Aladdin
[Devin Dayley]
Review:
On Tuesday May 7, 2019 I saw Disney’s Aladdin at the George S. and Dolores Eccles Theater in Salt Lake City, Utah.
I have previously seen the show- once in New York City, on Broadway, and several times at Disneyland. This is a great show. It’s fun, childish, light-hearted and has the ability to make you feel like you are a child. It makes you believe that the world is right, love is true and easy, and everything will work out the way it’s supposed to.
Now, I don’t want to spend a lot of time talking about the cast but… they were great! I like when the travelling casts of shows are just as good or better than their Broadway counterparts because a lot of people do not go to New York City every year or multiple times a year to see shows. I mean, I do, but that is not a common thing. Travelling Broadway shows are going to be a lot of people’s only experience with a certain musical. The sound system was great! I went with my mom, and she agreed that the sound was perfect. It was just loud enough to embrace you and bring you into the fabled city of Agrabah but not too loud to be distracting or too abrasive.
While we’re on the subject of sound, I want to talk about the live orchestra. I LOVE a live orchestra
and my favorite part of a theater-going experience is listening to the orchestra warm up and play their instruments before the show. To me, it makes the experience special and different. I can remember walking down to the pit when I was younger to watch the orchestra warm up. Thinking about it makes my heart tingle. I felt sophisticated. I’m sure I didn’t look as sophisticated as I felt but that wasn’t important. I was in for a good time at the theater. Lately, I feel as if that “experiencing the theater” involvement of the audience has been going away and the thought of going to the theater being equivalent to going to the cinema breaks my heart. So it warmed my heart to sit in my seat before the show started and hear the orchestra down in the pit playing scales and getting their instruments ready.
Okay, my rant about orchestra’s can be over. This show is a nod to “old-style” Broadway. With more and more modern shows coming out, the fad seems to be a “spectacle”. Well, that has been the fad for a long time. Anyway, the spectacle of a show used to be the actual show aspects- the singing, the dancing, the story, the live instruments, etc. Now, however, the spectacle has to be bigger and more dazzling in order to get people’s attention. So, shows have tended to make themselves more of an immersive experience rather than just going and enjoying a Broadway show. This relates back to my orchestra rant. You will see shows that have music playing when you enter the theater so you can’t hear the orchestra warming up or, shows will shoot things into the audience or, the sets will be made of something that grabs the audience’s attention or the sets will be absent altogether.
My point of that rant is to say that this show doesn’t rely on things other than the story to grab the
audience. I mean, there is a genie, a magic carpet, and men and women dressed in scantily clad clothing, what more spectacle could you need?! So, you can hear the orchestra warming up, there is a proper overture, the sets look like normal, everyday sets and you’re still invested because of the story, the true spectacle.
This is a show for anyone, well almost anyone. If you love the story of Disney’s Aladdin you will love this show. If you love Broadway shows you will love this show. If you only love one of the aforementioned things, you will at least enjoy, if not love, this show. And finally, if you hate Broadway shows and you hate Disney’s Aladdin- first of all, I feel bad for you because of all the hatred in your life- and this is probably NOT a show you should see. I would rate this show a 9.6/10.
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