The Spongebob Musical - Youth Edition

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Explore The SpongeBob Musical: Youth Edition

The SpongeBob Musical puts an entire undersea town a day away from destruction by an erupting volcano and hands the rescue to the least qualified resident available: an optimistic fry cook nobody takes seriously. It is a disaster comedy with songs, and it is a great deal stranger and sharper than the premise suggests. As the deadline closes in, the town does what towns do. A businessman spots an opportunity. A news anchor feeds the panic. A scientist who actually has the answer is blamed for being an outsider. Meanwhile the fry cook, his slow-witted best friend and that scientist set off to climb the volcano themselves. The jokes are broad; the satire underneath them, about panic and blame, is not. The book is by Kyle Jarrow. Rather than commissioning one composer, the producers asked a long list of songwriters working in different genres to contribute, so every number arrives in a different musical idiom. The show premiered in 2016 and has been staged widely since. The staging tradition is deliberately handmade - the underwater world assembled out of ordinary objects rather than realised literally - and that invention is a large part of the charm. The tone stays relentlessly upbeat without turning saccharine, largely because the show is so honest about how badly the adults behave. It works for children who already know the characters and for adults who arrive braced for something unbearable and leave surprised. Live, the ingenuity is the draw: everything is visibly built, in front of you, out of almost nothing.