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'Lör' reimagines classic fairy tale villains and heroes
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“Villains aren’t always all that they seem. Heroes aren’t always good.”
This line is at the beginning and end of “Lör,” an original musical coming to Fusion’s Cell Theater Friday, Aug. 1, through Sunday, Aug. 10, with a show at Juno Brewery on Aug. 8.
“It’s a prequel to ‘The Snow Queen’ but it’s a sequel to pretty much every other fairy tale that we follow,” Brandon Jensen, director and writer of “Lör,” said.
The show follows Sonja before she became the title villain in Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Snow Queen.” A slew of other classic characters are featured in the musical, including Tinkerbelle from “Peter Pan,” Beauty from “Beauty and the Beast” and the Scarecrow from “The Wizard of Oz.”
Nicee Brown, who plays Sonja, found the mix of characters made the musical a fun experience.
“Not only are we interacting with a lot of different characters that we would equate with Disney movies,” Brown said, “but we’re bringing in characters from other beloved childhood stories, like the ‘Oz’ series, and then we have a superhero in the midst. So it’s really fun and interesting, because it’s a lot of characters that we otherwise would never see together.”
Jensen is also the creator of the cosplay cabaret concert “Villains,” which helped inspire “Lör,” according to Nico Lutz, who plays Tinkerbelle in the show.
“The idea was just getting a bunch of villains and heroes from various media to do a little cabaret show,” Lutz said. “But then Brandon was like, what if it had a plot, and what if I scripted the entire thing, and what if we got together and wrote a bunch of music specifically for this?”
While Jensen wrote and composed the music for “Lör,” Lutz acted as a mentor, Jensen said, and helped with much of the process.
“It’s always cool seeing just the ideas that you have in your head come out into the sheet music,” Lutz said.
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Brown brought her own twist to the character of The Snow Queen. She said that the character shares some similarities with the original tale and Elsa from “Frozen,” but also has distinct differences.
“I definitely don’t want people coming to this show thinking that I’m going to be like Elsa and I’m going to be singing some version of ‘Let It Go,’ because that’s definitely not what you’re going to see,” Brown said. “This Snow Queen is a lot more vulnerable than what we saw in ‘Frozen’ and that’s the challenge, bringing that extra layer of humanity.”
Jensen said he wanted to give The Snow Queen a backstory on “what happened that made her this sort of cold person who kidnaps a little boy.”
“Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to create a villain here,” Jensen said. “What I want to create is a multi-layered character who has a past and, by the end of the show, has a future as well.”
The show explores the grief that Sonja is going through and, as a result, has frozen the land of Lör. Each of the other characters interacts with her in an attempt to help — or stop — her.
“I didn’t realize until I was completely done with the script that each of the characters sort of is a pretty clear representation of the seven stages (of grief),” Jensen said.
As an original musical, the cast has navigated the challenging road of being the first to bring these characters to life.
“You have to be the first. And that can be incredibly intimidating and incredibly terrifying, but it can also be really fun, because you are the first,” Brown said. “So … if anybody ever does it again, then they’re going to be going off of what you did, so you don’t have to compare yourself to anybody else.”
