The Genie Show
This review was written by one of our amazing travel advisors, Christine Cummins! You can check out her travel advisor page by following this link. She's also active on social media - take a look at her Instagram right here!
- Run time: 1 hr
- Ship: Disney Wish
If you’ve ever wanted to watch an Hour long Genie stand up routine with some moments from the movie Aladdin sprinkled in, then BOY do I have a show for you. The basic plot points of this Musical align pretty directly with the original movie. Except one character I couldn’t help notice was missing…I was sitting and waiting for them to appear. With every passing scene hoping for a big reveal. Until we got enough into the show where I realized…THERE IS NO ABU IN THIS MUSICAL!!!
Disney…listen…I just want to talk. I saw no less than 30 puppets on stage the night previously in The Little Mermaid. HOW HARD WOULD IT HAVE BEEN TO ADD AN ABU PUPPET TO THE SHOW?!?! And it's not like they mention him but he’s just not on stage. No no no. This telling of Aladdin takes place in an entirely Abu-less universe. A world I never thought I would have to live in.
Aside from this unforgivable omission to the story, the plot remains relatively unchanged. There are a few tweaks to the ending where instead of the Sultan breaking tradition and allowing Jasmine to marry Aladdin, he just makes Jasmine the Sultan which yay females in leadership positions.
The biggest thing to know about this show going in is it very much feels like “the Genie Show”. Each scene featuring the Genie is largely focused on showcasing the actors comedy and improv skills and are roughly 2x longer than most of the other scenes in the show. And don’t get me wrong, it was HILARIOUS so I didn’t really have a problem with it. It just really felt like Aladdin and Jasmine as a whole were supporting characters with a more minor plot line instead of the focal one.
Plus, “Friend Like Me” and “Prince Ali” clearly received 90% of the production budget with the over the top technical elements and spectacular effects while the other scenes and songs primarily used Screen effects with a bare stage. The only exception being “A Whole New World” where there was a pretty cool mechanical flying carpet.
I want to give a special shout out to the show for how they handled the Magic Carpet character. It was played by a person in a cool carpet suit who was clearly a skilled acrobat and dancer. This interpretation added so much fun and amazement to the character because of how impressive their physical performance was with their tumbles and flips all over the place.
In conclusion, the show has its merits for sure but didn’t leave me wowed in the end. My favorite part was The Genie by FAR. Any time he was on stage I was laughing my sides sore as he included a lot of “topical meme humor” that I’m sure will be a hit with most teens and young adults who spend far too much time on instagram or Tik tok.
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