How could a show about such an outsize hero as Hercules be so lame? That’s the question hovering over a Disney-backed musical that arrived at the Theater Royal, Drury Lane, in London on Tuesday, just nine months after the playhouse waved goodbye to “Frozen,” another screen-to-stage cull from the Disney catalog.
First seen in New York’s Central Park in 2019, “Hercules” has undergone significant changes in personnel on its way to the West End, including a German-language premiere in Hamburg. But all the tweaking hasn’t made a satisfying whole out of material that ought to feel a lot mightier than it does. Indeed, the production is so short — the second act is barely 40 minutes — that it begins to feel like its creators just wanted to get to the finish line and move on.
Based on a 1997 animated film (midlevel Disney in my view), “Hercules” casts its strongman central character (Luke Brady) as a puppyish young man trying to find his way in the world: as god, or mortal, or a hybrid of the two. To quote one of the better-known songs from Alan Menken and David Zippel’s score, Hercules needs to go from “zero to hero in no time flat.” That itself may help explain the rushed feel of the director Casey Nicholaw’s production.
Standing in the way of young Herc, as he is known, is his evil uncle Hades, who lords it over the underworld and casts a resentful eye on his brother Zeus’s perch on Mt. Olympus. The role of venomous Hades has been given to Stephen Carlile, whose previous stage credits include the sneering Scar in “The Lion King,” a villain cut from comparable cloth.
Hades’ two minions, Pain and Panic in the movie, here go by the rather more neutral names Bob and Charles. An inevitable love interest arrives in the cougarish form of Meg (Mae Ann Jorolan, a holdover from the Hamburg production), who has been enslaved by Hades but is quickly drawn to Hercules’s string vest (He is 10 percent toga and the rest muscle, we’re told, and the show features a largely bare-chested male chorus; for a family musical, “Hercules” doesn’t stint on suggestive eroticism.)
While Hades whines and moans — “I’ve lost everything but weight,” is how Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s jokey book puts it — Hercules takes advice from the wisecracking trainer Phil (Trevor Dion Nicholas), who advises the young man to “go the distance.” That happens to be the title of the show’s best-known song, which was nominated for an Oscar in 1998 and gets several reprises here without ever raising the roof.
The production’s self-evident task is to honor the movie’s sizable fan base while striking enough theatrical sparks to justify a live-action version. You have to wonder, therefore, at the absence of any wizardry to match the magic carpet ride in “Aladdin” — also directed onstage by Nicholaw — or the imposing icescape from “Frozen.”
The set from Dane Laffrey, a Tony winner this month for his gorgeous work on “Maybe Happy Ending,” consists mostly of movable white pillars overlaid with projections from the video designer George Reeve. But for all the talent to hand, the design is rarely as remarkable as Herc’s gleaming teeth, as the stage clears to allow our hero to do battle with monsters aplenty, including a Cyclops and five-headed hydra that resemble the outsized creatures you might find on a ride in a Disney theme park.
Carrying the production with the élan of a cheerful college quarterback, Brady is an immediately likable leading man, and Jorolan makes what she can of the predictably sassy Meg, who sounds very of-the-moment when she talks about “being seen.”
The show only kicks into gear with the appearance of the Muses, five wonder women familiar from the film who shimmy on- and offstage and narrate the proceedings. Giving off the air of calisthenics instructors (“Let’s pump some life into this legend”), they also tell us repeatedly after the intermission that “We’re back,” in case playgoers were unsure.
In the interest of these hard-working performers “being seen,” let’s give them their due: They are Sharlene Hector, Malinda Parris, Candace Furbert, Brianna Ogunbawo and Robyn Rose-Li. Between them, they lift a fragile show that still has a great distance to go on the way to success.
Hercules
Through March 28, 2026, at Theater Royal, Drury Lane; herculesthemusical.co.uk.
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