As a child of the 90s, I engaged in a popular post-school ritual growing up: plopping down in front of the TV to watch the hit animated show Pokémon. Since its inception in 1996, the phenomenon from Japan has spawned trading cards, video games, anime, and more. Now, Harrison Bryan and Brandon Zelman have tapped into that nostalgia in a new musical, boldly titled Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy. After seeing the show, I sat down with Bryan, who co-wrote Balls and stars in it, and Stuart Zagnit, who stars in the show and has a unique connection to the source material as a voice actor.
As a fair use parody, Balls pays homage to Pokémon while satirizing it. And there’s a lot to make fun of. For anyone isolated from kids’ pop culture since the 90s, the premise of Pokémon is that monsters live among us, and society sends 10-year-olds out to battle them and collect them in balls. While the degree of familiarity with the franchise may vary, its yellow mouse mascot, Pikachu, has become ubiquitous.
As such, Balls casts a wide monster-catching net. It spoofs everything from the trading card game to the anime to the video games. Seeing the show in April, I found some jokes about balls made me laugh more than others (and there are many). However, I did get a consistent kick out of the many inspired elements, such as a mid-show bartering segment among the audience. If you’re any type of Pokémon fan, this is a show for you to catch.
And Balls takes an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink approach to form as well as function. It is an interactive musical with projections, puppets, and a “Poké-rap” style song about the 151 monsters, here called “Collectabuddies.” All of these design elements exist by, well, design. According to Bryan, they wanted to “put as many multi-disciplinary creative mediums together to create Balls.”
It’s a Poké-centric approach, as Pokémon hero Ash Ketchum himself aims to be, according to the theme song, “the very best, like no one ever was,” despite being 10 years old. Balls shares that scrappiness, and dare I say, ballsiness.
Not the least of which is the fact that the creators brought on Stuart Zagnit, the original voice of Professor Oak in the licensed Pokémon anime, to play their parody version of the professor in the unlicensed musical spoof. But despite this pedigree, Balls is very much Off-Off-Broadway, independent theater. “We knew that the show was going to speak to a downtown audience,” Bryan notes, citing the original production of Little Shop of Horrors as inspiration, “Making the show feel like it’s bursting out of this little space.” Balls has played at Caveat, a theater located in New York’s Lower East Side.
Rather than focus on a hero collecting monsters, Balls the Musical focuses on a side character, the Professor’s rebellious grandchild, who teams up with the Professor to try to not get killed by the various bizarre monsters that inhabit their world. In the production, the many “Collectabuddies” appear in the form of puppets, elaborately made from recycled objects.
Not only do the puppets’ materials speak to a low-budget labor of love, but their creation does as well. Bryan came from a puppetry background. And Zelman, who also directs the show, learned animation and projection design during the pandemic. So while they did have the help of a successful Kickstarter, the creators of the show found that the DIY aesthetic and approach freed them. Still, they had some limits. Zelman’s digital characters bolstered the physical puppets when the actors finally said, “Harrison, Brandon, we don’t have enough hands!”
Bryan met Zelman in high school, where they shared “a deep affection for musical theater and comedy.” They were “very inspired by Mel Brooks and South Park and things that take Comedy with a capital C and Theater with a capital T and merge them.” Writing together, it was important for them to explore anything that they could theatricalize through a comedic lens.
As such, Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy came about from two angles. First, Bryan and Zelman wanted to create a work that audiences could laugh at and play around with. Second, they both grew up with a love of Pokémon. So an interactive Pokémon parody felt like the natural fit.
Still, they knew that Nintendo, the parent company of the Pokémon games, protects its copyright fiercely. But constraints are the mother of innovation. “We had an opportunity, maybe a responsibility–both artistically and legally—to go as far from the original IP as possible while still keeping it familiar,” Bryan notes. They realized that “taking a non-playable character and making them the star speaks to our love of the underdog story. Who in this world is not explored enough?” And so their original storyline about a grandfather and grandson bonding and confronting the ethics of this bizarre world was born.
Harrison Bryan and Stuart Zagnit in Balls. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.
Still, Ash and Pikachu stand-ins do make a cameo appearance in a particularly darkly hilarious scene. Without spoiling anything, their appearance draws inspiration from a brutal scene in Shakespeare‘s Henry VI Part II. And lest you think Balls is a highbrow show, Bryan reminds me that these iterations of the characters are named “Ass” and “PeePeePoo.”
But there is a surprising amount of insight to Balls, as it takes the concept of catching dangerous monsters to its outrageous and logical conclusion. In short, it’s Pokémon by way of Jurassic Park.
[The show is] creating, under the radar, a commentary on the whole concept and makes you think about, was this ever really a good idea? To take these little creatures and trap them in these balls?” Zagnit notes, remarking that Balls made him stop and think, “I never looked at it that way.
Ironically, the decision to parody the Professor character’s point of view is not how Zagnit, Professor Oak’s voice actor, joined the team. Bryan actually brought on Zagnit for a reading of their show A Hanukkah Carol in 2022. Meanwhile, they cast someone else as the Professor character in Balls, thinking that maybe they could get Zagnit to record a curtain speech for them at most.
Simultaneously, Zagnit took notice and thought, “Well, that’s curious.” And then, when the actor dropped out, the creators went out on a limb and asked if he’d fill in. Zagnit saw room in his schedule and thought, “Well, seems like the universe is putting this in my direction.” So he signed on and little by little—in between other anime work—learned this role, which ended up being much bigger than he expected. He had less than a month to prepare, but he made it work. “It was fated. I knew them, they knew me, the material could not be more perfect.”
