Shrek – Memphis Flyer

DreamWorks has long been a force to be reckoned with in animation, with financially successful properties like Kung Fu Panda and Trolls. Shrek is DreamWorks’ most beloved franchise, and the company has been able to flawlessly continue the ogre’s legacy by creating spin-offs centered around his sidekick, Puss in Boots. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish has proven to be a sleeper hit, with $555 million in box office earnings and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film.

This story follows Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), who has lived many lives as a fearless hero and, being that he is a cat, has had a few lives to spare. Inevitably, he takes a stunt too far and finds himself left with only one remaining life. With death always on his tail, he can no longer be the fearless cat he once was. Instead, he must live the life he has always feared: that of a domestic cat.

Exchanging boots for kitty mittens and unlimited toilet privileges for a shared litter box, Puss prepares for a quiet retirement. Then he hears about the Wishing Star, a magical object hidden somewhere in the Forbidden Forest that will make dreams real. It is not long before Puss straps on his cape and rapier and quests for the star. During his journey, though, he encounters other iconic fairy-tale characters, such as Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) with her Three Bears (Olivia Colman, Ray Winstone, and Samson Kayo), Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek), and Jack Horner (John Mulaney), who are all out for the same prize. Diving back into his dangerous lifestyle, Puss has to team up and trust those around him to have any chance at another life. Jack simmers as the main antagonist, who is angry at the world for his lack of fame. Driven by this anger, he wants the Wishing Star to make him the most powerful and recognized creature in the world.

Even though Jack is evil, director Joel Crawford tunes the humor to make sure he’s not too scary. Many jokes throughout the film are geared toward adults, usually coming from Perrito (Harvey Guillén), whose dialogue is sometimes bleeped out for comedic effect.

Aside from the feelings this movie elicits, the screenplay is as entertaining and interesting as the characters themselves. The animation style has a hand-painted look, similar to some scenes from Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. The noticeable brush strokes and swirling color make the film feel like watching a painting in progress. The landscapes are especially pleasing to the eye.

While I have praised Puss In Boots: The Last Wish heavily, I do have one worry. The film ends with an overt suggestion that the future may yield another Shrek movie. DreamWorks, so far, has done a phenomenal job at upholding the Shrek legacy, but with so many sequels and remakes saturating the film industry, I would hate to see another classic franchise driven into the ground. If Shrek 5 is your plan, DreamWorks, maybe slow your roll just a tad.

Puss in Boots: The Last Wish
Now playing
Multiple locations

Strange as it sounds, I suspect one’s enjoyment of Theatre Memphis’ Shrek might be determined in advance depending on whether you loved Fey’s controversial SNL monologue about protesting racial injustice by staying home and eating your grief in the form of a frosted sheet cake, or if you thought it was a heaping sack of privilege on parade. If you’ve got a sweet tooth, director Cecelia Wingate’s the cake boss. But with American identity politics taking a deadly turn, there’s something a little weird about sitting in a nice East Memphis auditorium filled with polite (mostly), middle-class (seeming) adults (primarily) getting all gushy when a verdant ogre and his unwanted posse of fairytale characters in fur suits sing a feel-good anthem to the freak flag and how good it feels to let it fly.

Shrek‘s a big, colorful dessert course of a musical; expensive-looking, with a visual profile inspired by the animated Dreamworks feature, a score by Fun Home composer Jeanine Tesori, and lyrics by Pulitzer-winner David Lindsay-Abaire. Bubblegum bass lines mingle with easily digested messages of inclusiveness for folks out looking to cram some hope in their faces during upsetting times. Even though the franchise launched in 2001, those looking for even more resonance will find it in Shrek’s plan to build a wall and a gag about a tiny tyrant with daddy issues.

Shrek‘s evidently a labor of love for Wingate’s tight ensemble of pink pigs, blind mice, and non-gender-conforming wolves, and the performances here are something to get excited about in any case. Justin Asher plays the abominable ogre with a warm Scottish brogue and a big heart. Asher’s a Wingate regular and no stranger to monster makeup. He was Lurch in The Addams Family and the Monster in Young Frankenstein, both at Theatre Memphis. Shrek’s Asher’s best beastie yet, and his big baritone makes a nice counterpoint to Lynden Lewis Jones’ soaring vocals as the cursed Princess Fiona. Cordell Turner’s Donkey delivers on laughs and between Anne Freres’ supernatural voice and Jack Yates’ epic, smoke-belching, fire-breathing, eye-blinking design, Shrek‘s dragon sequence is a hard act to follow.

Shrek is at Theatre Memphis through September 10th.

So I’m sitting in the audience before Playhouse on the Square’s fine production of 9 to 5 (the musical, natch) trying to remember if alarm clocks really looked like that in the 1970s or if the clock’s bells really were designed to look like a pink, generously filled bra on a chilly night. Could we really be objectifying so early in a show about fighting objectification? The answer I eventually settled on: Yes, clocks looked like that, and yes to all the rest, too.

9 to 5 isn’t just a screwball pink-collar relic of the Reagan era. It’s a transgressive anti-chauvinist romp with politics, to borrow from The New Republic, “rooted in the moment when Second Wave feminism prompted the entrance of millions of middle-class white women into the paid workforce and the exit of many of those same women from the marriages they had entered in the Baby Booming 1950s and ’60s.” It tells the story of three overworked and over-groped secretaries who kidnap the boss and take over the office and start making the business better in his absence.

Playhouse on the Square’s solid cast hits all the right marks. People cheer when Nicole Hale’s Doralee threatens to change Michael Detroit’s Franklin Hart Jr. “from a rooster to a hen in one shot.” They cheer the pot-fueled sequence when Jenny Madden’s Judy and Jeanna Juleson’s Violet fantasize about killing their boss. Detroit’s a solid heel, and there’s something undeniably cathartic about seeing him stuffed into an S&M rig and strung up in the air.

Dolly Parton’s musical contributions lend authority, but 9 to 5‘s arrangements call to mind popular music of the ’70s as seen on The Lawrence Welk Show. Even this gifted, giving cast has trouble selling some of the show’s clunkier numbers.

Fans of the song and film looking for a nostalgic girls’ night out won’t be disappointed. But 9 to 5 could still be radical, and deserves better treatment.

9 to 5 is at Playhouse on the Square through September 3rd.