Ratatousical: A Strange, Enjoyable Goof

If maybe not quite strange enough?

A musical is typically developed over multiple workshops, readings and industry presentations, a process often taking years. Broadly speaking, that process exists for a reason. Most musicals are bad. The good ones start out life messy, flawed and half-formed. Lin-Manuel Miranda developed Hamilton over six years, blah blah, etc.

Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical was thrown together in about four weeks. Now look, this strange TikTok sensation brought to life by Seaview Productions and TodayTix is not, to be clear, a real musical. The hour-long virtual presentation, available through 7pm Monday, is maybe about half a show, and doesn’t pretend otherwise. Honestly though? I’ve suffered through major workshops, often by name composers, that were a hell of a lot worse. 

What does that teach us? Mostly nothing, since Ratatousical is a weird one-off event precipitated by a very specific moment: pandemic, viral phenomenon, producers seeking alternate paths to putting out work. Plus a huge corporation, Disney, atypically willing to shrug off branding and say, “sure, whatever, go nuts.”

As executive producer Jeremy O. Harris tweeted shortly after the project was announced: “I think it’s really exciting to wonder how this might happen again, but we can’t divorce the wildly specific circumstances we are in now.” To vaguely herald Ratatousical as “the future of musical theater” is to ignore a lot of very specific situational elements around it, most of them unlikely to be repeated.

The wonderful surprise is, these songs are pretty good! Kevin Chamberlain’s “Anyone Can Cook” is a banger. Mary Testa slays Sophia James’ “I Knew I Smelled A Rat.” Even the more perfunctory numbers like Remy’s “I Want” moment, “Remember My Name,” prove sweet and uplifting, thanks largely to Macy Schmidt’s gorgeous orchestrations and a very game cast. Tituss Burgess in particular is impressively committed.

Since this whole craze originated with the deliberately nonsensical lyrics, “Remy the ratatouille/The rat of all my dreams,” I do wish it was a little more deranged. Burgess gamely plows through narration that fills in the story in-between songs, covering only bits of the movie’s (actually super involved) plot. 

That works fine - but the whole sensation didn’t strike me as really, actually about creating a musical adaptation of Ratatouille? The movie itself is the starting point, sure, but also feels incidental to the whole thing. The thrill was in the “yes-and” spread across the internet, allowing mostly young, diverse talent spread across the world to share in some absurd joy together.

“Remy the ratatouille” is so funny because it doesn’t make any sense - Remy isn’t the ratatouille, that’s the dish. It works because nothing makes sense right now, and we’re all completely losing our minds. Again: “Remy, the ratatouille/the rat of all my dreams/I praise you, my ratatouille/may the world remember/your name.” I mean, Pulitzer Prize. But a chance was perhaps missed for Burgess to lead us through the layers upon layers of internet mania as a “Remy the ratatouille” TikTok spirit, or something in that vein, rather than laying the songs onto the film’s plot in such a literal fashion.

No matter. The show is tremendous fun. The cast is wonderfully game. $1.6 million raised for The Actors Fund. Mary Testa. And in the closing number and megamix, Ratatousical does hit the joyful absurdity just right. This isn’t the future so much as a perfect encapsulation of the strange, awful and absurd that is right now.