Here's What You Need To Know About TikTok's Ratatouille Musical
Remember Ratatouille, the Pixar movie where a rat-infested kitchen turns into a gourmand's dream thanks to the world's first (and, we presume, last) rodent chef? It has long been a favorite of Francophiles, foodies, Pixar fanboys and girls, and, of course, rat lovers, since it's one of the very few movies to acknowledge these rodents as cute little pets rather than vermin. Well, fittingly enough, in the Year of the Rat, Ratatouille got the revival treatment. No, not in the form of a sequel or even a live-action remake, but it was reborn as a musical. Okay, not on the still-shuttered Broadway, but instead on the year's top entertainment medium for nouveau shut-ins: TikTok.
The way Vulture tells it, everything started in early 2020 with TikTok cooking videos using the song "Le Festin" from the Ratatouille soundtrack as musical accompaniment. The song later spawned a parody version, which, in turn, was used in videos of cooking fails. Fast-forward a few months to August, after pandemic-prompted boredom had well and truly settled in, when one TikToker created her own musical ode to Remy the Rat (called, fittingly, "Ode to Remy"). Yet another TikToker took this song and gave it a full Broadway treatment, Remy the Musical Act II Finale, complete with orchestration and production notes involving glitter, confetti, and a rat on a flying trapeze (or something). So was this the end of the story? No, not hardly.
The online evolution of Ratatouille, the Musical
The song that spawned the musical treatment went on to birth a bunch more videos, breeding like, well, rats. Further TikToks provided the nascent musical with set design, choreography, puppetry, a play bill, and even a cast party (at Denny's, rather than Sardi's or a quaint Parisian bistro — obviously this TikToker envisioned Ratatouille: The High School Musical), not to mention scads of songs for different characters to sing. Pretty soon the whole thing began to take on a crowd-sourced shape to the point where it seemed as if there were an actual musical in the works.
Well, as a mysterious voice once told Kevin Costner in an Iowa cornfield, "If you build it, he will come." "He," in the case of this musical, refers not to the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, but rather to a Broadway producer named Ken Davenport. Deadline reports that Davenport posted his own TikTok video proclaiming Ratatouille a Broadway-worthy production indeed, and shortly thereafter angels — in the form of Broadway production company Seaview — appeared in the heavens so announce tidings of great joy: on Jan. 1, there will be a very special video production of Ratatouille: The TikTok Musical. While you will have to buy a ticket to stream it, these start at just $5 apiece, which is insanely cheap by Broadway standards, and they benefit the Actors Fund. If you just can't wait, though, this Twitter thread compiles all the Ratatouille: The Musical TikToks in order.