Can You Feel a Hit Tonight?

In the fall of 1998, all anyone wanted to talk about was the pyramid. It was a giant motorized contraption that dominated the stage during the Atlanta pre-Broadway tryout of Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida, Disney's musical retelling of the tale of ancient Egypt that was the basis for Verdi's famous opera. The pyramid opened, it closed, it transformed itself into different sets. It seemed a suitably dazzling follow-up to Julie Taymor's innovative production of The Lion King, Disney's Broadway hit. The trouble was it didn't work, at least not very often. "Every time I saw the show, it broke down," says composer Elton John. "It got on the cast's nerves. It dragged everybody down."

The pyramid wasn't the only thing not working in Atlanta. Shortly after the run was finished, Disney's theatrical honchos fired the director, choreographer and design team and set out to do a major retooling. After two big Broadway successes, the entertainment giant seemed on the verge of its first stage pratfall. Not everybody on the Great White Way was prepared to shed tears.

Now, a year and a half later, Aida--show revamped, title pared down--is just days away from its Broadway opening. And darned if they haven't pulled it off. Unlike Beauty and the Beast, Aida doesn't arrive with a presold children's story and a hit movie to lure the family throngs. Unlike The Lion King, it doesn't break new theatrical ground--not even for the pyramid, whose only remnant is a laser triangle glimpsed briefly in the second act. But on its own terms, Aida is a big, bright, ingeniously staged show that--not going too far out on a limb here--should be Broadway's next monster hit.

To be sure, this is unmistakably a Disney product, mounted and mass-audience-tested like a theme-park ride. The opera's tragic story--about an Egyptian captain, Radames, and his forbidden love for the slave princess Aida--has been put through the studio's familiar food processor. Each of the main characters clashes with an authoritarian father; Aida is a feisty, headstrong heroine in the line of Mulan and Pocahontas; the bad guys dress in fascistic black trench coats. (And while the Nubian slaves are mostly African Americans, the Egyptians seem to have acquired a blond gene.) Those Disney magicians have even found a way to retain the opera's tragic ending and still have everyone live happily ever after.

Yet if Aida falls short of being a musical for adults, it's a musical that adults can sit through with pleasure. The playfully anachronistic tone is set early on, as Amneris, the Pharaoh's daughter and Radames' betrothed, celebrates her endless wardrobe in a catchy, Motown-style number, My Strongest Suit, accompanied by a deliciously over-the-top fashion show. The sets and costumes, by Irish wonder-worker Bob Crowley, dominated by rich oranges and reds, occasionally recall Taymor's Lion King look (silhouetted figures in front of backlit translucent screens, elaborate headgear), and are stunning. And here's a show with not one but three knockout stars: Heather Headley, a commanding, clarion-voiced discovery as Aida; Sherie Rene Scott, a delightful Valley Girl on the Nile as Amneris; and Adam Pascal (Rent), who brings some rock-star muscle to the thankless task of portraying one of those bland Disney leading hunks. The appealing soft-rock score by Elton John and Tim Rice breaks out of the depressing rut of Disney third-person love songs (Can You Feel the Love Tonight?, Beauty and the Beast); here the lovers actually sing to each other.

Though it's Disney's first show since the runaway success of The Lion King, Aida has actually been in the works longer than that musical. After considering the Aida story as the premise for an animated film, the Disney stage mavens turned to it instead as a follow-up to their first Broadway hit, Beauty and the Beast, which opened in 1994. They got Rice and John, fresh from their success with the Lion King movie, to do the score and enlisted Beauty's director, Robert Jess Roth, to head up the production.

Aida's first public staging, in Atlanta, was troubled. Critics, while praising stars Headley and Scott, complained about the show's campy and comic elements. Then there was that recalcitrant pyramid. The Disney execs, typically, saw the bright side of their problems. "When the pyramid stopped working, which was very public, the cast got on the stage and just sang the show," says Thomas Schumacher, co-head of Disney's theatrical unit. "What was so reassuring was that it worked so well as a sung piece of material we didn't need the pyramid."

So they scrapped it, along with the people who had thought it up, and hired Robert Falls, artistic director of the Goodman Theater in Chicago and a Tony winner last season for Death of a Salesman, to direct and rewrite the book (with eventual help from playwright David Henry Hwang). The first thing Falls did was try to tone down the comedy. "I took the piece completely seriously when I read it," he says. "I was really moved by it. I sort of imagined directing it the same way I would have imagined directing Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra." He came up with a clever framing device: opening and closing the show in a contemporary museum where Egyptian artifacts are on display.