More than a cartoon

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea? Next week, the answer will be students at Green Bay Southwest High School as they prepare to stage their production of Spongebob the Musical.

Although many may be familiar with the popular cartoon, Director Brent Brayko said audiences should expect a slightly more serious show.

“It’s not meant to be a cartoon on stage,” Brayko said. “It’s meant to have the simplicity and the joy and the fun of Spongebob, the original cartoon, but there’s a very real story. There’s a couple of themes that really intrigued us as directors.”

“One is the feeling of inclusion and exclusion of certain people,” he said. “Sandy the squirrel gets excluded in this show because she’s a mammal — somebody different — and so they want to get her out of the community and blame her for the problems. There’s also a theme of togetherness and of unity and there’s a theme of how to face diversity. Bikini Bottom is going to be destroyed, and the whole show’s plotline is trying to figure out how to save the town from perishing without blaming people and turning it into chaos and how to work together to solve the problem… It’s a little beyond a cartoon, but it incorporates the color and wild music, and the dancing and costuming and all of that should give it the fun and the lightness of a cartoon.”

But that added color, music and cartooning also give the show a high level of technical complexity.

“We had no idea how complex it was going to be in terms of the technical aspects,” Brayko said. “The sound effects are constant throughout the whole show, the lighting cues have to line up, there’s the orchestra, the singing and the dancing, all the costume pieces are different. All those pieces together have made this one of the most difficult shows I’ve ever directed, and this is like my 30+ show. This has been very complicated, but our goal is to make it seem like it wasn’t complicated.”

Brayko said he’s been impressed by how well the students involved in the show have stepped up to overcome those challenges.

“They’ve kept focused on a show that is complicated — deceivingly complex,” Brayko said. “They’ve risen to the occasion. They know the reputation of our shows and they want to uphold that tradition. They want to become a part of that tradition and they want to do the best they can.”

In addition to Brayko and other staff working on the show, student leaders have also played a key role in bringing the show to life.

“We have some really good senior leaders in all aspects of the show — technical and on stage — and they’ve done a nice job of pulling it together,” Brakyo said. “It’s really starting to come together. I think they know that audiences are going to have fun with this, so that’s what we’re really working on is the joy and the fun.”

And having fun is exactly what Brakyo hopes audiences will do when they come to the show.

“I hope they just sit back, really enjoy what they’re seeing and just take in all the spectacle,” Brayko said. “There’s so much stimulation — there’s so much color and there are projections and sound effects and all of that… The auditorium is already starting to get decorated like you’re walking into the ocean… We want to immerse everyone so they can just sit back and enjoy the show.”

Productions of Spongebob the Musical will take place Dec. 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13.

Tickets are available at trojanmusical.ludus.com/index.php?show_id=200497840.