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One of theatre’s greatest mysteries is how Disney literally made the most successful musical of all time and then proceeded to learn absolutely nothing from it. Virtuoso director Julie Taymor included all the dumb stuff required by the Mouse in her version of The Lion King – farting warthogs, basically – but nonetheless crafted an audacious and iconic production that departed radically from the aesthetic of the film and is still in theatres today. Subsequent Disney musicals like Aladdin and Frozen aren’t bad, but they take zero risks – effectively just plonking the film onstage – and are not in theatres today.
And here comes Hercules, the next in the megacorp’s long line of perfectly adequate, not very imaginative adaptations of its bountiful ’90s animated roster.
Book of Mormon director Casey Nicholaw’s production is good looking and high energy. Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s book is appropriately big hearted with a handful of very funny gags. The show’s not-so-secret weapon is the retention of the film’s sassy quintet of singing Muses. Here turbocharged into a full-on gospel group, they’re a whole lot of finger snapping, head shaking, quick-changing fun, and also add a note of character to Alan Menken’s likeable but unremarkable Alan Menken-style score.
Hercules is a unit of generic Disney stage entertainment
However, the Muses are also symptomatic of the fact that the show’s Ancient Greece comes across as a reskinned small-town America, without having any comment to make on small-town America. Everyone has American accents, and does American things: the notoriously vindictive goddess Hera is reimagined as a twinkly-eyed all-American mom. While there’s a vague nod to Hellenistic art, there were endless opportunities to have done something visually audacious and aesthetically interesting, and they were all passed upon. Sure, The Lion King does insist on the accents, but Taymor’s production is pointedly steeped in vivid pan-African aesthetics. Here, Dane Laffrey’s sets and George Reeves’s video design are often impressive, but they never don’t look like a themed restaurant (to be fair, one scene is actually set in a themed restaurant).
All that accepted, it’s a sturdy action-adventure romp that absolutely does the trick and is eminently worth taking The Kids to during the hols. It begins when Hercules is born to chief gods Zeus and Hera (classical scholars, just sit this one out). The infant is set to enjoy a heavenly existence on Mount Olympus until Stephen Carlile’s enjoyably batshit Hades strips away the baby’s immortality. Cast out of Olympus and raised by a human single mother, Luke Brady’s adult Hercules belatedly discovers his divine parentage and resolves to become a hero, dragging Trevor Dion Nicholas’s gruff warrior trainer Phil out of retirement to assist him. Heroic exploits follow: the special effects aren’t groundbreaking, but they’re good fun, especially the setpiece battle between Hercules, Phil and a many-headed puppet hydra.
Brady is a boyish and likeable lead. His permawhite smile is bigger than his pecs – but it’s kind of the point that he’s not a beefcake, but rather an affable young man bewildered by his own strength. Mae Ann Jorolan gives good ‘sassy love interest’ as Hercules’s sassy love interest, who is called Meg for some reason. They have a particularly great scene together where Meg is lecturing the smitten young man about how it’s misogynist to assume she needs his help, and he keeps beatifically zoning out to sing about how hot she is.
It’s all absolutely fine, and accepting it’s not a screechingly ambitious piece of work then perhaps all it really lacks is a big showstopper moment. The songs are solid, but there’s no ‘Circle of Life’/‘A Whole New World’/‘Let It Go’-style megabanger. Carlile’s Hades turning into a much bigger puppet version of himself in the final showdown almost does the trick visually, but the scene as a whole is a muddle: it’s unclear where the climactic battle between the gods is happening, or why it happens when it does, and the combat is pretty wishy washy until the afore-mentioned giga-puppet turns up.
Disney musicals have vast budgets and The Lion King is an ongoing reminder that even staying within the lines of the IP, bold creatives can achieve something special with that dosh. Hercules, though, is one unit of generic Disney stage entertainment. It has charm, because it’s adapted from a charming film and talented people have made it, but it’s definitely not going to go down in legend.
★★★
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