Call in the kids, ‘cus they’re wanna gonna hear this: the cast of Frozen is reuniting for a new musical, and it’s about their child being born with a rare genetic condition that requires high-risk surgery and may lead to permanent health issues! It’s practically Frozen 3!
Deadline reports that Kristen Bell and Jonathan Groff are set to star in Molly & the Moon, a musical written and directed by How I Met Your Mother creators Carter Bays and Craig Thomas. The story is based on Thomas’s real-life tale of having a son born with Jacobsen Syndrome, a chromosomal disorder with a one-in-five mortality rate before the child reaches the age of two. Those born with the illness frequently suffer intellectual disabilities, have dysmorphic features, and, as Thomas soon learned, face heart defects that often lead to infant surgery. The kind of thing that just makes you want to belt out a tune, doesn’t it?
“My wife made up a little simple lullaby about his name that she would sing to him that just sort of came to her there in the NICU, and that actual melody and lullaby is what we use in the movie,” Thomas said, explaining why it’s not insane to be singing about a chromosome disorder.
“Musicals are always about the first moments that prove why they are musicals. Kate, our lead character, the mother, is singing a lullaby to her pregnant belly and will sort of push in on that pregnant belly and go into this other world where we see a mysterious little girl in a rowboat in the middle of the ocean, looking up at the moon and hearing that song, hearing that lullaby come through the moon. It’s the moment you realize there’s this little soul, this life that wants to exist and be in the world and wants to reach the sound of that voice. She doesn’t know what it means or who it is. It just sounds like love, and she wants to reach it, and that’s sort of the moment that we connect the two worlds of our movie, the world of Molly and the real world that her parents are living in.”
Inspired by the likes of Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal, the film will cut between the real world and Molly’s internal journey, a fantasy adventure to reach the moon. Molly will, of course, be played by Josh Gad.
