Read this: At long last, the story of how the Ninja Turtles became a rock band

Ah, the ’90s.
Today’s “sure, that sounds interesting, I’ll go ahead and click on that, whoops 10 minutes have gone by and I am riveted” read is this story from (of all places) GameSpot: A surprising look at the origins of the Coming Out Of Our Shells Tour, a live show in the form of a concert-with-plot centered on an up-and-coming rock band. And who was in that band, precisely? Why, the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, of course.
You could be forgiven for thinking that this tour, which saw audio-animatronic heads lip-syncing to original Turtle tunes, was cooked up in some marketing executive’s office. The idea seems on its surface like a soulless cash grab based in pizza chain synergy (the tour was sponsored by Pizza Hut) and the hope that audience members would buy T-shirts, toys, and those flashy magic wand things you can get at entertainment events aimed at children. Not so!
In reality, this entire endeavor was born out of a desire two “punky little kids” had to change musical theater. “I started out as a musical theater performer in New York, working as a dancer and a singer in musical theater and industrials,” Bob Bejan, who co-wrote the album and wrote and produced the live show, told GameSpot. At the time, though—the mid-1980s—Broadway musicals were a lot different than they are in 2020, and Bejan had the first-person experience to know it after performing in revivals of both West Side Story and Grease. “There really [was] not, other than like Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals, a lot of rock and roll in the theater like it is now,” he said.
“I wanted to be more than a dancer, and just a performer. And I always thought I had an aspiration for a bigger creative vision,” Bejan remembered. “I wrote a musical, and I had this very strong point of view that popular music was something that Broadway needed.”