INTERVIEW: This holiday season, Winnie the Pooh takes the stage in NYC
Photo: Jake Bazel stars as Winnie the Pooh in a new musical stage adaptation. Photo courtesy of Evan Zimmerman / Provided by JT Public Relations with permission.
Off-Broadway’s Theatre Row is now home to Hundred Acre Wood and the characters from the beloved Winnie the Pooh series. Disney and Rockefeller Productions is currently hosting a run of the new musical stage adaptation featuring Winnie the Pooh, Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo, Rabbit, Owl and Tigger. The family-friendly fun promises to spread some holiday cheer for audience members anxious to get back to the world of theater.
The show is overseen by producer Jonathan Rockefeller and Disney Theatrical Productions. The original stories by A.A. Milne are nearly 100 years old and have sold more than 50 million copies. Disney came on board in 1961, according to press notes, and the company decided to create a series of featurettes about the iconic characters; later on, these short adventures were anthologized into the movie The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. The songs from these projects are thanks to the Sherman Brothers, Richard M. Sherman and Robert B. Sherman, who are also known for their work on Disney’s Marry Poppins, The Jungle Book and other films.
This stage adaptation tells its story through intricate puppetry. At the helm of the cast is Jake Bazel as Winnie the Pooh. His previous credits include TV’s Sesame Street and the off-Broadway production of Paddington Gets in a Jam.
“It’s been quite a ride,” Bazel said in a recent phone interview. “I was brought in initially just for early meetings on the show. They needed a puppeteer to be Pooh for concept meetings and then pitches and workshops, so it’s been a long road of slowly building the show.”
The cast and creative team were ready to bring the show to New York City audiences a couple years ago, but of course the pandemic struck in March 2020. Those plans were delayed, but this fall season, Winnie and his friends have made it to Midtown Manhattan. In fact, Theatre Row has renamed the theater where Winnie the Pooh is performing, now calling it the Hundred Acre Wood Theatre. “We’re having the most fun time,” the actor said. “And a lot of that is because of the energy the audience is bringing. It makes a huge difference.”
Rockefeller brought Bazel into the project because the producer knew that the actor was a huge fan of the original books and Disney adaptations over the years. In fact, Bazel’s first community theater production was a small staging of Winnie the Pooh, back when he was 9 years old.
“So this moment is wildly full circle,” he said. “To now be doing it again in this capacity is sort of hard to wrap my head around. I always loved the books. I grew up with all the movies on VHS, watched them endlessly, revisited the books as an adult as I started working in the kids media world, and fell in love with them all over again because of the layers that are there. … Those initial books were just so beautifully, intricately written. There’s so much there. They’re really beautifully written characters. I’m definitely a longtime fan. The fandom goes deep for sure.”
Bazel has found that the audiences at Theatre Row are honest, which he loves about younger theatergoers. There is no lying to them, and they know what theater works and what theater doesn’t. Thankfully, the cast members of Winnie the Pooh have been receiving positive reactions from the youngsters.
“Families and especially children are really honest audiences,” Bazel said. “When they love something, they really love something. I have been really lucky to work with some characters that people really, really love, so the excitement in those rooms makes it really gratifying. To work on these projects with these characters that mean so much to people’s childhoods, we get a lot of love back in our direction, and it’s never lost on us. It’s a huge honor to get to take care of these characters that mean so much to people and in this case bring them into a new medium. To be the person to do that means a lot for sure.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Winnie the Pooh: The New Musical Stage Adaptation, featuring Jake Bazel, is currently playing at Theatre Row on 42nd Street in Midtown Manhattan. Vaccination and testing protocols are in place. Click here for more information and tickets.
