When Broadway producer Greg Nobile heard Gayle King singing the words to “Ode To Remy” on The Morning Show some weeks ago, he knew a sort of leap had been taken. “I thought this thing that started online has not only become pop culture,” he recalls, “it’s become, like, culture culture.”
This thing,” of course, is what’s now called Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical, perhaps the first, or at least most widely seen, crowdsourced Broadway-style musical ever. By now just about everyone knows the story of how one woman’s single, simple off-the-cuff little love song to a rat went viral and inspired other, increasingly elaborate musical numbers based on the 2007 Disney-Pixar computer-animated film Ratatouille.
But how the viral sensation made its way to the virtual, 45-minute one-time-only “Broadway” staging – complete with an all-star cast is, in its way, equally as implausible and certainly as undeniable. Even Disney, ever the ferocious protector of its image and properties, wouldn’t or couldn’t stand in the way.
