Gene Sloan

USA TODAY

TORONTO -- What do you do when you're given the assignment of turning the highest-grossing animated movie of all time into a 55-minute cruise ship show?

For starters, you trust your heart, says Sheryl Kaller, the Tony Award-nominated director tapped to transform Disney's Frozen into a musical for Disney Cruise Line's 1,754-passenger Disney Wonder.

"We just got into the story and what we know," Kaller says of a process that began in secret 18 months ago with the assembling of a team of top Broadway creatives including Tony Award-winning costume designer Paloma Young.

Speaking during a sneak peek at the show at Disney Cruise Line's production facility in Toronto, Kaller suggests the hardest part of the assignment was crunching down a story that originally filled an hour and 49 minute on the silver screen. For that, she turned to Broadway writer Sara Wordsworth.

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"What we have to do is tell the entire story in a compressed version so that the audience doesn't notice they missed a thing," Wordsworth says. "Part of the job for me as the words person is (building in) iconic lines, iconic benchmarks and of course all of the (iconic) songs, which we didn't want to change."

Much of the audience already will know the story, which in some ways makes things easier but also presents a challenge. Wordsworth notes that the musical will include dance arrangements that are specific to the production, which raised the question of "how do you then take (lines and music) that they know and love ... and turn it into this thing they haven't seen before?" Solving that puzzle has "really been a fun process," she says.

Called Frozen, A Musical Spectacular, the cruise ship version of the 2013 blockbuster will debut on the Disney Wonder in November, when the ship returns from a massive makeover in dry dock. It'll play in the vessel's 977-seat Walt Disney Theatre.

Like other shows on Disney ships, the production will be an elaborate affair with a cast of 18 people, Broadway-worthy costumes and intricate special effects. Disney long has been known for having some of the best entertainment in the cruise world.

Wordsworth, who has a three-year-old daughter who is "living Frozen" at the moment, says she has watched the movie more times than she can count. But in adapting the film for the cruise ship stage, she has gone back to the original words in the screenplay written by Frozen writer and director Jennifer Lee.

"I wanted to get into the mind of Jennifer Lee," she says.

USA TODAY and several other media outlets were shown five numbers from the show during the sneak peek, performed in a rehearsal studio without lighting, special effects or costumes. They included Frozen's emblematic ballad, Let it Go, which Disney has said will be transformed into a "full-fledged stage spectacle ... complete with real-life magic." The company is promising snow flurries during the number among other special effects.

One twist that was on display during the sneak peek was the use of puppetry for such iconic Frozen characters as Sven the reindeer and Olaf the snowman. The puppets were created by Michael Curry, whose designs are featured in Disney’s Tony Award-winning Broadway musical The Lion King. Highly expressive and elaborate, they're made to be operated by actors who are visible to the audience and, judging from the sneak peek, are sure to be scene-stealers.

The costumes, too, are likely to draw notice, judging from illustrations pinned to a wall in one of the Disney production studios. One costume designed for Elsa's transformation scene will involve elaborate special effects.

Costume designer Young says she drew inspiration from the dress-up outfits that delight Disney-age children.

"I was the creepy single woman that went into a Disney store and just sort of observed the way that children were interacting with the clothing," Young says, laughing. She says she looked for "what they were attracted to, which ones they wanted to try on and what they said about the things that were in front of them."

Designing for a show that will play to Disney fans was a treat, she adds.

"Compared (to the audience for) Broadway or a very serious play, the Disney audience and especially children are absolutely the best audience when you're talking about iconic costumes because they come from the world of incredible imagination and dress-up," she says. "All over the world there are (kids) dressing up as Elsa and Anna, and they've got a roll of toilet paper and a pillow case (to do it). There is this way that a child sort of sees something that they recognize, whether it's a color or a single line of a dress, and they touch it and they close their eyes and they hear the music."