How a onetime acrobat and a “Lion King” puppet designer brought a speechless reindeer to life in Disney’s stage adaptation of “Frozen” on Broadway.
Sven almost didn’t make it to Broadway.
When Disney decided to adapt its megahit animated film “Frozen” for the stage, the creative team seriously considered killing off the reticent reindeer (a fate that did befall the marauding ice monster Marshmallow as well as the menacing pack of wolves).
“We were going to not have Sven in the show,” said Thomas Schumacher, the president of Disney Theatrical Productions, “because we were afraid it would just occupy space onstage and be distracting.”
But the company invited its longtime puppetry collaborator, Michael Curry (“The Lion King”), to experiment with ways the shaggy creature might be represented onstage. He tested two-performer pantomime before deciding to fashion a full-scale figure that could wordlessly engage with the unfolding plot — that could act — when brought to life by a single actor within.
The resulting reindeer has become one of the most popular characters in the show, getting entrance applause and even a cameo on the Tonys (joining James Monroe Iglehart at the microphone to introduce the “Frozen” performance).
Sven’s head is molded out of carbon-fiber composite, his body is shaped foam covered with braided raw silk, and his hooves are rubber-coated foam sculpture mounted around aluminum and stainless-steel orthopedic braces. Underneath, the performer wears a full-body wicking suit, a carbon-fiber head mount held in place by a soft urethane skin, knee and elbow pads, biking gloves, and a mouth guard.
Sven is a slightly larger than life eight and a half feet long, and his frame weighs about 14 pounds. There is a screen hidden in the animal’s neck, allowing the actor to see, although his field of vision is sharply limited — so much so that Sven has the de facto right of way onstage.
The reindeer’s predominant coloring is a tan-like hue called raw sienna, but he also has a bit of pink (to warm him up visually), some red and blue highlights (the colors of the Norwegian flag) and flecks of green (moss). Up close, there are some touches a theatergoer would never see — hoof carvings, for example, that echo Scandinavian design patterns in the set.
“He is a compromise between the caricature of the animated feature, a real reindeer and what I know would look human in a way,” Mr. Curry said. “When you look at his mug, we did some things to the orbits of the eyes and the cheekbones and the mouth that really make the audience relate to the human quality.”
The role was originated by Andrew Pirozzi, an actor who has been dancing (starting with ballet and tap) since he was 4, and who had learned tumbling and hand balancing by studying at a circus school and performing with an acrobatic team. Sven is onstage for about 40 minutes of the show, and the role is physically taxing — the performer inside is on all fours, essentially planking for up to seven minutes at a time, with 11-inch stilts attached to his hands, and five-inch metal shanks attached to his feet.
Sven’s head pivots by a linkage system connected to the performer’s head and body; the weight of his head is cantilevered away from the performer’s neck by a custom orthopedic back brace. A cable connects the performer’s right hand to Sven’s eyes, to make the animal blink; another connects his left hand to Sven’s ears, which generally swing freely but can also be rotated or pulled back to express excitement or happiness. The mouth moves only when another character (Kristoff or Anna) rubs his throat.
Mr. Pirozzi was the only Sven during last summer’s pre-Broadway run at the Denver Center for the Performing Arts. But once the mechanics of the role became fully clear, Disney decided it was too much for one actor to do eight times a week, so on Broadway Mr. Pirozzi is Sven at six performances, and Adam Jepsen, an actor who was once a competitive gymnast, does the other two. (The goal is that neither actor does it more than once a day.) “We spend a lot of time in the gym, with stabilizer exercises and shoulder exercises, strengthening really small muscles that I didn’t know existed,” Mr. Jepsen said.
Mr. Curry, who has studied animal anatomy, and Mr. Pirozzi, who simply loves animals, each spent hours watching YouTube videos of migrating reindeer, trying to understand how they move. “It turns out they’re really gangly, just like our guy — they’re not graceful,” Mr. Curry said. They worked with a movement consultant, Lorenzo Pisoni, to figure out how the animal would behave. Mr. Pirozzi also spent a lot of time lying on the floor with his dog — Bella, a Great Dane-pit bull mix — observing how she responded to being addressed, as well as where her gaze went in moments of silence. One more thing: “I actually trained with my daughters on my back,” he said. “I can do all the planking and the lifts, but I needed the agility on stilts, so Disney let me take those home, and my kids knew every time I was rehearsing I could give them a ride. They’re 7 and 8, so the perfect ages — like a little Anna and Elsa.”
Fun fact No. 1: A reindeer plays a heroic role in “The Snow Queen,” the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale on which “Frozen” is loosely (very loosely) based. That reindeer, like much of the flora and fauna in “The Snow Queen,” can speak.
Fun fact No. 2: The costume is so hot that, in breaks from the action, Sven retreats to a “puppet corner” offstage, where dressers supply water and even hold tissues for nose blowing (the actors can’t use their hands while in costume), and where an air conditioning tube can be inserted into the costume to lower their body temperature.
“Being Sven is really really difficult, and I knew that it would be from the beginning,” Mr. Pirozzi said. But, he added, “I love playing Sven, because for those two hours each night, I may be able to soften the hearts of 1,700 people.”
Produced by Laura O’Neill.
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Michael Paulson is the theater reporter. He previously covered religion, and was part of the Boston Globe team whose coverage of clergy sexual abuse in the Catholic Church won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. @MichaelPaulson
