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- [00:00]
A
Hey guys, it's Matt. If you listen to Broadway Breakdown, then chances are you're a fan of theater and you know that I'm a fan of theater and more importantly, I'm a fan of Disney. And Disney happens to have a couple of shows on the Broadway right now, one of which is Aladdin, which just celebrated its 10th anniversary this year. But did you know that Aladdin was actually never supposed to come to Broadway? And then when Disney was like, great, yeah, let's, let's work this thing for Broadway. It almost didn't go to Broadway due to reasons. Luckily. Broadway Podcast Network has a new series hosted by New York 1's Frank DiLella, chronicling all of the beautiful craziness of Aladdin's road to the Great White Way. This includes interviews with Alan Menken, Casey Nicholaw, Chad Beglin, as well as cast members Adam Jacobs and Tony Award winner James Monroe Iglehart. It's a really juicy listen and as someone who loves Broadway history and gossip, it's just like right up my alle and I can't really say too much more without spoiling it. So I think the best way to get you guys on board with this series, the Magical Making of Disney's Aladdin is to give you a little sneak peek to it right now.
- [01:32]
B
Welcome to the Magical Making of Aladdin, the podcast that pulls back the curtain on the untold story behind one of Disney's most beloved films and its journey to becoming a Broadway sensation. Imagine the Disney classics that shaped your childhood with Aladdin shining as a jewel among them. But did you know the full length stage production we know and love almost never happened? Starting as a humble idea in 2011, this ambitious show faced a rocky road, including their pre Broadway run in Toronto where critics all agreed on one it should not go to Broadway. Yet through sheer determination and a leap of faith, the team pressed on making changes up to the last possible moment. When Aladdin finally opened on Broadway in March of 2014 to rave reviews, it became clear that the team's sheer grit and perseverance had finally paid off. A decade later, on March 20, 2024, Aladdin celebrated its 10th anniversary, cementing its place in the history books of Broadway. Join me Frank Dilella, as I delve into this incredible transformation, sharing exclusive insights and behind the scenes stories that Disney has never revealed before. This is your all access pass to the magic drama and triumph of bringing Aladdin to the Broadway stage. Stay tuned because you won't want to miss a single moment of this enchanting journey. This Is episode one, Aladdin. From screen to stage. I can think of no better way to start our conversation than by bringing legendary songwriter Alan Menken into the the studio. The person who, alongside the late great Howard Ashman, first developed the concept and songs for the animated film released back in 1992. Today, he is possibly the person with the most knowledge of how it was first created. Alan, what was the original concept for Aladdin? Because it's much different compared to what we eventually saw on screen and even the stage show today.
- [03:50]
C
The original concept was it was like a buddy picture. It was Aladdin and his three sidekicks, babcac, Omar and Kasim. And they were street performers just trying to make a buck, you know, on the streets of Agrabah. And this princess was just kind of, you know, kind of like the. Was it Hedy Lamar in the Hope Hope and Bob Hope and Bing Crosby road pictures, that kind of a character. So we had all these songs that when it was decided that we really wanted to be more of a romance and more of a sort of a traditional approach to the storytelling, the mother got cut and the sidekicks got cut.
- [04:31]
B
Wow. I didn't realize there was almost a mother character for Aladdin. But you were originally working with Howard Ashman on the film and he had to step away from working on what became the final version. Right.
- [04:42]
C
Howard was not able to participate in that, really, because he was too sick. And after he passed away, they came back and told me there had been these changes. And then I teamed with Tim Rice to finish the movie. Then when the opportunity to do the Broadway show came along first, there was a treatment that was pretty faithful to the picture. And I said, no, no, guys, no, this is. We have to go back and incorporate the material that Howard and I, because we would have lost. Proud of your boy and Bat Cacamor, Aladdin, Kathim and High Adventure. And those were intrinsic. They were, you know, to the characters and to the. And also just for stage. It was a goldmine.
- [05:33]
B
I want to now bring in Tom Schumacher and Anne Court, two people who were pivotal to the creation and ultimate success of Aladdin Broadway. Tom is the chief creative officer at Disney Theatrical Group and former head of Walt Disney Animation Studios. And Anne is the executive producer for Aladdin. Tom, go back to the very beginning of where the concept for a full length Aladdin stage show came from. Isn't the idea attributed to a random comment from Chris Montan, who, for those who don't know, is the president of Walt Disney Music and the person who was responsible for Executive producing the music of the Aladdin animated film.
