An Arts Snob Attends Disney On Ice

When a middle-aged white man complained on Twitter with a picture of one of my favorite graphic novels captioned “Can you believe they expect us to buy this stuff?” a woman replied, “It’s not for you.” So before I review the Disney on Ice “Follow Your Heart” show I need to disclose that Disney-themed ice shows are not for me.

I am an admitted urban snob who has worked tirelessly to protect my daughters from the Disney princess cult and made a niche writing about sharing the art I like with my kids rather than spoon-feeding them the idiotic drivel our culture tells us is the only stuff safe for their consumption. My taste is high-low eclectic, running from ballet and opera to heavy metal festivals and comic books, but if there is one unifying thread, it is almost always noncommercial.

I associated figure skating with hired thugs and baseball bats until my daughter discovered Yuri!!! On Ice and I found myself driving to Shoreline twice a week for skate lessons and studying the merits of heat-molded boots. When I got an offer for press tickets for the whole family to attend an ice show, I overcame my knee-jerk response of “I’d rather have my eyes picked out by crows,” and accepted the tickets because I knew my daughter would want to see professional figure skaters live.

What happened next will astound you (sorry, couldn’t resist.)

Logistics

If you live in the suburbs, skip this part. But lots of us city folk are scared of the ‘burbs, and feel like driving out there (especially during rush hour) is a pretty big deal. This section is for them. Our tickets were for a 7 p.m. show at Showare Center in Kent. We left our house in Fremont at 4:40. Having learned our lesson in the past, we ignored Google’s recommendation to get on I-5 at Mercer and took 99 the whole way down. The traffic gods were on our side and we traveled the 18.5 miles in just over an hour.

At exactly 6 p.m. we found a free parking spot directly in front of a cute little Thai restaurant on Meeker Street. It was brand new and they seemed surprised to see us. We were the only customers in the restaurant, but the food was really good and they served it quickly, so we ate and were back in the car by 6:30. Showare was only half a mile from the restaurant, but we knew it was going to be a late night (by kid standards) and we didn’t want a long walk back to the car afterwards, so we drove. It took 20 minutes. Tickets were waiting at will-call, security was not super fast but organized and friendly. We  found our seats at exactly 7:00.

The trick is, our seats were already occupied. I got an usher while the rest of the family found some random empty seats. Occasionally I looked up as I followed the usher around and saw people dressed as hockey players spinning on the ice while women planked on their heads and really wished I could stop and see what was going on. Eventually the usher figured out where the squatters belonged, got them moved to their correct seats and freed up our seats just as the rightful occupants of the random seats my family had taken showed up. The woman sitting on the end of our aisle was hella pissed by this time. It was 7:20.

Parent Stuff

This show really is for families. I saw one couple on a date there, but everyone else had kids. And people with kids care about this stuff more than the show itself. So:

• The performance was two hours long, plus an intermission carefully timed to just allow a trip to the bathroom if you leave as soon as the lights go up (actually based on the time to resurface the ice).
• The music was so loud we wished we had brought ear protection.
• We did bring warm clothes, expecting the rink to be cold, but it was actually quite warm.
• Mulan and Tiana were performed by skaters of color, which we all appreciated.
• There was price-inflated merch and photo ops everywhere. We broke down and got cotton candy ($15! – but it came with a mouse-eared crown).
• The show is not just family friendly, it’s for kids, taking into account super short attention spans and nonlinear thinking. All the favorite Disney (and Pixar, yay!) characters make appearances. The first half has an Inside Out frame story of Riley preparing for a big hockey game and the emotions digging through (Disney-themed) memories to get her motivated. In both halves of the show, entire Disney (and Pixar, yay!) movies are summarized through re-enactments of key scenes and most popular songs, with Frozen naturally taking up the final quarter of the show as a grand finale.

The Actual Review

I must admit that Disney on Ice takes one of my favorite aspects of opera – spectacle – and takes it up to 11. The show includes All. The. Things. Opera combines theater, orchestra, and top-level singing. The ice show included theater, dancing, gymnastics, acrobatics, video, music, firecrackers, snow machines, elaborate costumes, and animatronics. There is literally something for everyone.

