NEW YORK — When future cultural historians, should there be any, look back on the contemporary stage, I hope they are able to discern, amid the din of jukeboxes and the lumbering of overproduced apes, the real theater of our time.
I mean Public Works, that program of passion plays for anxious, left-leaning New Yorkers: as emblematic of our fears and hopes as the ones at Oberammergau were for 17th-century Bavarians and the Dionysia was for ancient Greeks.
Speaking of Greece, did I mention that the series’ current offering, running through Sunday, is “Hercules”? And not even the one by Euripides but the one by a committee of Hollywood scriptmongers writing for an audience of tweens?
You will recall that most Labor Days since 2013, at the end of its regular season of Shakespeare in the Park, the Public Theater has mounted a huge (and free) show involving a handful of professional actors and many multiples more of amateurs. We have seen streamlined and musicalized new versions of “The Tempest,” “Twelfth Night” and even “The Odyssey” offered as models of civic engagement and reminders of the heritage of provocation and healing the theater has offered for centuries to troubled cities.
So how does a 1997 Disney cartoon, beloved mostly by late-vintage millennials now in young adulthood, come into this exalted lineage?
As you might expect, bigly.
For one thing, this is the largest Public Works outing yet. I don’t mean the size of the ensemble, though there are almost 200 performers involved, including a 10-piece orchestra and the Passaic High School marching band. Most come from community organizations, in all five boroughs, that serve the young and old, veterans and ex-convicts, domestic workers and recreational dancers. Just getting them all onstage seems like a municipal engineering feat as difficult and fundamentally optimistic as building new bridges.
But this “Hercules,” directed by the Public Works founder Lear deBessonet, is also big in the sense of spectacular, expanding the palette from previous seasons in ways that are both exciting and also mildly worrisome. Stadium-sized LED tickers were not previously part of the aesthetic or the agenda. Any one of the five muses who act as narrators here rocks more sequins with each costume than the cast of “The Tempest” put together.
Though such changes sometimes distract from the handmade ethos of the event, they are apt for the mostly comic material, adapted by the playwright Kristoffer Diaz from the movie’s patchwork screenplay. As is standard for animated Disney musicals, the depths of the story are more fully explored in the artistry of the execution than in the narrative itself.
So “Hercules” as a movie was already an expurgated, glossed-up product. Diaz follows most of its contours closely, giving us a Hercules (Jelani Alladin) who is the son of Zeus and Hera instead of (as in the classical myth) Zeus and a mortal he neglected to marry. When the bumbling minions of the envious Hades (Roger Bart) fail to kill the god-baby as instructed, he is raised on Earth as a clumsy lunk who wants nothing more than to be a hero so he can return to his rightful place on Olympus.
Though many of the Disney animated musicals seem to exist outside of time, “Hercules” has some late 20th-century problems that Diaz — as well as the songwriters, Alan Menken and David Zippel — had to address in making a 21st-century stage version. For one thing, there weren’t enough songs: just five, give or take. And Pegasus, the de rigueur flying sidekick dragged in from another myth entirely, clearly had to go.
But the bigger problems involved race and gender. Other than the gospel-shouting muses, drawn as five black women and given self-consciously sassy dialogue, everyone in this story was white. And the character created as Hercules’ love interest, the duplicitous but finally good-as-gold Meg, was conceived as a fetchingly cynical 1940s siren: Barbara Stanwyck in a tunic.
Happily, the changes the creative team has instituted to make “Hercules” suitable today are entirely successful; much of the new material is better than the old, and the Public Works format is strong enough to transform even middlebrow mass entertainment into meaningful political theater.
Most obviously, a black Hercules (backed by the wonderfully diverse ensemble) completely alters the implications of a story about a man seeking acceptance as “a good person of the Agora” — the public marketplace. As he did playing Kristoff in the stage version of Disney’s “Frozen,” Alladin makes an unimpeachably earnest hero, here adding unexpected depths of feeling as he considers, in a new song that cuts through the movie’s knee-jerk sarcasm, what it means “To Be Human.”
Another new song, “Forget About It,” establishes Meg’s proud independence, verging on disdain, even as Hercules misreads it as flirtation. “This one’s tall/This one’s ripped/This one’s mouth should stay zipped,” she sings. His counterpoint begins: “She rolls her eyes/and I’m filled with butterflies.”
As Meg, Krysta Rodriguez nails the show’s new take, biting into her songs (including a tougher version of the movie’s “I Won’t Say (I’m in Love)”) and a terrific new first-date scene that establishes the character as fully modern. It’s no accident that unlike anyone else in the production, Meg wears skinny jeans and a leather jacket.
And though the bluesy new number for Hades thankfully does nothing to reframe the material or remediate his villainy, “A Cool Day in Hell” does give Bart, who sang Hercules’ songs in the movie and now looks like he woke up on the bad side of a bender, a chance to show off his comic mastery. If the amateur cast is for the most part enthusiastically adequate to its tasks — and in some cases you’d be hard pressed to guess whether they are Equity members or not — the show wouldn’t work without a Hades who knows how to wrap an audience in his palm and squeeze.
All this makes “Hercules” something of a one-off in the Public Works catalog, and also in Disney’s. It is caught between opposing monsters: the commercial and communitarian imperative.
I don’t know whether Disney is considering a stage future for this adaptation, or whether the Public Works partners and affiliates in nine cities around the country may wish to take it on, but either constituency would find it rather difficult. Even the formidable Menken and Zippel did: A couple of the additional songs, despite nifty lyrics, lay eggs. (They’d work in a movie, though.) And the staging of the requisite battle scenes, despite gorgeous puppets by James Ortiz, defeats the logistical efforts of deBessonet and her team.
The resulting confusion was of little import on a gorgeous Labor Day eve in front of an audience primed to hoot at lines like “You’ve become a celebrity. That is not the same thing as being a hero.” And when the citizens of Thebes asked Hercules to prove his strength by helping with affordable housing, the 1,800 or so citizens at the Delacorte lapped it up like ambrosia.
But it was ambrosia with an afterkick. The biggest change made in “Hercules” may be the hardest one to make in real life. Public Works has turned it into a much more significant story, one in which everyone, not just the stud in the toga, has to learn to be a hero.
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‘Hercules’
Through Sept. 8 at the Delacorte Theater, Manhattan; 212-539-8500, publictheater.org.
Running time: 1 hour 30 minutes.
This article originally appeared in
.