- [06:16]
D
Chris Montaigne, who's had various roles at Disney, but every one of the 20 odd movies I worked on and every stage show, Chris Montan has been in charge of the music. He's a music producer and one of my dearest friends in the whole world. And he'd flown in from LA to watch the workshop version we did of the show with a full cast and we could hear it out loud. And we're in the middle of act two and the song High Adventure, which is a pure theater song, not in the movie, and he turns to me in the middle of High Adventure and we're all eating it up and he turns to me and goes, why isn't this show on Broadway? And I couldn't stop thinking that if we can make this work, this will go to Broadway.
- [06:58]
B
But how did you proceed with the development of the full length stage production without anyone knowing Broadway was possibly the end goal?
- [07:05]
D
We have a kid's version of it that has been performed in school. It's like a Junior Edition, like an hour long one. And people kept coming to us saying, could we have a two hour version? And what a lot of these regional theaters were thinking was, if we had a full length version with an intermission, we could use it and replace the annual Christmas carol in our theater. So they're thinking of a holiday show. What songs we put in, how could they expand? Because they were using ours and kind of filling it out, the student one. And we said, you know, we can do that because there's probably a market there.
- [07:35]
B
All right, so you want to make a full length stage production, and you were already working with book writer and lyricist Chad Beglin on the script for the stage adaptation, but you still hadn't yet solidified who would work on the music. How did Alan decide to come on board and start working with Chad?
- [07:53]
D
Menken called me and said, hey, are you gonna do a full length Aladdin? I said, oh, Alan. And he was so busy. I said, at the moment? And I said, you don't really wanna be involved, blah, blah, blah. I said, well, let me at least read it. And so I sent him a copy of what we were doing and he called me and he said, you know, the fact is, what you've created here is pretty horrible, but I gotta meet this Chad Baeklin guy because I want to work with him. So Chad took the train up to Alan's house and spent the day with Alan. And Alan opened his drawers, if you will, and pulled out all this stuff from Howard that they had created for the movie originally, which even had two genies in the. There were so many things, but Babcato, Mar, Aladdin, Kassim. All these things that we put in were from either drafts of the movie or a version of the movie that we actually put up when we screened it. And cut. Including Proud of youf Boy and things like that.
- [08:50]
B
And pretty early on in the process, the show's amazing director, Casey Nicholaw, came onto the project just to get it to Seattle. Is that right?
- [08:57]
D
Casey came in when the late Steve Fickinger, who was working here. Steve and Casey and I all slightly overlapped in Generations at ucla. That's when they had met.
- [09:09]
B
All right, real quick. Steve Fickinger, for those who don't know, was a longtime creative executive with Disney Theatrical Group who helped start the development of the stage version of Aladdin, among many other shows.
- [09:20]
D
Steve did a meeting with Casey and brought me in and said Casey would be great for this. And then Anne and I began to show him what we had done in a lab, which had just been directed by staff, because we decided to do a regional production of Aladdin in Seattle, only just to see if it had legs for licensing. And so the only remit for Case was to come in and stage it in Seattle and see if the audience cares. Was really the. Was what we set out to do.
- [09:53]
B
Chad Beglin, thank you for joining us. I want to switch over to you. What was going on with the stage production of Aladdin from your perspective. In these early days before Seattle, it.
- [10:03]
E
Was going to be used for licensing. There was no talk of Broadway or anything. So I did a draft, met with Alan Menken. He said, you know, I have an ulterior motive. I want to get as much of the cut Howard Ashman lyrics into the stage version. So that was what the main task for Seattle was, to sort of get these songs in and make it seem as if they were always, you know, it was always meant to be this way.
- [10:26]
B
How'd you guys decide, you know, where to slot in songs we know from the film versus writing new material?
- [10:32]
E
Well, the first thing to do was to figure out how to fit the cut songs in, because we sort of knew where, you know, Whole New World's gonna Go and Arabian Nights is gonna go. We knew we wanted Proud of youf Boy, but we knew we didn't want to create a mother character, which was in the animation feature. Yeah. You know, early days. So we sort of decided that would be his I Want song. And then we knew sort of where babcac, Omar, Aladdin, Kasim would go because that would have to be right before he meets Jasmine. And we knew how adventure would be when they decide to storm the palace. But it just really was, you know, Alan, Casey and me going, oh, there's a hole here. Somebody should probably sing. Do we. You know, there was this whole debate. Do we actually have Aladdin and Jasmine sing together before a whole new world? Will that undercut it? It's very funny because Tom Schumacher is very, very specific about his notes. I said, do we? And act one on a downer. You know, someone's in danger. Is it that thing that you do in musicals or is it just up, Happy, happy, happy? And he's like, oh, no, he's just turned into Prince Ali. He's excited. We know it's gonna backfire.