I’m not crazy about Disney music. I think the princess juggernaut is genuinely harmful to girls. But I’ve been learning a bit about skating this year and these performers were good. I mean really good. There were fewer falls in the performance than you see in an international competition, but they were pulling off some very high-scoring techniques. I saw lifts worthy of a professional ballet stage; flips and jumps that belonged on a gymnastics mat; and aerial acrobatics and silks routines that looked like they were going to hit the ceiling-mounted stage lights. Even sliding backwards and flying through the air, the skaters remained in character with appropriate lip syncing and facial expressions. And they did it all wearing wigs and knife shoes.

Ironically, my favorite part of the entire show was the princess montage. Each of the most commercially viable Disney princesses got a pas de deux with her prince (except Tiana who got a harem of doting waiters lifting her on their shoulders in a jazzy number). You couldn’t call this “pure skating” because it included aerials, silks, and firecracker arrows, but it did showcase the skaters’ abilities brilliantly.

Little kids might like Mickey et. al. but the giant muppet heads and recorded story recaps were, to me, a distraction from the real appeal of the skating. Although I was usually impressed with the costumes – the translation of bulky princess ball gowns into practical skating attire was delightful – but the entire Finding Dory sequence was just squicky. From certain angles, legs can resemble ventral fins, but fish-eye boobs are not a good look on anyone. And I don’t care if a seahorse’s tail curls forward, it just doesn’t work when you hang it between a pair of legs. When the cast of Toy Story told me to put my hands in the air and shout “Yahoo” I really did start looking for some crows to peck my eyes out. Which was too bad, because Woody had some pretty impressive moves.

It left me wondering about the performers. They were clearly top-level athletes and world-class artistic performers. Is being in Disney on Ice like Phichit’s dream for them?

Or is it like Chaz Michael Michaels’ Grublets on Ice nightmare?

How do the performers feel about being paid to cosplay on ice? I may have gotten my answer as we left the arena, when my daughter said, “Wouldn’t it be amazing if years from now I came back and performed in this same arena myself?”

What Everyone Else Thought

Which brings me back to my original statement. I genuinely enjoyed parts of Disney on Ice, and overall it won my grudging approval. But it’s not for me. I drag my kids to the opera and Shakespeare plays and they usually like it. But there really is something to be said for entertainment that is actually for you.

Disney on Ice is for the little toddler who sat on her daddy’s lap, waving her Anna doll during the Frozen numbers, blowing kisses at the skaters, and generally melting hearts all around her.

It’s for the guy checking his McDonalds app during intermission who nevertheless defied masculine stereotypes by talking to his son about feelings throughout the show (“Riley is sad now because she missed the shot.”)

It’s for the families who love Disney music and sang “Let It Go” so loud together I could hear them over the ear-splitting sound system.

It’s for my 8-year-old who refused to wear the Minnie Mouse crown that came with our cotton candy but made this face when Ariel went aerial:

Since Disney on Ice is for her, I’ve asked her to review it. This is what she says:

My favorite part was the part where all the Disney princesses came out and my favorite ones were Rapunzel, Merida and Ariel. And Jasmine. I liked all the cool tricks they did like Rapunzel did silks with no hands and Jasmine was doing backbends and flips on the ice, Ariel was going on the rope with one foot and no hands and Merida shot an arrow that was a firework. I personally thought that there was a lot of parts that were as cheesy as cheese and before you go to Disney on Ice watch Finding Dory cause it sort of ruins the movie. I was really disappointed in Mulan because she had really good skating but didn’t do a lot of tricks even though she’s one of the strongest female characters in Disney’s movies. I thought it was really good but there were a few improvements they could make. They put a lot of effort into the scene where Elsa is building her castle. I was surprised that they put so much effort into one part. I had fun. A lot of parts were cheesy but I would go again to see Ariel on the ropes. 

And it’s for my 13-year-old who built a new dream of a future in performance skating. She will imagine herself as Mulan when she practices her spins this weekend.

Disney on Ice “Follow Your Heart” is at Showare Center in Kent through November 6, and Xfinity Arena in Everett November 9-12. Tickets start at $25 and run up to $70 for the special rink-side seats on the floor. I’d say that these are worth it if this type of show is your thing; the seats are super close to the action and have room for little kids to dance. Even the cheap seats (at least at Showare, where we saw it) are not far from the ice and have unobstructed sight lines.