“Frozen” may have just opened on Broadway, but the Oscar-winning creatives of both the movie and the stage musical aren’t done with each other yet. They’re hard at work on “Frozen 2.”
“We’ve done amazing stuff on ‘Frozen 2,’ and have a couple of songs already that are blowing my mind,” said Jennifer Lee, the screenwriter and director of “Frozen” and its sequel, who also wrote the book for the musical. “We do about six screenings that we hand draw, and so I’m on the second draft, second screening. There’s no shortcut. What we have today hopefully will be 10% of what we have when it opens.”
Speaking at the opening night after-party at Terminal 5 in Manhattan, Lee added that their work on the Disney Theatrical Productions show has crossed over into how they collaborate on “Frozen 2.” “There’s this really fluid thing going on that we didn’t know about in the beginning as we were getting to know each other,” she said. “We learned this wonderful sort of chicken-and-egg back and forth. Even for the film, we’re building it like a musical, where the story and songs are intertwined and matter to each other.”
Songwriters Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez agreed. “We know the girls a lot better now,” Anderson-Lopez said of Elsa and Anna, the central characters of “Frozen.” “We’ve gone a lot deeper into their heads. We know the parents a lot better.”
The duo just recorded a new song with Kristen Bell last week. But don’t ask for the name of the song, because they can’t tell you. They can’t reveal much at all, in fact — except for one tiny tidbit.
The musical switches out the rock trolls of the first film with a group of sylvan “hidden folk” inspired by Scandinavian folklore. Audiences may not have seen the last of them.
“We’ve thought a lot more about those hidden folk,” Anderson-Lopez said. “That’s all I’m going to say.”
