Aladdin - Prince Edward Theatre

Is Disney’s Aladdin just a glorified panto, basically a local community show with a bigger budget? Yes. Did I still enjoy it? Yes. So is it being a glorified panto a problem?

Well, Yes and No, inevitably.

No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got some of the best songs by Menken, Rice, and the great Ashman (alongside some of their filler material). No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got the glitz of however many diamonds, sparkle everywhere. No, it’s not a problem when the dancing’s this wonderful mix of Broadway, Bollywood and Banghra, culturally all over the place but choreographically fun. No, it’s not a problem when Jasmine has her very well-received and very greatly-needed feminist awakening. No, it’s not a problem when you’ve got a genie, more on which later. No, it’s not a problem if it’s fun, and it was fun. And no, it’s not a problem when Dean John Wilson has his pecs out. It’s fun, I laughed a lot, it made me smile, and sometimes that’s all you need.

But sometimes it’s not. Sometimes you need more. Some of the best shows I’ve ever seen have made me smile, but there’s been depth, be it a real inherent kindness to them, or a real political positivity, or a genuine joie de vivre. This made me smile, and then I left with nothing to keep me smiling to take away from it, beyond the tunes I knew before I went in. And this is why it’s not good enough that Aladdin is simply good enough.

So yes, scrape beyond this very thin surface and it’s a very big problem that this is a simple cheap and cheerful panto with a simple script. It’s a fun panto, don’t get me wrong, but it carries with it all the connotations and clichés and issues of panto, most problematically the cheapness and shallowness of provincial ones. Firstly, Aladdin is not Disney’s deepest work at 90 minutes, and at roughly 150 minutes no real reason for expansion is added. Dan Rebellato once wrote of ‘Mr Potato Head’ characteristics – where a person’s motivations and desires seem attached, added apropos of the person underneath and not a priori. Whilst it’s great that Jasmine says “I want to make my own destiny and not belong to a man”, one line doth not a feminist make, and rather than expand upon this Jasmine still remains the macguffin, the prize to be won. Aladdin himself is just as thin: one song doth not a character make, and (sorry, Michael!) “Proud Of Your Boy” makes Aladdin a much less fun character than the scamp he was in the shorter movie. The villains weren’t exactly Richard III in the cartoon, but turning Iago into Artie Ziff makes him less exciting, as does giving Jafar the most clichéd ‘villain tango’ song to buff his part up. Beyond characters, the script is no better than any old school panto, from puns that actually made my eyes roll to each scene being not animated magic but old-school standing still in shonky sets. I mean, hell, the lyrics of “High Adventure” mock the cheesiness of it all, and that’s one of the show’s high points.

Perhaps that would be fine in a panto, but the issue here is one almost external to the show. This isn’t Shinfield Player’s Theatre’s Aladdin, this is “Disney’s Aladdin”. It’s a problem of expectation and possibility, and execution and reality. Aladdin is possibly the most visually inventive animation of this period. Script-wise, the film is the same enjoyable muddle as this – Scheherazadian Arabic narrative which takes a Broadway back-seat when the Genie’s centre-stage – but it’s a treat to the eyes, from the Chaplin-esque Magic Carpet, to Busby Berkley music numbers, to Lawrence of Arabia in pen and ink. And Disney knows how to do visually inventive on stage: for all the criticism of The Lion King it made you believe, long before War Horse, that pieces of wood on someone’s head was a gazelle gracefully galloping or that a mighty man in a silly costume really was the king of the jungle, and Beauty and the Beast recreated the movie so wonderfully that, to my untrained eye, I still don’t know how those cartoon characters came to life, how the beast became a prince again. Disney has a reputation, a standard raised. How, wondered we as we went in, would they do the talking parrot? Elephants on stage? A magic carpet?

You know the answer: it’s a bloke, it’s just some dancers, and the carpet is so shoehorned in that the line explaining it is a joke. As is most of the staging. The market is some cardboard boxes and curtains. The cave is diamonds. The castle is a white wall. The genie came out of an obvious trapdoor. Perhaps it’s simply that this is unfortunate to open almost alongside Harry Potter, where both boundaries are pushed and simple theatrical illusions are well-incorporated, or perhaps it’s that Disney have raised my expectations too high through other work. I loved the choreography: as I say, Casey Nicholaw brings Broadway theatricality whilst respecting the Arabian source, and that amidst the magic a story ABOUT MAGIC requires would be great, but the staging is so cheap, so unimaginative – it’s how you would stage Aladdin were you to stage it in a school with limited means, and whilst sometimes stripped back IS magic, it isn’t when it’s a million-pound Disney project in such a huge theatre, and that truly matters here. When one gets to the finale, one doesn’t expect him to literally turn into a snake, but the expectation of an imaginative substitution is founded on Disney’s track record; to finish this with everyone standing still in a line and two nifty costume changes simply is not good enough for the West End, not good enough for Disney. There’s no attempt to emulate the fantastical transfigurations of the cartoon, nor to replace it with a theatrical variant. There’s just people standing still. Not even something simple choreographed. Just stillness. It was hard not to be underwhelmed.

So duff script with tacked-on ‘big-ideas’ but diminished whimsy, material over-stretched, and a really, really cheap feel to it – surely that would overwhelm any feelings of goodwill towards a moderately entertaining panto? Oh, it does. But... Really, Aladdin isn’t an Arabian fairytale, or a Broadway musical, or a Disney cartoon. It’s a star turn. The movie had Robin Williams doing a child-friendly GOOOOOOOOOD MOOOOOORNING VIETNAM! and getting away with daylight robbery. This has this year’s Olivier winner Trevor Dion Nicholas. Where this fails is underdoing the potential theatricality Aladdin offers, but where this succeeds is casting someone who understands the theatricality of Broadway, the theatricality of Robin Williams and the theatricality of Panto, alongside his own effervescence. If the Nicholas Brothers had a child with Neil Patrick Harris/James Cordern’s Tony Hosts, then there’s been a major moral, biological and time-travelling transgression you’d have this genie. His joy is infectious – when he smiles, you smiles, and boy does he smile – and that goes a long way, but he’s also got a natural charisma, clear affection for the role and the show, one hell of a role to sink his teeth and not insubstantial talent into, and every second he’s on stage it’s perhaps the most fun you can have in the West End at the mo. He sparkles where the show does not. When he comes on it’s a Broadway extravaganza, bringing 42nd Street and Busby Berkley and Broadway razzmatazz galore. When he’s doing this, it’s transcendent. It’s pure Broadway, and (literally) pure gold.

So it’s a curate’s Faberge egg. Am I just being churlish because I wanted more glitz? Again, yes and no; it’s indisputably an awful awful awful lot of fun, but it’s little more than that which it could be, should be and sets us up to be. “Disney’s Aladdin” is a mess, redeemed by one supporting turn: the Aladdin/Jasmine plot is an overstreched underdeveloped muddle which removes an awful lot of the wit from the cartoon (especially as three of the cartoon’s best characters – the carpet, Abu and Iago – are predominantly visual beings) and stumbles on in a slightly clichéd, theatrically underwhelming way. But “Disney’s Genie”, starring Trevor Dion Nicholas – it’s padded out with too much Aladdin malarkey, but what a show that is!

Disclaimer: I may sound like I’m being rude about Shinfield Player’s Theatre. Not at all. It’s the best theatre in the Shinfield area of Reading. They have a standard to maintain. Yesterday they had Dean Friedman.