The Ratatouille Tik Tok Musical Comes to Life on New Year’s Day To Benefit the Actor’s Fund
The Tik Tok community never fails to surprise us with their talents and capability to come together. Over recent months, their biggest project thus far has been creating an entire Broadway musical centered around the Ratatouille movie, a Disney-Pixar animated collaboration about a rat pursuing his dreams of cooking in one of Paris’ top restaurants.
What started out as a short catchy tune posted on the app for a meme, turned into a grand overture with other creators making full arrangements of chorus and instrumental parts. Suddenly, other creators such as @blakeyrouse and @sophiajamesmusic started creating more music to correspond with different scenes from the movie, such as “The Rat’s Way of Life”, an upbeat melody lead by the character Emile, and the jazzy brooding tune of Chef Skinner’s solo “I Knew I Smelled A Rat”. Other creators made a tango style duet sung between Collette and Linguini’s characters, and even a solo for Remy’s father. To further the efforts, requests for karaoke tracks were made so other users can take part in singing along to the music. These songs started becoming more and more popular, and eventually a soundtrack was formed.
However, the creation of Ratatouille the Musical did not just stop there. Dancers started creating choreography to the music, fashion designers sketched designs for costumes and planned out the mechanics of different fabrics, and people shared their ideas for casting which included Dear Evan Hansen’s Andrew Barth Feldman as Linguini (who was very on board with the idea and made his own musical contributions). We even had stage and technical crews involved, as lighting designers showcased their ideas for different lighting colors and patterns, and set designers did the same with different props and set pieces.
Eventually, the musical caught enough steam that Broadway decided to create a full virtual production using the ideas of all of these Tik Tok creators. Tickets sold at $5 with a portion of the sales going towards the Actor’s Fund. Needless to say, the show was a success! On January 1st, 2021, millions of ticket buyers watched Remy the Ratatouille come to life and were taken through the emotional story that we know from the animated movie. To top off the success, the amount of tickets sold equated to $1 million donated to the Actors Fund.
The fact that multiple small creators can come together on a social media app to create such a project shows how Tik Tok and young musicians are revolutionizing the music industry. In the age of COVID-19 when in-person performances are shut down and coming together to create proves to be difficult, artists can overcome these barriers through technology and a strong sense of community.
To those that bought tickets to see the Ratatouille Musical, the livestream was accessible for about 72 hours after the event. However, if you missed out on viewing it, we highly encourage you to search it up on Tik Tok to view the origins of this project!
