“I Know It’s Today” - The Song That Saved Shrek the Musical

(Photo: Dreams 'n' Wishes)

by Chris Peterson

Broadway history is full of misunderstood creatures. Some wear leather jackets and sing about rebellion. Some wear masks and haunt opera houses. And some are… well… giant green ogres in prosthetics.

Shrek the Musical has long lived in the swamp of Broadway misfires. Opening in 2008 with a sky-high budget and an even higher set of expectations, it was supposed to be DreamWorks’ answer to Disney’s Broadway machine. Instead, critics rolled their eyes, audiences shrugged, and after just over a year, the swamp dried up.

And yet, to this day, Shrek endures. The proshot (originally released on Netflix) circulates online with near-religious fervor. Clips of Sutton Foster belting circulate on TikTok like gospel. And for those willing to dig beneath the fart jokes and fairy-tale parody, there’s a surprising gem buried in Act One: “I Know It’s Today.”

On paper, it looks like a gag number—three versions of Fiona, little girl, teenager, and adult, sit in her tower and sing about the fairytale prince who will eventually rescue her. It could have been a punchline. It could have been a throwaway pastiche.

But “I Know It’s Today” is anything but. What Jeanine Tesori and David Lindsay-Abaire do is deceptively brilliant—they layer the three Fionas on top of one another, creating a musical timeline that collapses years of waiting into a single song. By the end, the voices overlap, frustration builds, and Sutton Foster’s adult Fiona bursts through with a belt that feels like both liberation and exhaustion.

It’s funny, yes—but it’s also devastating. We don’t just laugh at Fiona’s predicament. We feel the erosion of patience, the tightening knot of expectation, the stubborn insistence that this will be the day her life changes. It’s a universal ache. Who hasn’t thought, “My real life will start when…”?

This moment is quietly radical. In the Shrek films, Fiona is defined largely by the twist: she’s secretly an ogre. In the musical, though, she becomes something richer—a woman whose life has been on pause for years, trapped by a story written for her before she even had a say.

“I Know It’s Today” reframes her as the emotional anchor of the show. While Shrek’s journey is about learning self-acceptance, Fiona’s is about the cost of waiting for someone else to give her value. The song plants that seed early, and suddenly, her relationship with Shrek isn’t just comic banter—it’s the payoff of a lifetime of deferred hope.

Part of the reason Shrek the Musical stumbled, I’d argue, is that Broadway in 2008 didn’t know what to do with it. There was little appetite for a winking, meta, pop-culture-saturated show that wanted to parody Disney while also imitating it.

If Shrek had premiered a decade later, in the age of SpongeBob SquarePants: The Musical and TikTok musicals like Ratatouille, it might have been hailed as avant-garde. Its mix of sincerity and satire, its willingness to be big, silly, and still heartfelt, was simply ahead of its time.

And at the heart of that balance sits “I Know It’s Today.” A song that takes the show’s premise seriously enough to resonate, but lightly enough to still get the laughs.

There’s a reason Shrek the Musical has quietly built a cult following—it’s not just the garish costumes or the internet’s love of all things ironic and meme-able. It’s because the show contains flashes of genuine brilliance. And theatre fans, especially younger ones, know how to sniff out authenticity in unexpected places.

Watch the proshot again. When “I Know It’s Today” reaches its climax, you can hear the audience catch its breath. It’s the moment when the swamp suddenly feels like Broadway.

So yes, Shrek the Musical may never sit beside Hamilton in the pantheon. But maybe that’s not the point. Maybe its legacy lies in reminding us that even a commercial juggernaut can surprise us with artistry—that even in a swamp of spectacle, something tender and true can bloom.

And that, much like Shrek himself, musicals have layers.

The next time someone dismisses Shrek as a misfire, don’t argue. Just tell them to listen to “I Know It’s Today.” It’s the song that proves Fiona deserved her story—and maybe, just maybe, the song that saved the musical.

And side note: “Who I’d be” is the best Act 1 closer in the past 25 years. But that’s another column for another time.