www.broadwayworld.com: Last summer, BroadwayWorld reported that Disney Cruise Line was working on a new Broadway-style musical adaptation of Disney's Hercules. Now, a first look at the concept art has been revealed, featuring the villainous multi-headed Hydra, which will be depicted by puppets in this version. Take a look at the image below!
9 comments:
I’ve never actually watched the Hercules Disney movie (intentionally) because I know it isn’t accurate to the myths, in some rather major ways. I have seen video clips of it, images of the animation, and heard some of the music. From what I know about the myth of Hercules, the scope of such a production and the elements involved, the concept art looks stunning and absolutely breathtaking. My jaw actually dropped open when I saw the image of the Hydra’s heads and Hercules standing stage left. The scale creates a majestic environment that I would like to see on a stage. If this is a snapshot of one scene from the stage show, I would love to see what the other mythical monsters, the gods, and the scenes look like on the stage. As a lover of Greek mythology, seeing the stage production live, regardless of the mythical accuracy of the plot, would be amazing and heal my inner child.
Honestly, I'm intrigued by the way theatre allows these well-loved characters to feel brand-new, even when we already know the story by heart. It's not just retelling the story—it’s recreating the experience through a completely different artistic medium. Like drama itself, this adaptation seems to thrive on creative experimentation, blending nostalgia with fresh perspectives.I'm particularly excited about the previously unheard song, "Shooting Star." Adding a new song always feels risky, but it's fascinating how theatre provides the space for lost or unused ideas to finally find their moment in the spotlight. It makes me think about how theatre often becomes the testing ground for what’s possible artistically—melding song, dance, puppetry, and narrative into something greater than the sum of its parts. Puppets have an immediacy that draws us in; they demand imagination from the audience, pulling us into the fantasy. I’m definitely looking forward to seeing how this creative vision comes together—it feels like pure theatrical magic waiting to happen.
This looks AWESOME! I love that Disney’s newest cruise ship, Destiny, is becoming home to a lot of musical renditions of their most beloved movies. They have taken this portion of the experience very seriously when it comes to production value, which I appreciate greatly. I love Hercules, and I think there is so much potential for it to be live on a cruise ship. I appreciate Disney’s braveness when taking on huge projects like this one, especially the choice to make the Hydra a massive puppet. Maybe it’s because I just saw Titanic and I’ve never been on an actual cruise, but I’m curious how it works to have all of that equipment on board and make sure that the cruise ship doesn’t sink. How do you plan for that? Is the ship built with a weight contingency to avoid problems like this? I think that’d be the smartest thing, but what do I know.
The first time that I saw this image was when I was scrolling through Instagram, and I was fully convinced that it was AI. With the combination of the style of the art, the faceless nature of each actor, and the fact that it's Hercules at all (we all know how little Disney likes to market that movie) I just didn’t believe it. However, seeing it confirmed in this article, I’m glad. I personally will never get on a Cruise Ship, they’re far too expensive for me and I prefer to keep my feet on land, but I will definitely look at photos other people take of the show. It's exciting to know that Disney is starting to look back at Hercules and honor the film as the masterpiece of animation that it is. It’s been thrown into the pile of lesser-recognized Disney movies for so long, but lately with the new Villain’s show in Magic Kingdom and the inclusion of Megara and Hercules in the Sweethearts parade in Disneyland I think there's some hope for the movie yet.
The show Hercules would be incredibly fun to put on, especially the creation of a hydra. Heracles fights and kills a huge multi headed beast that when one head is chopped off it grows into two. Being able to have a head fall to the ground and also have two heads grow in its place would be an incredibly interesting task to achieve. When I first thought about the hydra I imagined the silly blowy guys that are outside of car sales shops because the float movement reminds me of a really long neck similar to that of a hydra. According to the digital picture of the hydra found in the arrival they are planning on doing something huge. The head spans almost the entire deck of the stage and the drawing has the heads reaching over and into the audience. The picture also makes it look as if each head is individually puppeted to give off the illusion of a real conscious monster
I love how theatrical staging can help a story which we all know and love feel new and fresh. The puppetry concept looks so incredible. It so far doesn't look like it was made with AI, which is nice. I know one show got serious flak for using an AI background image in their actual show. My high school theater did that unfortunately. So you would be sitting there watching your child perform in their chorus concert and be looking at the background and realizing the hands on the background had 3 thumbs and 4 fingers. It was funny because the middle school once did "we're not gonna take it" and the background image was a bunch of fists, and of course, this was at the time when AI was very bad at doing hands (and kind of still is, but it is rapidly improving). But yeah I would love to go see the stage play of Hercules. Anything Disney does would be better than their live action remakes.
This looks really neat. I both did not know anything about this new Disney cruise ship “Destiny”, nor had I heard anything about the Hercules stage show on that ship. I’m really excited about the use of puppets in this production. In the past decade or so, there’s been some truly amazing and creative use and design of puppets in big-name productions, and I definitely feel like the School of Drama is on a puppet kick right now, so puppets are fresh on everybody’s mind. I’m super excited to see more about this show as it develops, and to see the details about the design of the puppets and how present the puppeteers are with the puppets. With Disney’s recent live-action everything trend, I’m kind of shocked to hear the word “puppet” and not “animatronic,” and honestly, I’ll be pretty disappointed if this just turns out to be an animatronic and not have that puppet & puppeteer dynamic and element to it.
Puppets? Puppets? Say no more! If the puppets involved in this production end up actually as large as the puppets in the concept drawing (which inevitably, sadly, will be no) I would lose it. That would be so insanely cool. I ended up looking up Michael Curry, the puppet designer for this show, and he has worked on a lot of really, really cool things involving animal-like puppets. Lion King, Beetlejuice, and apparently the olympic opening ceremonies? I wonder if he was involved with the horse for Paris’s olympics opening ceremony! Anyways, I love puppets and puppetry is something that excels so well in theatre. I wish movies used puppets more, rather than opting for CGI. You can’t really disguise a puppet as truly “real” but they have such a charm and a style to them. I am so glad that theatre can consistently act as a medium where your state of disbelief can be increasingly suspended for cool technical and style feats, whereas with film it is far harder to keep your audience engaged the more artistic you get with it because the expectations around realism are so much more strongly defined. But theatre is inherently unrealistic and a little absurd, so you run into that less I feel.
Hercules is one of my all time favorite Disney movies and I feel like the original movie took inspiration from theatre so I think it would translate well enough into a production like this. I always feel kind of iffy when I see movies being turned into broadway shows since often at times movies that have no business being on broadway are chosen and it’s just a cash grab, but I feel like I can tell when a movie is chosen cause it’ll turn profit or if someone genuinely felt like it would work and I feel like Hercules is the latter. The songs in Hercules are so grand and emotionally complex that it seems like a crime that they were never performed live, so I hope that Disney can do them justice for a live audience, I’ll never be on a Disney cruise to see it live but I’m sure it would be an amazing experience and it would probably bring an intense feeling of nostalgia
Post a Comment