Rating: ★★
Venue: Pentland Theatre at Pleasance at EICC, Edinburgh
The hilarious hit musical with more bite, more sass and zero damsels in distress. Forget happily ever after! Cinderella's done cleaning, Sleeping Beauty's wide awake and Snow White's calling the shots now. These princesses don't want to play nice; they want to storm the castle! One showstopping number at a time. Disenchanted! is the side-splitting, cheeky, musical mash-up of all your favourite fairy tales. If you're looking to let your hair down, take a magic carpet ride or maybe kiss a frog or two, Disenchanted! is the night out you didn't know you desperately needed.
The idea: grown up Disney Princesses coming together to share experiences and what their lives are like now. Conceptually? Love it! In practice? It spectacularly misses the mark.
Basic, boring, and repetitive drum tracks accompany a live pianist to what are objectively funny songs (mostly), but the performances felt flat and dull. The talented cast were clearly performing with full energy but just didn't seem like they were actually enjoying it or having fun. So I didn't either. It was like they knew the material was bad and actually felt awkward singing those awful lyrics.
Disenchanted is also completely missing a storyline. Each princess takes to the stage to sing one song after another about feeling fat, or hating guys, or their shared childhood trauma… for 80 minutes. It's a little like SIX, but with more adult humour and far less plot to follow. Why the show was written, or what interest the team thought an audience would have in it I am truly unsure.
The only number I genuinely loved was sung by Tiana (Jewelle Hutchison) because it was different. It was the only song that really stood out from the rest, offering something slightly new or exciting. Just after this point, tipping into the second half of the show, there is a section of audience participation, as if they knew we would be falling asleep by now and needed to try and re-engage us. Unfortunately, I could have left after the third number and not really missed anything that came in the following hour.
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