Bikini Bottom has arrived on Broadway. Opening Monday, “SpongeBob SquarePants” boasts songs by John Legend, Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie and other heavy…
Bikini Bottom has arrived on Broadway.
Opening Monday, “SpongeBob SquarePants” boasts songs by John Legend, Cyndi Lauper, David Bowie and other heavy hitters, plus a number by a writing team most have never heard of: Andy Paley and Tom Kenny.
Turns out Kenny, 55, has voiced SpongeBob since the cartoon’s 1999 Nickelodeon debut. “It’s not like ‘SpongeBob’ was handed off to a bunch of people, ‘Here, raise this baby,’ ” Kenny tells The Post, saying he and others on the TV show had a hand in the musical. Here’s what else he told us about life in a pineapple under the sea.
I had done other animation and I had been in a lot of sketch comedy like “Mr. Show With Bob and David” on HBO . .. So, I was used to playing over-the-top, nutzo characters. I feel like that’s kind of where I live anyway. .. It wasn’t like I was at Juilliard doing “Hamlet” and suddenly I was SpongeBob.”
[Creator Steve Hillenburg] took out his pitch bible for “SpongeBob,” which had drawings and personality paragraphs — personality breakdowns of the characters — and explained the show to me, and he said, “I’d like you play to SpongeBob. This guy.” It’s weird. I’m not a mystical person or a spiritual person at all, but I gotta say, I fell in love with it immediately. I don’t really think I’d had that feeling before, or since.
One thing that I think has helped the “SpongeBob” franchise live is that the people that make the show are a pretty small group still. We recorded an episode yesterday, and I was like “Man, 20 years I’ve been going to work with these people!” We’re yucking it up and laughing, talking about each other’s kids.
Ever since I saw a preview of the show in Summer 2016 in Chicago, people have gone, “Wow! Is it weird for you to watch somebody else play SpongeBob?” And I’m like, I’m surprised at how not-weird it felt. I’m pretty possessive about SpongeBob. He’s my guy. [But] I realized that we’d done CGI versions of SpongeBob, stop-motion versions of SpongeBob. There’s theme park versions of SpongeBob who walk around in costumes. This is just the newest way to see SpongeBob.
