After a successful Kickstarter campaign, a solidified venue, and a few rehearsals under its belt, BALLS: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comédy ran into a problem back in March: its lead actor had to drop out of the production. The Pokémon parody show was three weeks away from opening night at Caveat, a comedy theater on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. The Professor, a clear homage to the Pokémon Professor who greets players in most games and gives them their first monster, had to embody a nostalgic presence in theatergoers’ minds, and with only weeks to go before opening, co-creators Brandon Zelman and Harrison Bryan had a wild idea. What if they got Stuart Zagnit, the original voice actor of Professor Oak, the iconic scientist who opens the original Game Boy games and serves as Ash Ketchum’s mentor in the animated series?
“Brandon and I sort of like, locked ourselves in a room and said like, ‘What do we do?’” Bryan tells Kotaku. “What’s the biggest Hail Mary we can throw right now? Getting the original voice of the actual professor that we grew up with seemed like the most insane possible route, but we had known that Stuart was a musical theater performer for much of his career, and we had connected previously a few years ago.”
It’s true. While most Pokémon fans will know him as Samuel Oak, the goofy but heartfelt professor who can’t remember his grandson’s name, Zagnit’s Broadway career goes back decades, with the veteran actor having played iconic roles like Seymour in Little Shop of Horrors and the Mayor of Whoville in the first run of Seussical. Would a prestigious actor who had long since hung up his lab coat be willing to don it once more to spoof his old character in an off-Broadway musical? Especially with such a short window between seeing the script and his first performance? Hell yeah, actually.
Zagnit tells me that his first impression of Balls was that its combination of slapstick, crude humor, and a surprisingly pithy commentary on the culture of the Pokémon games jumped off the page upon his initial read-through. However, it was when he heard the show’s original music that he was especially taken aback by the group’s songwriting chops.
“There’s development in there, there’s variety, and there’s jokes within the music,” Zagnit said. “It’s kind of a full meal of entertainment. You’ve got the musicality for people who like original musicals. It walks that line of being a little naughty. It’s not for kids, really. It’s for former kids who grew up in this world.”
Along with getting a chance to throw on a lab coat again, Zagnit says that one of the most rewarding parts of Balls is getting to explore new sides of the archetype he didn’t in his stint as Professor Oak.
“[The show] has made me think about the character in new ways because they’ve added dimensions to his backstory, which was something that even when I was doing the series, we never investigated or discussed,” Zagnit says. “We’d just go and read the words every week and whenever they called us. So it’s, it actually took me back into it and then [I could] sort of revisit it with a whole new lens.”
Much of that new introspection has come from the satirical basis of Balls. While the entire production is legally distinct from Pokémon and stars 151 original “Collectabuddies,” the show still parodies a lot of the original games’ concepts, including some that were based solely within video game mechanics rather than meant to be interrogated as actual parts of the fiction or world-building. Zagnit stars as The Professor, who, alongside his “piece of shit” grandson (named by an audience member), created the capture devices to put monsters in, largely due to his own fear of these creatures, rather than a desire to befriend and study them. With the premise of capturing monsters in balls put under a microscope, Balls spends much of its run-time picking apart the logistics of the Pokémon world for the gags. There’s an entire segment dedicated to unpacking the mental toll a monster might feel after being left in a PC box for too long. A player can only carry six critters on their belt at a time, and any excess captures end up in a storage system until they’re either added to the team or released back into the wild. But more often than not, Pokémon live the rest of their lives in these boxes, and in Balls, those little guys are depicted as having lost their minds.
“There’s something very fun about when you investigate around the corners of things that were not created to be really investigated,” Zelman said. “It’s like if you really dig deeper into a fairy tale and you try to pick apart those pieces, or if you’re looking at an early Bible verse or something and you’re trying to piece it together. It’s like, well, maybe an allegory is meant to just be what it is. This is something that we’ve been commenting on. A franchise that’s been around for almost 30 years now and a story that has to be sustained over that amount of time across different kinds of platforms and mediums, obviously it’s grown so, so big, how could all of it hold without one part of it bursting?”
Some of the topics Balls touches on, such as the ethics of keeping monsters in balls or what someone does in this culturally hegemonic world if they aren’t trying to be the very best like no one ever was, have been explored in Pokémon games themselves as the franchise has grown, but never with this sharp of an edge. Ultimately, however, the show’s use of over-the-top shock humor serves to harken back to the series’ original lessons.
“We found that as we kept developing the piece and as we brought in actors and composers to ask us these deeper questions about what kind of story we’re telling, the whole notion of not holding ourselves to the label that others or society puts on us was why we fell in love with these games to begin with,” Bryan says.
But how do you engage with these ideas when Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are notorious for squashing fan projects and even competitors that get a little too close to Pikachu for their liking? Very carefully.
