‘Kindergarten: The Musical’ Creators Discuss the Newest Stars on the Disney TV Stage

This article was written for the September/October '24 issue of Animation Magazine (No. 343).

Kindergartners love to sing and dance, so creating an animated show featuring Broadway-style songs and dance numbers for very young audiences is a no-brainer! That’s exactly the premise behind Disney Jr. and Disney+’s new show, Kindergarten: The Musical. Created by Michelle Lewis and Charlton Pettus, and co-produced by Oddbot Inc., the new fall series follows the adventures of five-year-old Berti and her new friends as they experience the highs and lows of leaving home and starting school for the first time.

The show’s creative team also includes exec producers Kay Hanley and Dan Petty (Doc McStuffins), exec producer/supervising director Tom Warburton (Muppet Babies) and co-exec producer/supervising story editor Laurie Israel (Sofia the First).

‘This show has given all of us the opportunity to fill in some of the missing spaces, to honor music we love, to honor the teachers and role models we had and to give voice to the big feelings and emotions little humans have when they first go to school.’

— Co-creator and executive producer Michelle Lewis

Lewis and Pettus were kind enough to take our readers behind the scenes of their new show.

“We were writing a totally different show and, in preparation for the pitch, decided we needed to be ready for the inevitable ‘What else do you have?’ question,” says Pettus when discussing the show’s origins. “Kindergarten: The Musical was initially just a title spitball, but once we started filling in the outline, we realized we had something special.”

“Charlton has been one of my favorite go-to songwriting partners, and we’ve been meeting regularly to write songs for Disney projects for years, mostly for live action,” adds Lewis. “We started riffing on how everything can be musicalized, but how some things are easier (and more appropriate!) than others. One of us said, ‘Kindergarten: The Musical,’ and we both went, ‘Wait a minute…’”

The Long Wait

After pitching the show to Disney in 2019, development began in 2020 (over Zoom, during the pandemic), and the series was officially greenlit in 2021. “Building an entire world out of three words is a tall order!” says Lewis. “Developing a show is a very long process,” adds Pettus. “If you knew how long it would take when you started, you’d never do it. At the same time, it has been an amazing experience seeing this world come together!”

Lewis says she often writes about what she likes to see in the world. “This show has given all of us the opportunity to fill in some of the missing spaces, to honor music we love, to honor the teachers and role models we had and to give voice to the big feelings and emotions little humans have when they first go to school,” she says.

Pettus agrees. “We love the characters. They’ve become these amazing, brave little people who share their stories and feelings in the songs we write with them,” he says. “After seeing the journey from script to record to finished episode, we have a deep appreciation for how much the actors imbue our characters with their own personalities. And we love the artists, designers, storyboard artists and animators who have brought this whole world to life. This is my first animation experience, so I’m still absolutely dazzled by the magic of it all.”

So, what makes this show different from other similarly themed kids’ shows?

“Our show is a real musical, in the classic sense,” says Pettus. “The songs move story and reveal inner thoughts, which helps our stories dig much deeper than preschool shows usually can. Also, our characters are real kids, almost the same age as our viewers. From what we’ve seen so far, that has made them extraordinarily compelling and engaging. Kids will see themselves on the screen and, we hope, be inspired and engaged.”

Prep work for each episode begins by breaking down the story, creating outlines and then scripting it. The songs are written in tandem with the scripts. “We figure out during outline which story beats should be musicalized,” explains Pettus. “We generally have three songs per 11-minute episode: one to introduce the story’s theme, one to capture the peak emotional moment and one to resolve things. We are really committed to letting the songs drive the story rather than just commenting on it. During production, we are songwriting an episode every week while simultaneously recording the songs from the previous week, so it gets pretty crazy!”

Once the songs and script are nailed down, radio plays are recorded, then cut down to rough time, and become the basis for the animatics. Each animatic has a lead artist and a second song specialist, because the demands of the more elaborate musical sequences would be too much otherwise. Animatics go through revisions with episode directors (and an additional supervisor for 2D sequences) and then the cast is recorded. At this point, the production has an animatic with cast dialogue and songs. From there, it goes to Mumbai- and Bangkok-based M2 Animation for animation and then postproduction.

A Valentine to Musical Theater

“This show really digs into the musical theater elements, which added more layers to the process like choreography, set design, stage lighting and vocal arranging,” says Lewis. “We had a choreographer on the show, who blocked out where the kids would be on stage and what moves they were doing; our director oversaw the building of actual stage sets (animated, of course); the lighting of the musical numbers re-creates classic musical stage lighting; and all of the vocal arrangements — which are so multilayered and intricate in musical theater — took a lot more time and effort than they have on other shows I’ve worked on.”

For Pettus, a key challenge was to polish each song to reach a peak level of perfection. “There are over 150 songs in the first season, and we love and are proud of each one,” he says. His partner says being responsible for the entire puzzle (rather than just one piece) has been a steep but gratifying learning curve as a co-creator. And as Charlton mentions, “The sheer volume of material we had to come up with is technically a challenge, but with such an inspiring world to draw from, it’s a fun one!”

Both Lewis and Pettus have nothing but great praise for the show’s other executive producer, animation veteran Tom Warburton, creator of Cartoon Network’s popular show Codename: Kids Next Door, whose other credits include Disney’s Fish Hooks, The 7D, Muppet Babies and the recent Naked Mole Rat Gets Dressed. “We hit the lottery,” says Pettus. “I don’t think we realized until much later that we had literally the best showrunner in children’s TV. He is inexhaustibly positive and relentlessly focused. It’s an impossible job that he makes look easy every day. Sometimes you just get lucky!”

“I wish he wasn’t so mean and grumpy all the time,” jokes Lewis. “Just kidding! We’re lucky to have such a talented and experienced showrunner to work with. He makes it all look easy.”

The duo is now excited to finally see the show reach its target audience this month after many years of hard work. “I hope they experience the power and joy of music,” says Lewis. “That we show them that kindergarten can be awesome and that bursting into songs, when words just aren’t enough, is a perfectly reasonable thing to do! And we hope kids see themselves in our classroom and that we help them ‘feel like they can do or be anything!’”

Kindergarten: The Musical is now airing on Disney Jr. and streaming on Disney+.