn to embrace that she’s part beautiful and part hideous — like all of us. And to be reminded that we need not fear or bomb or banish those who don’t look just like us.
Often, those who do, turn out to be the most special among us.
John Moore: 303-954-1056 or jmoore@denverpost.com