![]() ![]() Costumes are carefully examined after each performance and missing beads are hand-sewn back on by a team of tailors. The attention to detail is such that there's a bin allocated for each performer, full of the spare beads that match his or her costume. The garments use 1222 different fabrics, imported from nine countries. There are 337 costumes in the show, 137 of them individual designs, all exuberant riffs on ''Arabic'' clothing, from fezzes and brocade turbans to harem pants and jewelled skirts. The backstage area is a rabbit warren, with higgledy-piggledy corridors and anterooms stuffed to the gills with glittering costumes, swords, market carts, filigree metal sets and feathered fans worthy of Ziegfeld. Fanny Brice and Josephine Baker once waited in the wings here. ![]() I love backstage at any theatre and this one is especially thrilling. Before the last dervish has whirled, the entire audience is on its feet, applauding madly.Īs gorgeous as Aladdin might be from my view in the stalls, it's only when I go backstage a few days later that I understand the phenomenal creativity and attention to detail that has gone into the design aspects of the production. The friend I bring with me to see the show is a designer who is hard to please, but she pronounces the production values ''exquisite'', especially the show's visual highlight, the magic carpet ride, when Aladdin and Princess Jasmine are swept away against a starry sky. It is fantastically entertaining, with enough belly laughs and witty asides to keep the adults in the audience entertained as much as the children. ![]() The stage musical, with music by Alan Menken and lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, is cleverly directed by Casey Nicholaw, best known for his Tony Award® -winning direction of The Book of Mormon. It also houses the corporation's offices above the theatre, in a space that was once host to Ziegfeld's Midnight Frolic, an X-rated revue.Īlmost everyone knows the popular children's story of Aladdin, the street rat who wins the heart of a princess with the aid of a stolen magic lamp and its genie. Disney extravagantly restored it and reopened it in 1997 as a live theatre venue for their productions. After 1937 it became a movie theatre but it fell into disuse in the 1980s. I touch down on Broadway, in orchestra seats at the historic New Amsterdam Theatre, which was once the home of the Ziegfeld Follies. The stage version of this ''city of mystery and enchantment'', as the opening number describes it, is not anything you'd find in a Lonely Planet Guide (it's more Bing Crosby and Bob Hope's Road to Morocco than reality) but the dazzling stage settings and astoundingly beautiful costumes have been created to capture the spirit of ''joyfulness'' found in the sensual North African city, according to costume designer Gregg Barnes.īy submitting your email you are agreeing to Nine Publishing's Photo: Deen van MeerĪnd Morocco? My carpet doesn't make a physical stop there but the musical's fictional city of Agrabah, Aladdin's hometown, is a flamboyant, high camp reimaging of Marrakech, which the show's designers visited when they were conceptualising the production. I do it on an A380, more flying whale than carpet, but the experience is magical nevertheless.Īdam Jacobs in Aladdin. I have been invited to fly to New York to see the Broadway show, meet the team behind the production and then wing my way back to Sydney to visit the inner city workshop where the opulent costumes are being made. ![]()
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