Skates hit the ice as 'Disney on Ice Presents Frozen' lands at Verizon Arena

It sounds redundant, but Disney on Ice has put Disney's Oscar-winning animated film Frozen -- on ice.

Disney on Ice Presents Frozen will be on the frozen floor of North Little Rock's Verizon Arena this week, with performances at 7 p.m. Wednesday-Friday; 11 a.m., 3 and 7 p.m. Saturday; and 3 and 7 p.m. Sunday.

The show covers the movie's tale of big-hearted Anna, who embarks on an epic journey to find her magical sister Elsa, determined to remain secluded as she tests the limits of her powers. Along the way, Anna encounters rugged mountain man Kristoff, his loyal reindeer Sven, lovable snowman Olaf and some mystical trolls.

Dream role

"For me, it's definitely a dream come true," says Becky Bereswill, who skates the role of Elsa. "I'm a huge fan of the movie. Elsa is a dream role. And I love the music."

The Houston native, like most ice show performers these days, started out in competitive figure skating at age 7, placing highly in national and international competitions and becoming a member of Team USA. Frozen is her first ice show, but she has been on the tour for almost two years and more than 800 performances.

She skates and "acts," but doesn't have to speak or sing: "We use the original track from the movie," she says. "You'll be hearing your favorite characters' voices." And the audience is not only able, but encouraged, to sing along on "Let It Go," "Fixer Upper," "Do You Want to Build a Snowman?" and the other songs on the soundtrack.

Besides learning the fancy skating, Bereswill and her cast mates spent a lot of time preparing to get the rest of it right.

"We went through a thousand hours developing these characters, their gestures and their movements," she says. "In addition to the athletic nature of skating, in addition to the big tricks -- and you'll see a lot of fast, world-class skating -- the most important thing is bringing to life the characters and the energy."

Even two years in, she says, there's still plenty of rehearsal time, and even refresher sessions in which they'll put the movie up on a screen and watch it again for things they might have missed or forgotten: "We're always looking for ways to improve the show."

The icy extravaganza also features some pretty fancy sets and special effects.

"You might have seen Frozen a hundred times on TV, but our show is really the full experience in 3-D," Bereswill says. "It'll be snowing inside the arena, and you'll feel like you're part of the blizzard. You'll feel like you're trekking up the North Mountains with [the characters]. So you get to be a part of Arendelle.

"One of my favorite things is Elsa's ice magic, incorporating that important part of Elsa's character, how that manifests with the snow and great dazzling effects. It definitely adds an extra layer."

Speaking of extra layers, the show also features Mickey and Minnie Mouse as sort of masters of ceremonies plus "special appearances" by several princesses and favorite characters from other Disney animated films.

"We tell the story of Frozen from start to finish," Bereswill says. "In addition, at the beginning and in the finale, we do have Disney princesses as well as characters from Toy Story and Finding Nemo and The Lion King, all coming together to introduce the story and talk about love and friendship.

"Every night I feel like I'm at Disney World."

Force de tour

Transporting Bereswill, her wig and costumes, her fellow cast members and their effects, the crew, the sets and everything else from town to town is the responsibility of tour coordinator Lynnlee Jewell. She also books hotels and transportation within cities, and "I work with our [public relations] department to establish all the PR events on the road."

It's a week apiece in most towns; earlier in the tour, there were places where the show did two-week "sit-downs."

So far, her duties have varied depending on the day. "What I always try to focus on is making sure all of the traveling arrangements are set in stone, making sure all of the hotels have our current rooming lists, making sure the buses are all organized to get from city to city, or from the hotel to the [venue].

"If those things don't happen, the show doesn't go on."

North Little Rock is the show's penultimate stop on the North American tour (Jewell acknowledges they're saving the best for second-to-last). After a break, at the end of the summer, the whole shebang heads to Japan. And Jewell will go along with it.

With the show getting ready to go overseas, "one of my main responsibilities right now is starting to get the documents ready for everybody to get their Japanese visas."

The soundtrack will be the Japanese version of the film. "We get the version of the soundtrack the way [the audience] heard it and transform it into our show," Jewell says. "For Japan, the skaters will go over the script and get the soundtrack in advance so they can rehearse."

Some cast members go so far as to actually learn the language when the show goes abroad. For example, it toured for a while in South and Central America; "We were in Mexico and many of them did actually learn Spanish so they would know what they were 'saying' and making it authentic."

The skaters don't actually speak or sing, at least not so the audience can hear them, Jewell acknowledges -- "They were born to skate, not to sing," she says -- but some of them "do kind of sing along" with the soundtrack, more or less under their breath, to help keep things in sync.

"They all really work hard to be authentic and to put on a really great performance no matter where we are in the world."

Jewell, a native of Hyattstown, Md., a little closer to Baltimore than it is to Washington, got the job two years ago, a month before she graduated from the University of South Carolina in August 2014.

"I graduated college and then went right out onto the road," she says, and it wasn't long before she had challenges to overcome.

"I don't think anybody really knew how big this was going to be" during the planning stages, she says. "The unit that we travel with is significantly larger than most Disney on Ice shows, so the challenge last year was sometimes our group was bigger than the hotels that we had contracted [had space], so we had to find second hotels.

"My second week on tour, we had all of our rooms for our show and we wanted to add a few more rooms, and the hotel had sold out because fans were coming in from all over" to see the show. "We managed to get everyone from Point A to Point B and a place for them to stay.

"We were on our way to one hotel and they gave me a call: There had been a pipe burst, and they had 15 rooms go out of commission. Luckily we managed to keep [everybody] in house; the hotel was sold out, however, and we had to kind of [double-bunk] up for the night, figuring they'd have it fixed by morning and folks could get into their rooms.

"That's the closest we ever got to being locked out."

Style on 05/03/2016