SpongeBob musical to premiere in Chicago, open on Broadway in the 2016-2017 season

So tell me about SpongeBob and how this got onto your radar.

Well, about 7 going on 8 years ago, believe it or not, I got a call from my agent asking if I would like to go in and pitch for a SpongeBob musical, because Nickelodeon was starting not with writers or story but with directors and were interested to hear from people if they could imagine a way to put this animated series on the stage that did not feel like a theme park show or big arena show. They were interested in new ways of creating this world on stage that would be something unique and unexpected for the brand. They weren't really interested in doing something that was more traditional. But even so, with that said, when I first got the call and my agent said “SpongeBob musical” my instant reaction was “no”, because I did have a preconception in my head, as perhaps many people still do, about what kind of show that would be. But I very quickly thought about it and I thought, well, there is a way that I could see it that would be exciting to me, and if they're really open to alternative approaches – sure, what do I have to lose by going in? So that began about a year-long process of developing ideas and going in for meetings with Nickelodeon until I got the job. During that time I really developed all the primary concepts that to this day have really held. So it's been a long and wonderful process.

How much control do they retain over the project, and how much do they give over to you?

This has been one of the best, most freeing processes I've ever enjoyed. What was astonishing about Nickelodeon was that they didn't really have a notion of “we have to do this”. What they had a notion of is a creatively led and driven project that if they kept coming and seeing something that excited them they would take the next step. So because everyone was on the same boat about “well, we'll do it if it merits it”, I felt like I had nothing to lose and I think in some ways they really wanted me to run free and I did. Every time I worked in a room with a whole mass of interesting people and they would come in at the very end and see whatever it was that we had worked on for that workshop and they would either give a green light for the next stage or not. And very fortunately, over 6 years or so, we kept getting green lights until here we are today.

Let's talk about the core group you put together with Kyle [Jarrow], the great Tom Kitt, Christopher [Gattelli]. How did that core group come to be?

It happened very slowly. The first thing we did after I got the job was we arranged a movement/physical workshop, and at that point I had multiple designers and circus artists and dancers and clowns and we experimented with the human body and if and how it could inhabit these animated forms in a way that was actually very live and human. At that point there was no story. So Kyle came on next. We spent about a year selecting who we thought would be the perfect book writer for this. Then over the next year we developed the story, we did a workshop on that. At that point Tom Kitt was next on board because we knew after a basic script outline was in place that it was time to think about music. So Tom came on next and Chris Gattelli, our choreographer, has come on board just in this last year after a very fully staged workshop. We realized, “oh, we're now doing a full production and there are number of big dance numbers that I can't do”. I tend to do a lot of my own movement work, and we got up to a point where I had done everything with the cast but it was definitely time to say “oh, we need someone to do this huge tap number or this hip hop dance”. So, again, everyone has kind of come on in layers and people were layered in as we got to focus on that particular element of the production.

So what is it about this character that is able to transcend animation and connect some kind of truth? What is SpongeBob's truth that's going to connect with the audience?

SpongeBob is an optimist in a sea of cynics. He is an innocent. He is impassioned. His joy at each day and each experience and each moment is contagious, and that's why I fell in love with the character. I liked the show well enough when I first started, but I really have fallen in love with this spirit that is SpongeBob. He touches in me and brings out in me something that is very childlike – not childish, but childlike – and I feel like the whole project and everyone who's come into contact with it has been infused with this sense of play and abandon and giddiness that really comes first from the character.

We've created a world in Bikini Bottom and a story that in a (I hope) very light-handed way echoes our own world – we've been surprised at how true that has become – in that it's a story where a community is threatened and behave in ways that are propelled by fear, and SpongeBob is the one at the center of it who both understands the importance of holding the community together and is actually in the end able to do so. So it feels both very human, very timely, very timeless, and SpongeBob has a voice and a vision that is one certainly that I want to be in the world and to even live my life with.

Let's talk about the original songs being placed into the show. From the Plain White T's, They Might Be Giants, Cyndi Lauper, even the late David Bowie has contributed, Aerosmith ...

And we have John Legend, Sara Bareilles, T.I., Aerosmith, and we just recently added to our roster Yolanda Adams, the great gospel songwriter, and Alex Ebert from Edward Sharpe and the Magnetic Zeros. And yes, The Flaming Lips, the list goes on. To this moment I pinch myself daily and say “Wow, this happened and this works and is working”.

And how does that work? How does that work to make a cohesive song structure?

Well, this idea was one of my first ideas when I went into Nickelodeon, and it was because I had listened to the film soundtrack of the first SpongeBob movie, and the songs were so cool and energized and unexpected and I thought, “Why can't a Broadway score sound like this? It's the kind of music I want to listen to”. And what I realized very early on was that the world of Bikini Bottom where SpongeBob lives is a world of mash-up and non sequiturs and stylistic juxtaposition, and I thought if there is a story and a theatrical world that can hold all these different sounds and styles, it's this one. So it seemed very organic, the notion of different kinds of music, and as we worked with the artists it was very important to say them them, “We want the song to sound like you. We don't want to homogenise it into some musical where everything is consistent. We want ultimately to have cohesion, but it's cohesion that comes from each singular.”

