ALADDIN continues Disney’s successful stream of live musicals adapted from animated hits, LITTLE MERMAID and TARZAN being notable exceptions. With an excellent score by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, with additional lyrics by Tim Rice and Chad Beguelin, fluid atmospheric sets designed by Bob Crowley, Natasha Katz’s effective lighting design and the myriad of colorful costumes created by Gregg Barnes, ALADDIN proves to be a thoroughly enchanting evening of theatrical magic. As a fan of magic, I must mention that the various impressive and surprising stage illusions were created by the legendary Jim Steinmeyer. After seeing this show, you will believe that they really were on a flying carpet!
If you somehow missed the animated classic, now celebrating is 26
The musical follows the animated feature in many ways but as always changes needed to be made to deal with physical reality versus the possibilities of animation and the needed expansion time-wise to fill two-plus hours in the theatre versus 80 minutes at the movies. Most of these changes occurred in the sidekick characters for Aladdin and Jafar. In the film, Aladdin had a monkey named Abu as a sidekick who helped him get what he needed to exist. On stage, Abu became a trio of friends who, along with Aladdin, form a sort of Four Musketeers quartet. Each has a distinct personality and favorite obsession (food, women, etc.) One of the most entertaining songs added for the stage is High Adventure sung by this trio of friends as they plan to rescue Aladdin from Jafar’s clutches. By and large, their addition to the show is actually an improvement to the original. Not as successful is the substitution of a real person in place of Jafar’s wise-cracking parrot Iago. As voiced by Gilbert Gottfried in the animated feature, Iago was the perfect comic foil to Jafar’s straight man. He was at times a sycophant, at other times sarcastically critical but even at his most irritating he was always funny. Unfortunately I found the live version of Iago to be mostly irritating and adding nothing to the musical. Luckily his role is not so large as to detract from the pleasures of the rest of the production.
Aladdin is at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood now through March 31, 2018. So do yourself a favor and hop on your magic carpet and head to Agrabah, I mean Los Angeles, for a really fun night at the theatre.
