It’s never too early to introduce kids to the arts. That’s the thinking behind Disney Jr.’s new series Kindergarten: The Musical, which aims to adapt Broadway-style song and dance numbers for the preschool set.
The show follows 5-year-old Berti and her kindergarten classmates as they start school for the first time at Porter Elementary. The goal was to create a series that could speak to kids about kindergarten and how fun it could be. But doing this came with numerous challenges for making sure the show would be accessible to the young age group.
Kindergarten: The Musical has a cast of nine kids, a teacher, and a guinea pig—all needing their own screen time. As well, each 11-minute story, with two stories per episode, is packed with theater-inspired dance numbers and alternating 2D and 3D animated sequences. They include at least three original songs, with each song needing to be choreographed and staged, making it “probably the most difficult thing I’ve ever worked on,” says Supervising Director and Executive Producer Tom Warburton.
Because Kindergarten: The Musical alternates between two different dimensions—the 2D imaginary world and the 3D real world—the design team had to establish markedly different looks for each to keep its viewers from getting lost. “Young children like consistent visual cues,” explains 3D Supervising Director Guy Moore. “You have to figure out how to make [things] visually understandable to them.”
Art Director Edgar Carlos and his team were tasked with creating many of the 2D renderings, including props, design elements, and 2D versions of each character. On top of that, if the students were doing something like drawing self-portraits in class that day, Warburton says that Carlos would have to make multiple different versions of the portrait showing the child’s progression from start to finished product.
“The fun part is trying to draw like a child,” says Carlos. “That’s very difficult because we’re trained artists that have to go back and create [child-like] illustrations for kids to relate to.”
Setting the Stage
Kindergarten: The Musical is set in a classroom, which presented its own unique set of challenges. Because the show is confined to school grounds, the design team had to be strategic about creating opportunities for variety in the set design.
Mini “stages” were spread throughout the classroom to create space for interesting plot points to happen. “We had to make it so that even though we’re in the same space, it doesn’t feel boring and there is always something fun and interesting happening,” says Warburton.
Stylistic choices like dimming the lights and spotlighting key characters are some ways the design team would signal the introduction of a song or dramatic scene. “No one ever says, ‘I feel a song coming on!’” says Warburton. “Our teacher Ms. Moreno might say, ‘We’re going to pick our student of the week,’ and then the kids would break into a ‘Who’s it going to be?’ song.”
“It’s a natural progression,” explains 2D Supervising Director Mallory Coronado. Each story features at least one song animated in 2D that enables exploration of fantastical worlds outside of the classroom: outer space, under sea, back in time. “We get to explore reality while also taking a sidestep into the imaginary,” she says.
On the boarding side, Storyboard Supervisor Stephanie Alexander and her team, which included Storyboard Artist Rebecca Snowden, made sure to lead into songs with increasingly dramatic shots or movement that could usher in dance numbers. Snowden describes arranging the story and its many characters on the page as a “call and response” between the design team and directors.
“What it’s really about is making sure that the kids [watching] can see the whole story and that everything is clear but still has some fun moments and creativity to it,” she says.
After the directors finalized song placement, Storyboard Artists would lock down each kids’ position around the classroom and find ways to punch up the jokes “so that the [audience] has something visual to latch onto,” says Snowden. “Or if there’s a teaching moment, make sure it’s extremely clear as to what’s being talked about.”
In one story, Berti comes to school wearing a new pair of sneakers. She’s obsessed with keeping them clean and belts out a dramatic number to her peers on the playground called My New Kicks.
“She’s up on a bench singing to the rafters about how she’s no longer that person that plays in the playground anymore,” says Warburton. By the end of the story, she’s gotten the shoes dirty and is offered a different perspective from a classmate who calls the dirt “fun spots,” a sign of how much fun she’s had that day.
Another story Moore calls “poignant” is on the surface about counting, but it’s a deeper message about learning for personal enrichment and growth rather than simply to get good grades and the anxiety of that kind of perfectionism. “By writing their concerns large, we communicate to the audience that those concerns are universal,” says Moore.
“We try to come up with stories that we really think are going to resonate with kids and mean something,” adds Warburton.
Despite a career spanning three decades in the animation industry, Moore says he loves preschool shows especially because of their positive value. “The characters can hug and tell each other that they care about each other’s feelings,” he says.
“Getting to showcase the wide range of storytelling that can happen in a musical theater fashion is just so cool for a pre-K show,” says Snowden, who describes herself as a “lifelong musical theater person. It’s very musical theater that if you can’t talk, sing, and if it’s not able to be conveyed properly through song, add dance.”
Snowden found that her Midwestern show choir background came in handy while mapping out the dance numbers. “For a lot of the big camera shots of nine children going at it, it’s like, ‘OK, we need levels. Who’s going where, what’s the picture we’re making?’ It was a lot of fun to go back into that high school self and see, oh, wow, this paid off.”
The Sound of Music
Getting the music right was crucial to the success of the show. The music team included alums of popular preschool series like Doc McStuffins and Muppet Babies alongside Tears for Fears guitarist Charlton Pettus, who co-created the show with songwriter and composer Michelle Lewis. The team wrote more than 150 songs for the first season alone, churning out approximately three songs every two weeks.
“Just when you think they couldn’t top themselves, they just kept doing it,” says Warburton. “Our musicians never really stuck to one style. They did a salsa number, heavy metal, a rap song…”
While each story includes at least three songs, the record number squeezed into a single 11-minute story is five (or “four and a reprise,” says Moore). Song placement was determined as early as the script-writing stage, but the songs themselves were not written until after the script was finalized. “Sometimes we’re like, this needs a dance break in the middle, and we’ll add some time in between for that to happen,” says Warburton. “Or the ending of this isn’t big enough. We’re always revising to make it bigger and better.”
“In most preschool shows, the songs are a comment on the story,” Warburton adds. “We wanted to do a show where the songs really are the story.” When it was found that the characters were saying the same thing in the script as in songs, the directors had to decide whether to prioritize dialogue or lyrics. “Usually, it was better to hear it in the song,” says Warburton, explaining that it took a lot of “recipe alchemy” to strike the right balance. Not to mention: “Every one of us has had a different one of these songs stuck in our head at any given moment over the last two years.”
“That’s the initiation event for the crew—Which K:TM song did you end up with in your head?” says Moore.
“You just find yourself humming along and instead of hating it—it’s like, ‘No, I actually do like this song,” Snowden says. “‘It’s here now. It’s here to stay.’”
