When composers Kristen and Bobby Lopez took the stage at the end of the New York Pops Gala, Mr. Lopez informed us that this event had originally been planned for Spring 2020, and it was then titled, “Into the Unknown.” Two years later, now that the concert was actually happening, Mr. Lopez added, “we’ve had enough ‘unknown’” and thus the show takes an appropriate title from the Lopez mega-hit Frozen, namely, “For the First Time in Forever.” (The concert included so many songs from Frozen that I almost thought the evening was sponsored by Baskin-Robbins.)
Yet the Lopez song that I had in my head through the whole show was “There’s a Fine, Fine Line”—which regrettably wasn’t heard, but seemed to set the tone for the night. Mr. Lopez originally earned his Broadway bonafides by writing songs and shows that were strongly driven by the notion of musical satire. Avenue Q (written with Jeff Marx) used Sesame Street as its point of departure, while Book of Mormon (written with South Park’s Trey Parker and Matt Stone) attacks dozens of musical theater tropes. Frozen is hardly a spoof, but like Q and Mormon, it’s constructed on the foundations of earlier shows and scores; where Avenue Q’s songs sound like Muppet composer Joe Raposo grown up, much of the lovely score to Frozen sounds like Stephen Schwartz on ice. (Indeed, there are several sister duets that could easily be mistaken for out-takes from Wicked. By the time the Disney Wicked movie finally gets released, it’s going to seem at least a tiny bit redundant.)
And Frozen (the major work by Kristen and Bobby Lopez together) is a beautiful score, especially so as rendered by conductor Steven Reineke and the full New York Pops, as well as being Mr. Lopez’s most popular. Thus it wasn’t surprising that the bulk of the evening could be described as “Frozen: The Concert.” (Indeed, there were so many songs from Frozen that I almost thought the evening was sponsored by Birdseye.) Between the movie and the Broadway version’s twin heroines, there were a lot of gorgeous blonde sopranos (who’s complaining?) that tended to seem somewhat interchangeable, but all sounded spectacular, especially with the power of the Pops behind them. For me, the most memorable Frozen moments were Santino Fontana’s onstage selfie (possibly a first in Carnegie history) in the middle of “Love is an Open Door,” and “I Can’t Lose You” a beauty of a tune only heard in the national tour and not on the cast album.
The New York Pops has, in a sense, become an arbiter of musical taste, and this being the first time I’ve ever heard a whole evening of Mr. Lopez’s music, it became clear that there is a fine, fine line between his spoof songs and his serious songs. There were three numbers from Book of Mormon performed by the original leads, Andrew Rannells, Josh Gad, and Nikki M. James, and in this context, it’s easy to believe that “I Believe” is one of the all-time great musical theater anthems—precisely because it’s also a spoof of one hundred years of Broadway baritone anthems. The satirical element gives it an ironic undertone that undercuts the deliberately dry message of the lyrics, and gives it both bite and power. The same is of “The More You Ruv Someone” (“the more you want to kill them”) from Avenue Q, delivered by Ann Harada and Stephanie D’Abruzzo (not to mention “Kate Monster”) of the original cast. It’s the humor (“The More You Love Someone / The more you want to kill them”) that gives the song its energy.
Other highlights including Jamie Camil, dressed in a toreador-able outfit, singing “Remember Me” from Coco, which has to be the best love song of the last ten years, in three choruses: first, as musica romantica, a bolero, then fast, like a mariachi number, and finally en Espanole. And then the Lopez’s themselves, Bobby and Kristen, along with their two daughters, performed a medley of the ersatz TV sitcom themes that they wrote for WandaVision, one of their most brilliant musical stunts. And then there were yet more songs from Frozen—so many, in fact, that I fully expected to see Tom Carvel make a guest appearance as the singing snowman.