So I originally made a list of artists that I either loved or wanted to meet or work with, and I was supported greatly by a man named Doug Cohn at Nickelodeon, who runs their music department, and what we did is Kyle and I worked on which moments seemed like they wanted to be sung. It's called “song spotting” - which moments in the story ask to be sung – and we determined what those were and after that we went through the list of artists and thought, “Oh, well this really should be country/western tinged because it's Sandy the squirrel who comes from Texas”. So we used Lady Antebellum for that. Or in the case of the Plankton character, who is a plotter and a schemer and trying to get the town to go along with some idea he has I said, “It's a little like Ya Got Trouble from The Music Man, except the contemporary version of that, which is rap.” So we went to T.I. for that song.

So what would happen was Doug Cohn would make the initial approach or introduction to these people and then once they were on board I would speak with them or meet with them and give them a packet of the scene around the song, a very detailed description of the song involving a suggested structure, some lyric prompts and some information about the show. Then we would get demos back. Sometimes they were just scratch demos of the one artist on the piano and sometimes they were fully arranged and orchestrated. I'd say in about half the cases the songs came in and were good to go right away and in the other 50% I ended up doing a round of notes, where I would go back to the artist and say “look at this” or “change that” and they would do it and we'd get the song. And then Tom Kitt has been responsible for arranging all the tunes so that they both retain the original artist's sound and voice but also work within our play world and our singers and dance arrangements and all that kind of thing.

David Bowie is actually the one case that is a little different in our whole scenario in that he wanted to participate but he let us know that he was unable to write a new song from scratch, so we decided to look at a song he had called “No Control” and we took that song and basically re-wrote it for the show so that it's a new arrangement, new lyrics. So that's the one song in the show that had an origin in another form. All the other songs were written note by note from scratch.

So let's talk about this amazing cast, because I have a man crush on Ethan Slater, who is just the cutest. Where did he come from?

He is SpongeBob, that's what so funny. Of course he doesn't look like a square yellow sponge and doesn't sound exactly like him, but there's something in his DNA that is “oh, these are kindred spirits” for sure. Ethan we found during one of our very first workshops where we were casting people and the casting directors we were working with then knew him from a summer program. He was a sophomore in college and he came to do this workshop and we have stuck with him ever since, so we've seen him through his college years. For a while we did a workshop almost every June, so Ethan would go to school and then he would come to New York in the spring and we would do a workshop. We didn't plan it that way around him but our timing worked out that way. He's been at the center of the project for at least 5 years now.

And of course the great Gavin Lee. What an immense talent that man is.

Yes. He came into his first audition and I'll never forget when he left the room I turned to the other people who were in the audition with me and I said, “That's what I've meant this whole time about how to approach the physicality.” He did work with his body and how specific it was that I learned from him and I've kept it in my head as an example of what can be. He's playing Squidward, he's going to be just phenomenal. He of course has four legs as the character Squidward does, and that not only does not stop him from doing a huge tap number, it actually increases his tap potential because he has more feet.

Where are you rehearsing the show?

We start rehearsal in New York on April 11th and we rehearse there for about 5 weeks and then come to Chicago to begin a 2 week tech process at the Oriental. June 7th I believe is our first preview and we open officially June 19th.

When are you scheduled for New York?

Well, that is the waiting game of theaters. We are hoping in the fall, but we are waiting to have a theater availability and confirmation, so we don't have exact dates yet.

Where in the lexicon of your amazing career does this fall?

It's interesting, because for a long time when I was younger I felt like I had a split artistic personality and there was work I did that was more serious and experimental and there was work I did that were musicals. I grew up and I directed The Music Man and Guys And Dolls and I felt like I had a split personality. As I grew older I came to understand that both of those worlds could live together and happily. And especially in this day and age where there's so much experimentation and pushing of boundaries in the American musical I think the lines between what is a piece of installation art versus a musical versus a physical theater piece … so many of the boundaries are getting blurred and for me, as I've grown older and synthesized the two forms, when I direct a play now it feels like a piece of music and when I direct a musical it feels like a piece of drama or a comedy or whatever.

I feel like SpongeBob is some sort of culmination of my understanding the synthesis of forms, because it's a musical that invites anything and everything in some way. So we can have a silent movie moment, and we can have the audience walk into what feels like an immersive art installation environment, and we can have a piece of real, intimate, grounded relationship on stage, and we can have circus elements, and somehow all those things are welcome and make this world. So for me it feels like a grand explosion of everything I've been working on manifesting at the same time.