Is there a recipe for success? And if so, why hasn’t it been more widely distributed? Shrek the Musical, cooked up for the stage from DreamWorks’s eponymous film by David Lindsay-Abaire, Jeanine Tesori and Jason Moore, deftly soars over Broadway blunders—will the plot retain any morsel of integrity? Will the music be sugarcoated or contain some morsel of brilliance? Will the sets and costumes try to compensate for a lack of thematic content and witty dialogue? And the big question, will it be worth watching? 

In a word, yes. Take one disgruntled ogre, slightly soured by his encounter with a brood of displaced fairytale creatures, add an evil lord with a Napoleon complex and a propensity for OCD, fold in a talking donkey with a loveable but slightly grating bray and mix with a quirky, enchanted princess in need of a long-overdue rescue. Stir with a pinch of bathroom humor, add a healthy dose of moral fiber, bake until complexity arises, set aside to cool and coat with a fine dusting of fantasy. 

The result? A single serving of non-stop laughs, surprisingly non-cloying musical numbers, unexpected chemistry and a brilliant evening of escape that is more adult humor than bedtime story. Of course, adding the incomparable talent of Brian D’Arcy James, Sutton Foster, Christopher Sieber and Daniel Breaker doesn’t hurt, but it is the decisions that occurred behind the scenes that truly make this a winning dish among a Broadway menu of otherwise soggy soufflés. Wit is balanced by tenderness, morality tempered by moments of vulnerability and humanity, and the show is just downright funny. Where else on Broadway can you see a fire-breathing dragon fall in love with a donkey and a princess and ogre sing about one-upmanship in a song punctuated (literally) by flatulence? 

What saves Shrek from an early dismissal as a silly show about potty humor and magic is its total investment in its core value—the retelling of the Golden Rule. Trumped up with jazzy numbers, inside jokes about the musical industry, sexuality and a little admonition about general human nature, Shrek teases the audience into moral acquiescence before we know what hit us. By the time we are rocking out to pinnochio and a talking gingerbread man belt out lyrics like “let your freak flag fly,” we already feel like part of the fairytale, and there is no turning back—we are the secret ingredient to this near-perfect recipe. And it tastes good.