Ratatouille: The Musical, the musical of our dreams. What started as a meme last year on TikTok — that the 2007 Pixar film Ratatouille has Broadway musical potential — unexpectedly exploded in popularity, with hundreds of creators contributing songs, performances, choreography, set design, costuming, and even a playbill. The internet’s favorite “musical that’s not a musical” eventually snowballed into, well, kind of becoming a proper musical; an adaptation of the show benefitting The Actors Fund premiered on Jan. 1, 2021, starring Tituss Burgess, Adam Lambert, Wayne Brady, André De Shields, and more.
The Road To Ratatousical
But how did we get here? In August 2020, TikTok user Emily Jacobsen (@e_jaccs) posted a short song, “Ode to Remy” — a quick soundbite of her musical praise for Ratatouille’s rodent hero. Then, Daniel J. Mertzlufft (@danieljmertzlufft) posted an ensemble version of the song, envisioned as an end-of-Act-II showstopper à la the finale of The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
Over the next few months, heaps of videos buoyed the Ratatouille: The Musical meme. Additional songs came from TikTok users like RJ Christian (@rjthecomposer) as well as theater performers, such as Dear Evan Hansen’s Andrew Barth Feldman, who performed songs for Linguini, and Disney Channel and The Prom star Kevin Chamberlin, who donned a chef’s hat and sang what would become Chef Gusteau’s defining number, “Anyone Can Cook.”
Eventually, folks at Seaview Productions and The Actors Fund caught wind of the TikTok trend. They brought on Six co-director Lucy Moss, with a libretto from Michael Breslin and Patrick Foley who hand-picked a few of the most popular songs from TikTok, and the entire production was co-executive produced by theater titan Jeremy O. Harris. Remy was, some way or another, destined for the stage.
So Gen Z Made A Ratatouille Musical
I won’t say I got TikTok just for Ratatouille: The Musical, but it certainly didn’t hurt. The most exciting thing about the then–purely conceptual Ratatousical is also what makes it so hard to adapt into a traditional show: the scale. The surplus of content, in songs, performances, and ideas, from which to draw from. For every sequence in Brad Bird’s 2007 film, TikTok has at least three songs, each one wholly different. Breslin and Foley’s book is hewn from this unwieldy mass of TikTok numbers, pared down to the basics and set at a full boil for 50 minutes.
In December 2020, while the creators’ favorite songs from the TikTok community were being plugged into the book, the cast was assembled: Feldman and Chamberlin returning to play Linguini and Gusteau, respectively. Tituss Burgess stars as Remy, with Wayne Brady playing his father, Django, and Adam Lambert as his brother, Emile. At Gusteau’s, The King and I star Ashley Park plays Colette, while Oklahoma’s Mary Testa plays the sinister Chef Skinner. Rounding out the cast are Priscilla Lopez as Mabel, the old lady who attacks Remy and his family; André De Shields as Anton Ego; and Owen Anthony Tabaka as a young Anton, shown in flashback. The stunning orchestration, covering 12 full-fledged musical numbers with an overture and a final mix, is from the 20-piece Broadway Sinfonietta orchestra, which is all–female-identifying and mostly women of color, orchestra.
Seaview announced the cast via TikTok on Dec. 28, and the show went live on Jan. 1. “Donate what you can” ticket revenue totaled over $1.8 million for The Actors Fund — a runaway success, built on the work of theater geeks on TikTok which proves that, just like Gusteau says, anyone can cook.
Reviewing Ratatousical
The full musical is available to watch for free on YouTube. Minus the introduction and the credits, it’s a tight 45 minutes, about a third of the length of most Broadway musicals. It’s a scrappy, passionate, wild adaptation of a rather unwieldy medley of TikTok ideas. With so many cooks in the kitchen and so little prep time, it’s frankly amazing that it’s as good as it is.
This might be the definitive endpoint of Ratatouille: The Musical as a meme, sure, but probably not as a musical. I can totally see Burgess killing it as Remy onstage in front of a packed audience. But the show is fundamentally incomplete. For one thing, Remy’s more a passive narrative device than a character in his own right. He mostly narrates his story, with plenty of musical scenes to help him along, but because we exclusively inhabit Remy’s perspective, Linguini isn’t the co-lead he should be. We brush past his burgeoning friendship with Remy, his romance with Colette, and even the revelation of his birthright. There’s never even a song where they work out the whole hair-pulling thing!
The show has too many ballads, as well — one for Linguini, a big “I Want” one for Remy, and Anton Ego’s number is devastatingly austere and stuffy, way more a chamber piece than the vicious, snarly climax the show needs. Family is more foregrounded in this adaptation, too, which isn’t a bad thing, as Brady’s Django rocks as this rough-and-tumble Fagin figure.
For some reason, Remy now wants the fame of opening up his own restaurant. Call it Hamilton syndrome, but the rat’s been recast as this young, scrappy, and hungry character with an overwhelming taste for the spotlight. He mentions it at least once per song. On top of it all, the performers do this thing where they act out of breath at the end of every number, and since you can tell they’re exaggerating and everything’s shot in close-up, it’s always a little creepy.
When the show works, it sings. Sliding around the kitchen or the café I work at, I’ve caught myself singing the chorus from Lambert’s “Rat’s Way of Life,” which I would kill to see performed live. Django’s, Gusteau’s, and Skinner’s numbers all slap, too, and the choreography, though it’s the same two dancers cloned to make an ensemble, is smooth and syncretic. And goodness, the actors are all having so much fun, despite how mutilating the hasty turnaround must’ve been on this thing.
Conclusion: The Future Of Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical
Live theater was basically eradicated last March and has yet to make a recovery. Thousands of crew members, musicians, actors, and creatives have been in limbo since then, and TikTok gave them an outlet for their frustration as well as their passion. As a crowdsourced piece of pop culture phantasmagoria, Ratatousical reminds me of 2018’s Shrek Retold, for which over 200 creators made a shot-for-shot Shrek remake. It also wields the meme potential of 2018’s Ya Like Jazz? A Bee Musical, which is – you guessed it – a Bee Movie musical. Despite being a higher caliber of internet meme than these projects, Ratatousical, unfortunately, doesn’t have the manic energy to match.
Taking all these TikToks and buffing them up with A-list actors, gorgeous orchestration, and a tight 45-minute story doesn’t fully do justice to the show’s shilly-shallying roots or its niche fanbase. It celebrates their work without completing it. I hope Ratatousical makes it to Broadway eventually, after this pandemic fog lifts and venues re-open again because, on the whole, Ratatouille works as a musical. Though it tastes a little off now, there’s enough drive among the homebound theater community to make a proper version succeed. The stock’s already prepped, the onions are diced, and I swear I’m out of cooking metaphors.
I don’t have any hot takes on Ratatousical — contrary to what some entertainment reporters have written, it’s not going to revolutionize the way musicals are made and consumed. After all, the show wouldn’t exist if there weren’t a pandemic. Ratatouille: The Musical fills a deep, Broadway-sized hole in the hearts and free time of theater nerds everywhere. It’s full of reverence for that specific theatrical form — hell, I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of musicals, and even I caught the Cats references. All of the adaptation’s shortcomings, however, stem from the fact that we have to consume it as a TikTok-style video on the internet and not as a proper Broadway show. Ratatousical isn’t the new norm. It’s the cliché wife at the window wondering when their mariner lover, Broadway, will return from sea. Or maybe more aptly, Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical resembles Remy stranded in Paris, away from his family, finding joy and comfort in the only thing he knows how to do: cooking.
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