Review: Dive into THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL at the Carrollwood Cultural Center – Runs thru August 4th
Broadway World
By: Peter Nason Jul. 20, 2024
Thank God the current production at the Carrollwood Cultural Center has some sterling performances by some of our area’s top talent that makes this sushi songfest go down in the most delightful way. It’s so much fun that it may be able to turn your Mr. Krabs frown upside down.
Comic strips and animated TV series seem ripe territory for creating musicals. Some of the most popular stage shows started as iconic cartoons found either in the Sunday paper or on the television screen: Annie, L’il Abner, You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown, Doonesbury, and even in the 1990s, Rugrats: A Live Adventure (remember that?). So, it shouldn’t have surprised anyone when, less than a decade ago, Tina Landau conceived of THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL based on Stephen Hillenburg’s Nickelodeon series, with a book by Kyle Jarrow, and starring everyone’s favorite multicellular organism that lives in a pineapple under the sea.
Since then, THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL has popped up on stages from dinner theatres to middle school cafetoriums. It boasts songs by a number of artists, including Cyndi Lauper, The Flaming Lips, Stephen Tyler, John Legend, They Might Be Giants, and even Panic! At the Disco. And if you want the “mindless entertainment” that Patrick was referring to in the above quote, then THE SPONGEBOB MUSICAL just might be your cup of kelp. It’s a feel-good mess featuring beloved sea creatures, sort of like a live-action melding of Yellow Submarine and Sid & Marty Krofft’s Sigmund and the Sea Monsters, and it has the potential to bring out the kid in all of us.