With eye-popping sets, music by Disney veteran Alan Menken (Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Little Mermaid) and a book by Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah that leans into the puns and panto vibe, it’s hard to resist its good-hearted energy.
Like The Lion King there’s an evil uncle – Stephen Carlile’s boo-hiss baddie Hades channelling Alan Rickman in Die Hard – and a young blade who has to shape up, in this case a beefy demigod with superhuman strength who was stolen as a baby from Mount Olympus.
But there’s the matter of sarcastic, hardboiled Meg – Mae Ann Jorolan making a feisty West End debut – who has made an awkward deal with the devil.
Enlisting the help of Philoctetes to train him up – no longer a satyr but Trevor Dion Nicholas’ wisecracking landlord of Medusa’s taverna – our hero races perhaps too speedily through his Herculean tasks.
Although there’s a terrific fight with Hydra heads and a comical cameo by the Cyclops. (Puppetry by James Ortiz.)
The movie’s winged horse Pegasus is dispensed with in favour of five magnificent Muses, whose dazzling costume changes and vocal dexterity raise the roof of Drury Lane with the likes of The Gospel Truth, Zero to Hero and A Star is Born – giving shades of the chorus in Menken’s Little Shop of Horrors.
They drop by to make sure Hercules stays on track as he falls for Meg, saves her from Hades’ evil plans, and fights the Titans; giant figures embodied by a head, shoulder plates and two punching fists.
It’s not the deepest of Disney stories, but director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw invests it with terrific action-packed energy and tongue in cheek humour.
What with lush visuals – Dane Laffrey’s spinning Greek columns and eye-catching video animations – it’s well suited to younger theatregoers, and it won’t take a Herculean effort for parents to have a ball too.
Hercules runs at The Theatre Royal Drury Lane, London until further notice.
