Disney princesses play on female empowerment
Disenchanted (out of 4) Book, music and lyrics by Dennis T. Giacino, music direction by Paul Moody. Until Nov. 5 at the Randolph Theatre, 736 Bathurst St. Ticketfly.com.
Disney princesses gone rogue: that’s the compelling concept behind this bawdy musical revue, visiting Toronto as part of a North American tour.
The budget’s not massive, and the material and delivery sometimes undermine the show’s overall spirit of political progressiveness.
But Dennis T. Giacino’s book and lyrics are full of sharp observations and funny gags, and the brassy talent of the six-woman ensemble is winning. At a tight 90-minute running time, this is girls-night-out entertainment that delivers laffs and groans aplenty.
The show’s premise is that the heroines of animated Disney movies have finally gotten fed up with the way they’ve been objectified, hemmed in and exploited by “our old buddy Walt” — that is, his global entertainment empire — and are busting loose.
“One more ‘once upon a time’ and I swear I’ll go insane” belts out Snow White (Merritt Crews) in the tonesetting opening number. She, Cinderella (Madison Hayes-Crook) and Sleeping Beauty (Daniella Richards) go on to bemoan various annoyances, including waiting for their “prince to . . . come.” If you find that joke crass, this is not the show for you.
Crews’ Snow White continues as the evening’s emcee, with great poise and comic timing. Vanessa Leuck’s costume and Christina Spina’s makeup cleverly quote the familiar elements of the character’s appearance (high white collar, black bob, cherry lipstick) while giving it a sexed-up contemporary flair (miniskirt).
Hayes-Crook’s Cinderella and Richards’ Sleeping Beauty are her comic foils. The former bears the closest resemblance to the classic, disempowered princess figure familiar from the classic films: she’s played as a hammed-up dumb blonde. The latter constantly misses the cue for her big number because she’s dozed off.
The remaining three cast members play a number of roles from more recent Disney franchises, and while knowing your Jasmine from your Tiana allows access to some inside jokes, you don’t have to have seen all the movies to understand the show. Quite the contrary: Giacino is a former American history teacher, and one of his driving purposes here is re-education — to remind audiences how far, for example, Disney’s Pocahontas, with its adult love story, strays from the historical truth of a 10-year-old Native girl who may or may not have saved the life of the English colonist John Smith.
This is accomplished through a lot of smart comedic songwriting: “Without the Guy” satirizes stereotypes of East Asian women and offers a hypothesis as to why the title character of Mulan didn’t get a major romantic subplot: “I just might be lesbian” sings Ann Paula Bautista, her powerful voice twisting at just the right moment from pure sweet- ness into satirical bite.
Miriam Drysdale appears first as Beauty and the Beast’s Belle, straitjacketed and tied to a chair, driven bonkers by a house full of singing cutlery and a mate who poops on the floor; and then as a drunken Little Mermaid, who took to the bottle after discovering that giving up her tail for two legs is shackling her to a boring terrestrial married life.
While not wanting to give too much away, one of the show’s funniest meta-gestures is how long it takes Cherise Thomas as the Princess Who Kissed the Frog to finally arrive onstage (the lyric “It’s been a hundredyear stroll to get a Snow White with soul” provides a clue to the joke here).
All this cleverness serves to critique the dated representation of gender and ethnicity in these influential entertainment products. The material frequently risks offence and there are numerous “I can’t believe they went there” moments.
At some points, for this viewer’s sensibilities, they go too far — did we really need goose-stepping choreography in the number about the German antecedents of many of these fairy tales? And two whole songs (including one called “Big Tits”) to critique the impossible expectations of the female form created by Disney’s animated female figures?
Casting, in fact, makes this latter point more powerfully than crass lyrics. None of the performers here are stick-thin, and most of them are real-world curvy: this is what women look like, they love their bodies and they’re “Perfect” the way they are, as Sleeping Beauty sings in the evening’s penultimate number.
The show’s critique is also somewhat compromised by having Filipina-Canadian Bautista play aboriginal and Middle Eastern as well as East Asian characters, sending the problematic message that non-white ethnicities are interchangeable.
Christopher Bond directed this production when it opened in Chicago in May but, oddly, there is no director listed in the program for this Toronto run. It’s to the credit of stage manager Jenn Hewitt, music director Paul Moody and the cast that the material is delivered precisely, clearly and with great energy. The set (Gentry Akens) is simple but attractive — several curtains that shimmer prettily and change colour with switches in Michelle Ramsay’s lighting. The sound balance (design by Kevin Lacy) with the vocals is almost always bang-on, and the diction is very crisp.
Having to work with recorded rather than live music puts a particular onus on the cast to keep things feeling fresh, and these women — nearly all of them Canadian, in this show produced in Toronto by Starvox Entertainment — are old-style troupers in the best sense, keeping the yuks coming even in a post-show exhortation to like, tweet and swipe right if you enjoyed the show.
Even if this show about female empowerment is written, directed (maybe sorta?) and produced by men, it’s women who give it life, and the talent and spirit of the cast here shine.