Rats!  I never thought while I was in New York in January, 2020, to see a friend in the Broadway play, Grand Horizons, that shortly thereafter no one would be able to see a Broadway show live on stage for over a year.  However, that doesn’t mean the creative expression would come to a grinding halt as well. 

Producing/filming stage shows for broadcast is as old as broadcasting itself.  Even before there was television, operas and plays were being performed on the radio for the “theatre of the mind.”  Ed Sullivan often brought segments of popular Broadway shows to his show on Sunday nights.  In 1957, CBS gave America the full-length musical Cinderella, saving the citizenry the fare to New York. 

The phrase “adapt or die” has been more prevalent during the pandemic than ever, and Broadway is no exception.  With theatres on the Great White Way, and all over the country, shuttered for a year, leave it to an ingenious group on social media, specifically TikTok, to develop an entirely new musical based on the Disney Animated Film, Ratatouille. 

In the family spirit of the theatre community, anyone who pays the suggested donation of $5 to $50 to stream the online version, will have their money donated to the Actors Fund, which helps with emergency financial assistance, affordable housing, health care and insurance counseling, senior care, and secondary career development for anyone in the entertainment industry. 

Now that we’re all slowly returning to some semblance of normal, the next natural step in the creative evolution is to take the production to the stage in Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical. 

Ah, it’s the circle of life … wait, sorry, wrong Disney film/show.