Shrek's Trek from Page to Screen to Stage

On the eve of the much-anticipated Broadway debut of Shrek the Musical, Broadway.com presents a century-long history of the show—from the pre-Depression beginnings of its creator through its triumph in Hollywood and onto its current incarnation onstage at the Broadway Theatre. Did you know that the flatulent green ogre with the heart of gold has roots in Brooklyn? Or that his maker transformed the greeting-card industry? Well, don your filthiest apparel and read on…

Bohemia Lost
Born in Brooklyn in 1907, Shrek creator William Steig spent most of his childhood in the Bronx. Dad painted houses. Mom was a seamstress. Both were socialists who pursued the fine arts as hobbies, and did their best to steer their children clear of the workaday business world. As Steig once wrote in Horn Book magazine, “My parents didn’t want their sons to become laborers, because we’d be exploited by businessmen, and they didn’t want us to become businessmen, because then we’d exploit the laborers.”

So all the Steig boys became artists: Irwin became a journalist and painter, a talent he shared with Henry, who also played saxophone. Then there was brother Arthur, who read The Nation in the cradle, was telepathic and “drew as well as Picasso or Matisse,” as William later told The New York Times. William found a niche drawing cartoons for the high-school newspaper while excelling in athletics and graduating when he was 15. His self-proclaimed “defective education” continued with two years at City College, three at the National Academy and five days at the Yale School of Fine Arts, before he dropped out completely.

“If I’d had it my way, I’d have been a professional athlete, a sailor, a beachcomber, or some other form of hobo, a painter, a gardener, a novelist, a banjo-player, a traveler, anything but a rich man,” Steig later told Publishers Weekly. “When I was an adolescent, Tahiti was a paradise. I made up my mind to settle there someday. I was going to be a seaman like Melville.”

But then came the Great Depression, and the family went broke. Since his brothers were either married or teenagers, the unspeakable happened: William Steig’s father suggested he get a job.

The Not So Hard Knock Life
Steig hit the freelance circuit, with immediate success. He sold his first cartoon, featuring one prisoner grousing to another, “My son’s incorrigible, I can’t do a thing with him,” to The New Yorker in 1930. ‘“I earned $4,500 the first year, and it was more than our family, then four of us, needed,” he recalled. In total, Steig would contribute more than 1,600 drawings and 117 covers to the magazine.

In 1944, Steig published Small Fry, a series of cartoons depicting clever, ill-tempered kids who stood up at the dinner table and declared things like, “I say it’s spinach and I say the hell with it,” which became a catchphrase. He also made an indelible mark on the greeting-card industry. “[They] used to be all sweetness and love,” he told The Hartford Courant. “I started doing the complete reverse—almost a hate card—and it caught on.’”

Having long supplemented his income with advertising gigs, which he deeply disliked, Steig accepted a colleague’s offer to create something for young audiences, and the letter-puzzle book C D B! was published in 1968, as was Roland the Minstrel Pig. In 1970, Steig found himself at the top once again with Sylvester and the Magic Pebble, a story about a young donkey who finds a magic pebble and accidently turns himself into a rock, which his parents then sit on while having a picnic. Earning the coveted Caldecott Medal, the book was interpreted by parents, scholars and hippies as a metaphor for anything from juvenile helplessness to death.

But it wasn’t until age 83 that Steig produced what would become his most famous book: a sweet yet tres-subversive love story about a horribly repulsive ogre who’s informed by a witch that he will marry a princess who’s even uglier than he is and thus sets out to find this hideous bride.

Bedtime Story vs. Blockbuster
Published in 1990, Shrek! earned the usual raves, with Parenting magazine calling it “a mischievous, topsy-turvy chronicle of a nasty ogre’s wonder years, and the School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly both naming it Book of the Year. Shrek! developed a cult among adults, too, who appreciated a book that turned such a twisted tale into suitable bedtime reading. To wit, Shrek woos his putrid princess by proclaiming, “Your horny warts, your rosy wens/Like slimy bogs and fusty fens/thrill me.”

When the book was adapted into an animated summertime blockbuster in 2001, many lovers of Steig’s original work were not pleased, since it jettisoned the book’s dialogue and illustration style, and most of the story. New additions included a subplot about homeless fairy-tale characters, a few musical numbers, lots of pop-culture in-jokes, cameos from Disney cartoons and the unmistakable voices of Mike Myers in the title role, Eddie Murphy as his sidekick Donkey, Cameron Diaz as Fiona and John Lithgow as the villainous Lord Farquaad.

“Why even call this movie Shrek?,” asked Margot Mifflin on Salon.com, labeling the DreamWorks feature as a typical Hollywood whitewash. “The book on which the movie is based does not feature a sensitive hero, an incarcerated princess or a host of abused Disney characters fated for ‘resettlement.’” The author himself, who died at 95 in 2003, took a milder view of the film, saying, “It’s vulgar, it’s disgusting—and I loved it.”

The film became a monster hit, going on to win an Oscar for Best Animated Feature. It spawned two sequels with Shrek the Fourth due in 2010 and inspired several video and TV spinoffs, not to mention an ever-growing list of video games. It was only a matter of time before this big, smelly, sweet, lovestruck, lime-colored ogre made the trek to the Great White Way.

Easy Being Green
Sam Mendes, the Oscar-winning director of American Beauty and Tony-nominated director of Cabaret, originally had the idea of turning Steig’s book and the first film version of Shrek into a musical. His first choice for a writing team were composer Jeanine Tesori and librettist David Lindsay-Abaire. Both had solid theater credits Caroline, or Change for Tesori, the Pulitzer Prize-winning play Rabbit Hole, plus kooky comedies like Fuddy Meers for Lindsay-Abaire as well as animation experience Lindsay Abaire wrote the screenplay for Robots. Jason Moore, who found success with Avenue Q, another musical that managed to be both funny and moving, was tapped to direct.

The creative team agreed to dig deeper into Shrek’s character, beginning their show with the ogre’s parents packing his things and sending him off on his own in the song “Big Bright Beautiful World But Not for You.” As Lindsay-Abaire explained to Broadway.com, “He sets out on this journey to find out who he is. He’s an outsider, basically, like most lead characters in plays and musicals.”

Though Shrek the Musical keeps many of the film’s glitzy augmentations intact, the writers were adamant about restoring the ugly, repulsive appeal of Steig’s source material. Hence the Broadway version is chockful of bodily noises and wonderfully tasteless jokes, all of which made for an interesting collaboration. “We got really immature,” says Tesori. “We didn’t care what other people would think. We were just writing for ourselves.”

After a staged reading in August 2007 featuring Christopher Seiber, who remains in the show as Lord Farquaad, Shrek the Musical was on its way. Broadway favorites Brian d’Arcy James and Sutton Foster signed on to star as Shrek and Princess Fiona, along with Avenue Q’s John Tartaglia as Pinocchio. Sumptuously designed by Tim Hatley of Spamalot fame, Shrek the Musical had its world premiere at the 5th Avenue Theatre in Seattle in August 2008, which resulted in a few nips and tucks, such as rethinking the role of the Dragon and the addition of Daniel Breaker, a 2008 Tony nominee for Passing Strange, as Donkey.

Now the character first introduced to the world in Shrek! is primed and primped and ready for the Great White Way. Judge for yourself, Steig disciples. And listen up, fans of Foster and James: If you ever dreamed these two would battle it out onstage to see who can pass gas the loudest, well, your dream’s about to come true.