Adapted from Disney's 1992 animated film, Aladdin earned James Monroe Iglehart the 2014 Tony Award for Best Featured Actor in a Musical for his performance as the Genie.
Family-oriented Broadway musicals can sell out school-break and holiday weeks well in advance, so booking further ahead is generally wiser than counting on rush or lottery seats during peak periods.
Howard Ashman died in 1991, before the 1992 film he had helped shape was finished, and a good deal of his work for it was cut along the way. The stage version puts some of it back. 'Proud of Your Boy', a song he wrote with Alan Menken for the film and which never made it in, becomes the show's emotional anchor; 'High Adventure' and 'Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim' return with the three friends the film had replaced with a monkey. Four further songs were written for the stage, with lyrics by Chad Beguelin, who also wrote the book. Tim Rice's film lyrics remain.
Where The Lion King reinvented its source, Aladdin accepts that a stage cannot do animation and reaches instead for an older idiom. Casey Nicholaw directs and choreographs it as a period revue: tap breaks, a chorus line, a Genie who works the house like a headliner rather than a character. That is closer to the 1930s comedies the material was always winking at than to Disney's animation style, and it explains why the show is funnier live than the film is.
The production had its premiere at Seattle's 5th Avenue Theatre in the summer of 2011 and opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre in March 2014 after substantial rewriting. It drew five Tony nominations and won one, for James Monroe Iglehart as the Genie — a performance built on the show's centerpiece, a Vegas-scale rendering of 'Friend Like Me' that arrives roughly halfway through the first act and stops the evening dead.
The technical set piece everyone asks about is the carpet, which flies during 'A Whole New World' with no visible support and no wires that read from the house. The production has never explained the mechanism. It is worth noting the New Amsterdam itself: a 1903 Art Nouveau house on 42nd Street that had decayed into a ruin before Disney restored it in the 1990s, and whose interior is a considerable part of what a visitor is paying to sit inside.
214 W 42nd St, New York, NY 10036 · Official site ↗
Aladdin is a stage musical based on the Walt Disney Animation Studios 1992 film of the same name, with a book by Chad Beguelin, music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman, Tim Rice and Beguelin. It resurrects three songs written by Menken and Ashman for the film but not used, and adds four songs written by Menken and Beguelin.
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