Disneys Frozen: The Broadway Musical

Frozen puts two sisters on opposite sides of a locked door. One of them has a power she cannot control and has spent her whole life hiding it; the other has never been told why she was shut out. When the secret gets loose at a coronation, it takes the kingdom's summer with it.

Elsa runs, builds herself a palace out of ice and decides that isolation is safer for everybody. Anna goes after her, collecting an ice harvester, a reindeer and an unnervingly cheerful snowman on the way. What looks like a rescue turns into an argument about fear, and the act of love that finally resolves it is not the one the story has trained its audience to expect.

The stage musical keeps the songs from the 2013 animated film and adds a substantial amount of new material, with music and lyrics by Kristen Anderson-Lopez and Robert Lopez and a book by Jennifer Lee. It reached its first full production in 2017 and has been staged around the world since.

On stage the transformations are the draw: costume changes that happen in front of you, ice spreading across the set, and a company that has to build a blizzard out of light and fabric. The score is bigger than the film's, and the relationship between the sisters carries considerably more weight than the romance does.

It suits families, and anyone who has ever been told to conceal something about themselves. It works best live, where the effects happen in the room and a full theatre gasps at the same second.