It’s rare for an actor to get to play the spoof version of a role they originated. As such, Zagnit found Balls as “kind of a wish fulfillment.” For Pokémon, he was limited to the script he was handed. But he was still impressed that the Pokémon scripts always had a sense of humor, especially in episodes featuring the goofier Pokémon like Muck, Psyduck, and Mr. Mime. He particularly enjoyed playing both the comedic and dramatic sides of Professor Oak in Pokémon, citing Pokémon: The Movie 2000 as his favorite of the films for that reason (my favorite Pokémon film as well).
But with Balls, there are no limitations. “It’s all in the service of entertaining the audience,” Zagnit muses, in regards to poking fun at his Pokémon persona. “So it’s okay.”
Is there a line he won’t cross? “I have my own standards for my sense of humor. I don’t want him to go farther than I think is appropriate.” Still, Zagnit admits that he gets a kick out of cursing as the professor, and took it in stride when one audience member responded to the “What’s my grandson’s name?” question with “Diddy,” noting it got a lot of laughs whenever it came up again.
But on the serious side of things, Balls also gave Zagnit the chance to think more about the backstory of this kind of character. In Pokémon, he had never thought about Oak’s father, for example, but in Balls, that’s a big character point. With Pokémon, “I was using my own character actor instincts. There was no blueprint; we saw the episodes one at a time. So every episode, we were discovering more about the show in the recording studio.”
As someone perpetually interested in the cross-section of theater and games, I asked Bryan and Zagnit about their experiences blending those two worlds. Zagnit got his start in live theater when a friend suggested he audition for this anime show that was coming out: Pokémon. “Little did I know that those two worlds were going to merge,” Zagnit explains. “I basically kept them very secret [from each other]. So the theater people, I didn’t really talk about the anime stuff. [And for the anime people] I thought, ‘they don’t need to know about musical theater.’ And suddenly they’re both supporting one another.” Zagnit finds the two worlds colliding pleasantly surprising and thrilling, especially in regards to Balls. Pokémon fans “show up and are thrilled to see that I’m still alive and working onstage. And then I have this great theater experience that I can give to this piece as well.”
Bryan likewise has noticed that audiences come from both the theater and gaming worlds, and has seen a lot of crossover. “It was very important to us that we were bringing people in the gaming and the anime community to the theater, and theater people to the gaming and anime world, because the interactivity between the two fandoms is tremendous,” Bryan explains. For some fans, they know Zagnit from Little Shop of Horrors, Newsies, and Seussical, while others go, “That’s Professor Oak!”
But in developing the show, that overlap wasn’t always the case—for the better. The majority of the music team did not grow up with Pokémon. Bryan and Zelman showed the “Squirtle Squad” episode to give the music team a sense of Pokémon. But it was never a prerequisite. It was more important that they work with people who were “fun and imaginative and collaborative spirits.”
Katie Luke and Harrison Bryan in Balls. Photo by Arin Sang-urai.
Bryan and Zelman wrote the lyrics and script so they felt they could do justice to the source material from that angle. “For the creative team, it was really just important that we all loved the story… do we all love it?” From there, “Once we got that buy-in, it didn’t matter how much of a fan they were… let’s tell the best possible story and share the best possible music.” On that side, neither Bryan nor Zelman studied music theory, so they learned much about musical theater from the music team, while the music team trusted their comedic take on the source material. The creative team coming from two different worlds actually helped the show, as each side recognized that the other had a unique perspective to share.
And Balls has quite the music team: Lena Gabrielle (Six, Emojiland), Pippa Cleary (My Son’s a Queer, The Great British Bake Off Musical), Joriah Kwamé (Little Miss Perfect), Aaron Kenny (The Little Mermaid, A Hanukkah Carol), and Grace Yurchuk (Caesar: The Musical). Balls features additional music by Matthew Ryan Hunter (NBC) with orchestrations, arrangements, and music supervision by Lena Gabrielle.
In addition to Bryan and Zagnit, the show also features Teresa Attridge (Avenue Q, Fun Home), Katie Luke (Bandstand, Hairspray), Ebony Deloney (Hairspray, Beautiful), Kurt Cruz (Asian AF, UCB), and Rachel Parker (Book of Mormon, Ragtime).
With Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy selling out several shows at Caveat, what’s next? Bryan thinks on this a bit, musing that it would be great to simply grow the show’s movement. And maybe it would be nice to have a live band or make a full album of the music or even create their own Balls game.
But mostly they’ve been living in the moment, tickled by the response to creating this “wouldn’t it be cool if…” idea and seeing it succeed. And Bryan hopes Balls can be a source of good. The show recently teamed up with the New York Marine Rescue Center to adopt a turtle for recovery and rehabilitation back into the wild. No monster-trapping balls for that turtle. But the team did get to name it “Spittle” after a character from the show.
And as someone concerned about the economics and inaccessibility of Broadway, Bryan hopes that Balls can “speak to not just a theatergoing audience but audiences who want something to do, love entertainment, love [Pokémon], and need a creative outlet outside of just the games and the cartoon, which are isolated activities. Theater is a very communal activity. And that’s what [Balls] celebrates.”
Much like his entry into Pokémon, Zagnit notes that he arrived at Balls “with zero expectations,” and “to surpass any of my expectations about it and to have this thing continue as long as it has, I think, is just kind of extraordinary.” Wise words from the Pokémon/Collectabuddy professor, indeed.
Balls: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comedy plays intermittently at Caveat in New York City. You can follow on social media @ballsmusical to get a sneak peek at the show and find out when to catch them next.
This post was written by the author in their personal capacity.The opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect the view of The Theatre Times, their staff or collaborators.
This post was written by Andrew Agress.
The views expressed here belong to the author and do not necessarily reflect our views and opinions.
