Review: Disney’s Hercules: big, bland, and American

Disney, the American company that pulled that off, are clearly hoping for the same critical and commercial success at the venue with Hercules. This time around, however, they have scored only one out of two. Investing in a big in a tried-and-tested brand has once again paid off handsomely – they’ve already announced an extension of its run to the spring of 2026 – but on the critical front I’m afraid it’s a flop.

Grandage understands how to pull together big all-singing-all-dancing spectaculars, but he is also a cerebral director who understands the psyche of his compatriots: to appeal to a broad audience on this side of the Atlantic, even big overtly commercial shows need a certain degree of wit and sophistication, and, if there is to be humour, it does need to make people laugh.

Let’s just say Casey Nicholaw, the director and choreographer of Hercules, is very American. The show is big, brash and brassy but lacks heart and depth. This is a directing-by-numbers show, and, watching it, I found myself imagining how he put it all together: “Oh yeah, this is the bit where the dancers dance, the baddie gets to be bad here, the hero gets to be heroic right here, his love interest gets all loved-up here, big closing number, the end… will that do, Disney?”

Of course Nicholaw can’t be blamed for the bland music and lyrics by respectively Alan Menken and David Zippel or Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah’s witless lines, but a director like Grandage could have made a lot more out of these meagre ingredients and made it taste like something more than just a cynical attempt to cash in on Disney’s 1997 animated film of the same name.

Still, the cast all look pretty and throw themselves into it with energy and enthusiasm: Luke Brady makes a good job of Hercules, Stephen Carlile has fun camping it up as Hades and Mae Ann Jorolan makes a fair stab as the love interest, Meg.

I wearily concede that Hercules is spectacular and that a vast amount of money has clearly been spent on it. I don’t dispute, either, that it will also probably make a vast amount of money back. It still stands, for me at least, as a symbol of a divide that’s opening up between us and the Americans: what makes them happy isn’t necessarily any more what makes us happy.