VeggieTales co-creator talks about live show coming to Madison

VeggieTales Live is bringing its latest tour “God Made You Special” to Asbury United Methodist Church on March 22. VeggieTales co-creator Mike Nawrocki says this VeggieTales Live performance “is sort of a silly songs showcase.”

Tickets are 15 dollars in advance, 20 dollars at the door and 25 dollars for gold circle seating. The stage production is directed by Brian Roberts.

The show tells the tale of what happens when a song goes missing from the VeggieTale’s Silly Songs Warehouse. Tour-goers will hear Silly Songs such as “The Hairbrush Song,” “His Cheeseburger,” “Love My Lips” and many others.

Nawrocki said during a phone interview from Nashville, “It’s so much different seeing the characters live,” as opposed as to watching them on a TV. During the show, human characters interact with the veggies, and there are choreographed dancers.

“The voices for the characters Larry, Bob and Junior are all prerecorded,” said Nawrocki. The timing is important because the human characters do their lines live. The first VeggieTales Live production was in 2001, which retold two animated episodes onstage. “Since then we’ve done about 5 different live shows,” Nawrocki said.

Nawrocki strives to make VeggieTales “a quality program with characters that really engage kids.” He and fellow co-creator Phil Vischer made VeggieTales because they saw a need for stories reflecting a biblical view. At the end of every episode, a veggie tells kids “God made you special, and he loves you very much.” Nawrocki said VeggieTales is a resource for parents with young children. He acknowledged that not all children’s entertainment is something he deems appropriate and VeggieTales is something that both kids and parents can get behind.

The birth of VeggieTales was a culmination of almost a decade of friendship between the two creators.

“We met doing puppets in the mid 80s in college and just really had a great time performing together,” Nawrocki said. During the late 80s they worked in computer animation in Chicago, and a few years later they combined their puppetry and animation skills.

They began working on their idea in late 1992. They wanted characters that were simple and with no hair or limbs. First came a candy bar character, but Vischer’s wife Lisa, who is now the voice of junior asparagus, didn’t think morals coming from a candy bar would the best thing for children. They landed on vegetables as the choice item to animate to teach kids. “We lent our voices and own personalities to Bob and Larry,” said Nawrocki. He is Larry the Cucumber and Vischer is Bob the Tomato. “We related them as characters like Phil and I relate as friends.” They purposefully picked common vegetables for the main characters and gave them common names. Nawrocki said a tomato and a cucumber also have complementary shapes and colors.

Nawrocki said VeggieTales’ tales are “stories from real life redirected a little bit.” Some characters are modeled after people in the creators’ lives, including Madam Blueberry who was inspired by his mom and Jimmy and Jerry Gourd who were takes on their impersonations of someone they worked with at a post production house.

The first episode in premiered in 1993 and focused on teaching children how to deal with fear. While VeggieTales characters are similar shapes than the characters of the film Toy Story, Toy Story didn’t hit theaters until 1995. VeggieTales was first sold in Christian bookstores and caught on through word of mouth. Nawrocki said it took off and sparked the interest of bigger retailers around 1995 or 1996. The bigger retailers wanted the biblical storylines toned down. Vischer and Nawrocki would not alter the nature of VeggieTales, so they decided to turn down those retailers. Later the creator of Barney took VeggieTales as is into the mass market through the distribution channel he created through Barney.

“God Made You Special” will be at Asbury United Methodist Church on Hughes Road in Madison on at 6 p.m. on March 22. Tickets are 15 dollars in advance, 20 dollars at the door and 25 dollars for gold circle seating. The stage production is directed by Brian Roberts.