A big part of that is the creation of 151 new monsters that aren’t direct retreads of the Pokémon people know and love. In fact, most of these critters are crude sketches that Zelman says are meant to be representative of the “juvenile and silly” time in our lives when we would nickname a Pokémon something like “fartmouth.” So you will likely not see anything resembling these guys in a Pokédex. Though there are some clear homages to characters like Snorlax’s road-blocking ass, the mischievous Squirtle Squad, and even some deep cuts like the Missingno glitch, Zelman and Bryan say it was important that the visuals of the show be “nostalgic or evocative,” but not using any trademarked imagery or language. As such, Balls falls under parody and satire protections, and the pair hopes that it can exist alongside other big parody musicals like Puffs and Stranger Sings.
“We have all those protections and freedom of speech as well, as long as we continue to comment on the material and not actually utilize any of it, I think we’re okay,” Bryan says.
With all the legal hoops jumped through and probably the best man for the job in the leading role, Balls played a few shows at Caveat with Zagnit as its leading man. However, getting to the point where he was willing to engage with the role again after he stopped playing Professor Oak was a difficult process for him. He originated Oak in the English dub and went on to play him for over 400 episodes before he and most of the English cast were unceremoniously recast in 2006 when production changed hands from 4Kids to The Pokémon Company itself. While some actors stayed on the project, several others, including Zagnit and original Ash Ketchum voice actor Veronica Taylor, were replaced for the remainder of the series’ run. Though he hasn’t officially played Oak in nearly 20 years, he says that in all the time he spent playing the guy, he has “bonded completely” with the character, and they are still “a part” of one another.
“I was like, really angry and bitter and sat around grousing all the time,” Zagnit says. “Little by little, I began to understand that my fellow original voice actors were starting to turn up at these anime conventions, and I said, ‘Oh, maybe there is a life after the series.’ The fans haven’t forgotten us, but the fans grew up with us. That really changed my whole feeling about it and really brought me back to it.”
Even though most members of the original cast have long hung up their Poké Ball belts, Zagnit and Taylor still frequent anime conventions and have fans who know them from their original roles. While Taylor isn’t in Balls’ main cast, she did perform in one of the New York performances as one of the audience volunteers, playing the “10-year-old kid” who takes part in the opening number. She has also signed merchandise that’s on sale at the show’s booth, and will host its newly announced New York Comic-Con panel in October. Bryan says that they hope the panel, which will function as a “bonus level” to the show with its own sketches and splash zone, and other events that the cast has attended alongside Zagnit, will help them recruit more former actors into its extended family, whether that be by being involved in the show or helping to spread the word.
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The question is, will familiar voices be enough to bring non-musical fans into the fold? Even with runaway successes like the Wicked movie, musicals are still a hard sell to some of Balls’ intended audience. Zelman says that musicals have somehow become a “dirty word,” as evidenced by the 2024 Mean Girls film obfuscating that it’s even a musical in its promotion. To some extent, Zelman understands the hesitation some audiences might feel about musicals because they’ve been “burned” by bad ones.
“I get pretty frustrated with theater when it feels like it’s just serving theater makers,” Zelman says. “It feels too circular, right? We shouldn’t just be making this for each other. We should be, like, offering something to other people.”
Several Pokémon fans who have little to no experience with musicals have shown up to see Balls and enjoyed themselves, so Bryan hopes that the shared love of the material being affectionately spoofed can help get people who have historically been musical-averse into seats at the Caveat and beyond.
“Pokémon being the number one IP on the planet [means it] has such a spectrum of fans, and many of them are super introverted and not very social and I think they would like this show a lot if they trusted the idea of, like, seeing a live performance event. And it’s just not in their vocabulary,” Bryan says. “I’m not concerned that the material won’t connect. I’m eager to find out how we can help bridge the gap between people who wouldn’t necessarily do something like this. How do we gain trust from the less social or the less extroverted of the fandom of the community?”
For now, much like everything else about Balls, it’s a “word of mouth” game. The Comic-Con panel, however, is one of the biggest stages the show has ever had, and it’s in front of a lot of New York locals. But what about the rest of the world? If Balls is localized to New York City, is its audience not inherently pretty limited? Well, Bryan and Zelman have thought about that and hope to use their growing social media reach to emulate something like how StarKid Productions hosts entire video versions of its parody musicals online.
“We have filmed all of these performances and we’re hoping to—in pieces—start presenting the material and hopefully getting some virality in that way,” Bryan says.
For now, Balls will return to the Caveat after a brief break, but Zelman and Bryan are “flirting” with the idea of a traveling show, and hopefully Professor Oak himself is on board. Zelman and Bryan have grand hopes that Balls can carve its own space in the pantheon of musical parodies, and they hope that Zagnit will stay on board as long as he’s willing and able. The character description for the Professor says he’s a “spry 100 years old,” so they have plenty of time. Zagnit says as long as he’s mobile and enthusiastic, the show “keeps [him] young.”
“We are Stuart’s children and he’s our child,” Zelman says. “We’re all each other’s children. We love each other dearly. I would love for Balls to remain part of his incredible legacy, and we’d love to have him as part of this project for as long as he is willing and able to do so. So, yes, please, forever.”
To keep track of BALLS: The Monster-Catchin’ Musical Comédy’s upcoming dates and developments, you can check out the show on Instagram.
