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Aladdin
I can't remember if I've mentioned here that the group of friends that bought a theater ticket subscription for Hamilton purposes last year decided to sign up again. We've seen three shows in the new season -- Something Rotten, a silly and entertaining comedy about Shakespeare, An American in Paris, based on the movie and involving excellent dancing and horrifying gender politics, and tonight, Aladdin, also based on the movie, yet another in the string of Broadway musicals based on Disney animated films. Although I hadn't seen the stage version before, it's still the media property in this season that I'm most familiar with, so I was looking forward to it, and I was pretty pleased.
I figured the story would need to be stretched out from movie length, and altered in other ways to be possible to perform in live action on a stage. I'd already seen some of this in action, when we watched The Lion King last year, but I found the changes to this show much more dramatic. One thing I noticed was a reliance on glitz and glamour -- shiny gold-painted sets, elaborate props, so very many sequins. They also cut the characters of Aladdin's monkey, Jasmine's tiger, and the magic carpet, although Iago survived in the form of a toady little guy who followed Jafar around. Instead, Aladdin had three human friends: Babkak, Kassim, and Omar. They get a couple songs and, in my opinion, added an interesting dimension to the story, by giving Aladdin more people to play off. They also had a fun musical number of their own. Jasmine also had three handmaidens who supported her and gave her advice.
Another notable series of changes was to the music. Howard Ashman, the lyricist who worked with Alan Menken on The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, died while the original movie was being written, and a number of his songs were cut from the film. The stage show edit restores three of them, a song about Aladdin wanting to make his mother proud and the two songs featuring Aladdin's friends, which suggests that those characters were in earlier drafts of the movie. I really wonder what the movie would have been like if Ashman had survived to write the whole thing.
Probably the best part of the show was the actor who played the Genie, who went all in with a big personality (the Wikipedia entry on the show compares him to the jazz great Cab Callaway). This also leads to one of the show's greatest weaknesses: not enough Genie. Except for the opening number (in which he replaces the old peddler as the narrator), he doesn't make his entrance until almost the end of the first act, far too long to go without him, and he could have been better used in the second act as well. The other actors all did well, but the Genie is so fun to watch that everyone else suffers a little in comparison.
I figured the story would need to be stretched out from movie length, and altered in other ways to be possible to perform in live action on a stage. I'd already seen some of this in action, when we watched The Lion King last year, but I found the changes to this show much more dramatic. One thing I noticed was a reliance on glitz and glamour -- shiny gold-painted sets, elaborate props, so very many sequins. They also cut the characters of Aladdin's monkey, Jasmine's tiger, and the magic carpet, although Iago survived in the form of a toady little guy who followed Jafar around. Instead, Aladdin had three human friends: Babkak, Kassim, and Omar. They get a couple songs and, in my opinion, added an interesting dimension to the story, by giving Aladdin more people to play off. They also had a fun musical number of their own. Jasmine also had three handmaidens who supported her and gave her advice.
Another notable series of changes was to the music. Howard Ashman, the lyricist who worked with Alan Menken on The Little Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast, died while the original movie was being written, and a number of his songs were cut from the film. The stage show edit restores three of them, a song about Aladdin wanting to make his mother proud and the two songs featuring Aladdin's friends, which suggests that those characters were in earlier drafts of the movie. I really wonder what the movie would have been like if Ashman had survived to write the whole thing.
Probably the best part of the show was the actor who played the Genie, who went all in with a big personality (the Wikipedia entry on the show compares him to the jazz great Cab Callaway). This also leads to one of the show's greatest weaknesses: not enough Genie. Except for the opening number (in which he replaces the old peddler as the narrator), he doesn't make his entrance until almost the end of the first act, far too long to go without him, and he could have been better used in the second act as well. The other actors all did well, but the Genie is so fun to watch that everyone else suffers a little in comparison.