Michael Grandage Illustration by Tom Bachtell

The first time that Michael Grandage, the distinguished British theatre director, saw “Frozen,” the wildly lucrative animated Disney movie, was upon its release, in 2013. (It was at the bidding of his partner, Christopher Oram, a theatre designer with a fascination for animation.) At the time, Grandage made the passing observation that its plot resonated with themes in the pastoral comedies of Shakespeare that he had directed. Then he moved on, as one does when one has more pressing concerns, like bringing Daniel Radcliffe to Broadway in “The Cripple of Inishmaan,” for which Grandage received a Tony nomination.

The second time Grandage watched the movie was in the summer of 2016, after being asked by his agent whether he wanted to be considered to direct a stage-musical version of the film. (The show opens at the St. James Theatre on March 22nd.) “I thought, Actually, you know what, I think it is one of the very few things I haven’t done yet, a new musical,” Grandage said the other day. “I looked and thought, All the music is rather charming and beautiful, and very attached to the narrative. And I reconnected to the big sweep of the story. I thought, I would love to come at it with a Shakespearean sweep—to do something with it that takes on all these big questions that I believe are in ‘Frozen.’ ”

What might those themes be? To discuss this, Grandage agreed to pay a visit to the Shakespeare Garden, in Central Park, whose delicate poetical plants—eglantine, cowslip, and rue, all mentioned in the Bard’s works—were still buried under a schmalz-thick layer of snow deposited by the bomb cyclone of a week earlier. Metaphor alert!

“The biggest connection to Shakespeare with what happens onstage in ‘Frozen’ is the reuniting of Sebastian and Viola, in ‘Twelfth Night,’ ” Grandage explained, settling on a bench, the temperature having risen to a balmy thirty-one degrees. “Both of those siblings assume the other to be dead, and at the end of the play they turn and see each other, and realize that the person they love deeply is alive. I think that moment—that specific moment in the turn, before either has said anything—should be the most moving thing you could ever achieve in the theatre.” He was aiming for a similar effect at the end of “Frozen,” in which one sister sacrifices herself for the other, and then is resurrected by the power of sibling love. “If we get it right for the audience, pretty much everything else will, at some level, take care of itself,” he said.

Another parallel: “As You Like It,” Grandage’s favorite work in the canon. He said, “The two cousins are trapped in a castle at the beginning, and they free themselves and go out into a forest. And, in the landscape, they are freed by the landscape to find and understand love.” When Grandage directed the play, in 1999, he and Oram, who designed the production, set it mostly in wintertime. “We thought, Wouldn’t it be great if, when they first came across the people in the forest, they were all standing around braziers?” he said. “When you go into the Forest of Arden, the first thing that happens is snow falls.”

Grandage also directed a wintry “Hamlet,” with Jude Law, in the West End and, later, on Broadway. Law delivered the “To be or not to be” soliloquy outdoors, in the snow, in bare feet. “Hamlet” has come up in Grandage’s conversations with Caissie Levy, the actor playing Elsa on Broadway. “The existential journey that Elsa goes on, independent of her sister, is, for me, absolutely related to ‘Hamlet,’ ” he said. “Her running off to create her own palace is the catalyst for a freer existential debate. The problem with Hamlet is that he is always trapped in Elsinore—he doesn’t have the luxury that Elsa has. Which I guess is why I put him out walking in the snow—getting out of the palace and turning into something elemental. Isn’t that weird?”

The sun slipped behind tree branches: bare ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang. “What is remarkable about the genius of ‘Frozen’ is that it takes you on a Disney fairy-tale track and blows it out of the water,” Grandage went on. “The idea that family love comes to the fore as the key message is a wonderful thing for us to investigate.” Before returning to rehearsal, he took a turn around the garden, where plaques bearing quotations were peeking above the snow, like wary crocuses. “Most friendship is feigning / most loving mere folly,” read one, from “As You Like It.” Grandage cudgelled his brains to recall the speaker. “It’s Amiens!” he said at last, and sighed with theatrical relief. “I was about to give back my Equity card.” ♦