From zero to hero in no time flat…is not quite how I’d go about describing Disney’s Hercules live on stage. There was a lot I liked about Disney’s Hercules on the West End but felt it didn’t quite live up to the high expectations of a Disney classic adapted to stage.
The movie of Disney’s Hercules is one of my favourite Disney classics that came right at the end of their high period of the 1990s. The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, The Lion King, Pocahontas and Hercules – an incredible run of all-time greats. That then started to become more hit and miss with the era of Mulan, Emperor’s New Groove, Treasure Planet and such like. Still classic movies, but arguably not quite the same heights as the mermaid, beasts and lions of a few years before.
Hercules feels like a good candidate for a stage adaptation.
The promise is we’ll see all the classic characters songs and scenes from the movie come to life on stage, although what we get feels like it falls a little short on that front. All the songs are there, but characters are heavily stripped back, and scenes that could wow us with gods and monsters are lacking in godly powers and in monsters.
What I liked
The show has all the great songs from the movie, and I think some extra ones in there too. The songs sound great, and the standard of singing and dancing is top notch as you’d expect from a big budget West End production. There’s a lot of humour in the show as well, and it’s far from all just lifted from the movie. In fact, I felt a lot of the script felt very different from the movie. Certainly, some more adult jokes in there at times. But it’s been a couple of years since I watched the animated movie, so maybe I’m just misremembering.
Something I was very impressed with was the show’s depiction of the underwood where Hades lives. It was simple, but to show the flow of souls doomed to the underworld that you see in the film, the stage solution was actually pretty genius. There was a circle beam of light which created the effect of the stream of souls, and then to show people’s ghosts trapped there they used a very simple piece of cloth that would float on an upstream of warm air to give the scene that it was a trapped lost soul floating away from actor’s bodies after they collapse on the ground. Simple, but effective.
They also pulled off a few neat tricks to demonstrate Hercules’ mighty strength with foam statues or boulders and giant logs that he could easily pick up and break.
Performance wise, Hades stood out for his comedic delivery, and the actors playing Hercules, Meg and Phil were all likeable and had their charm, even if I felt they didn’t quite live up to their animated counterparts.
What I didn’t like
Ok, so let me just get this off my chest. There was no Pegasus. No flying horse! Huge missed opportunity to cut this out as the character in the movie has the personality of a springer spaniel and is all kinds of fun. I get that portraying it would have either required a pantomime horse style situation or some advanced puppetry like Warhorse…but to be honest, both of those would have been better options than not including him at all.
Then there’s Phil, who in the movie is voiced by Danny Devito, and is a goaty legged centaur with little horns and literally looked like Danny Devito topless from when he played a stripper in Friends. In the stage version he is presented a much more competent looking cool guy, who didn’t seem to have anything mythical about him at all. Still a fun character with a good song and humour, but lacking the magic.
The stripping away of magic and gods continued with the two ghost demon minions of Hades, who are guy two guys on weird looking period clothes – no sense that they’re otherworldly at all. This just left them as an average Abbott and Costello like pair of bumbling henchmen.
And then there’s the lack of monsters. If you remember the movie, when Hades sets an attack on Zeus, he gets this giants to attack and Zeus is struggling to fend them off with a lack of magical lightning bolts. Well, the giants aren’t in it. To me these could have been created with a combination of projection and oversized puppetry. The kinds of which were used in the Lion King where several puppeteers worked together to create Mufasa’s face in the clouds…but oh wait…the Hercules show did use this method, but to create a giant version of Hades replacing the giants in this same sequence. Fair enough, but this was just a static Hades head on a stick and then puppeteers controlling two big hands and two big shoulder pads. It really seemed like the villain Andros from the Star Fox video game if you get that reference.
Other monsters included were a giant rat looking thing which was just one guy wearing a literal big T-Rex costume which had got fur glued to it. You could actually see the dinosaur scales underneath where the costume had been adapted. Then there was a Cyclops, but scale wise this was little more than a Mr Blobby style costume with a big head to add height. And the Hydras with their ever-increasing amount of heads was perhaps the biggest missed opportunity than had an easy fix. After cutting the first head from the neck of the beast, more heads appeared, but these heads were just big puppet heads being held by guys running around freely with no sense of the heads all being connected to a single body. Why not create this like a Chinese dragon where there are long flowing cloth bodies to give the beast some scale?
Still, the show was good even if these omissions and changes made it feel a lacking in monsters and mythical elements.
Another issue for me is that although, Luke Brady, the guy who played Hercules performed well, he didn’t look like the most powerful man on Earth. He was smaller than I expected, and there was a guy in the ensemble who was a lot bigger built than wonder boy, as Meg kept calling him. Of course you shouldn’t cast someone just on their look, but then why cast an effective extra who makes your Hercules look small?
Final thoughts
I had fun with the show. Truthfully, the only real downside was that I was excited to see the likes of Phil, Pegasus and giant monsters realised on stage as I remembered them from the animated film, and this show chose not to do that. That was a shame, but it doesn’t mean that what they did instead wasn’t enjoyable, because it was.
For fans of the movie, I’m sure you’ll have fun seeing a version of it realised live on stage, but it comes with the caveats of the adaptation being compromised with a lot of the Disney magic taking the hits.
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