- [11:42]
C
Curtain.
- [11:43]
E
That's sort of how we decided, you know, where the songs would go. It would just be like, this book scene is going on forever. Can I sing some of this information? You know, but, yeah, it was known songs first, the cut songs next. And then Somebody's got your back was the last thing we wrote. And Casey's like, we need something here. We need something. And we went into the basement of the new AM and like, he does Alan in five seconds, played it. I recorded it on my phone and went into the show, like, three days later.
- [12:12]
B
Wow.
- [12:12]
E
Yeah, just, like, amazing how he does that.
- [12:15]
F
Fair is fair Cross my heart and.
- [12:18]
A
Double pinky swear say ain't it great.
- [12:21]
B
To know that somebody's got your. So Alan just, like, pumps out music and then you just start to think of the lyrics.
- [12:30]
E
Yeah, yeah, I have. You know, we talk about the situation. We talk about what we want it to feel like. And Casey was, you know, I want it to be a buddy number. I want it to be old musical theater. But then, yeah, then I go away and come back with stuff and people will say, yeah, more of that, or not so much, or, you know, and then I just keep tinkering with it.
- [12:49]
B
Wow.
- [12:57]
F
Got your back.
- [13:00]
B
In terms of the animated feature, how much of that did you have access to with putting together the stage version, even the cut stuff, and also the influence of Robin Williams for the character of Jeannie.
- [13:12]
E
Well, I wasn't given any footage. Alan, on the first day we met, gave me Howard Ashman's original treatment. And that informed sort of how we were going to get away from Robin Williams and the Genie, because no one can top him. No one wants to see an imitation. And their original concept was that the genie was a Cab Calloway type character. We thought that was amazing because we wouldn't even try to do what Robin Williams did in the movie. And it also sort of set the tone for the rest of the show that, you know, we sort of. The costumes have that sort of flashback feel to them.
- [13:50]
B
I'm curious, just for fun, do you remember any of the original concepts that never made it into either the film or the stage production?
- [13:56]
E
Jasmine was a minor character. There was this other character that I think was named Gabby with an I who was a tomboy that was part of their gang that they ended up falling in love. There was a. There were two genies. There was a genie of the ring. You know, there was the lamp and then the ring. There were all of these things that, you know, were so completely different from the actual finished feature film. And some of it, like I said, was really, really helpful. And some of it was just like, this is. We're not adding another genie. But it was fascinating and really, you know, interesting to see sort of behind the curtain.
- [14:36]
B
Casey Nicholaw, thank you two for joining us today. As Tom and Ann mentioned, your initial goal was just to get the production on its feet in Seattle to see if this concept would even work. And Broadway was never, quote or unquote, the goal. So what was that experience like for you? And just sort of paint the scene of Seattle.
- [14:57]
F
It was great. You know, we had a really good time. It ended up being the cast that we had here.
- [15:02]
B
Courtney Reed was in it.
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F
Courtney. Adam James.
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B
Jonathan Freeman.
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F
Jonathan Freeman.
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B
Okay.
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F
Don. Darrell Rivera, who was from Seattle. And then we had a different ensemble.
- [15:12]
B
There, and much different from what we see now.
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F
So much different.
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B
Talk about that.
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F
So much different. It was. It was sort of, you know, it was sort of done like sort of like a buddy comedy. It was kind of more meta. Like, one of the lines at the beginning was like, where's Aladdin? They're like, well, he should be coming any second. And then some guy walks by with, like, a. A vendor's pool with playbills on it. He goes, oh, seems like he's coming in the next scene. And then he swung out on a rope. And it was really sad because he was, like 6 inches off the floor. It was a little crazy. There was no tap in it.
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B
No tap.
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F
Tom Schumacher was like, are you crazy? You have to have tapping friend like me. I was like, oh, okay.
- [15:52]
B
And the magic carpet was a mattress.
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F
On a stick, right?
- [15:55]
B
And it was really a mattress on a stick.
- [15:58]
F
It really was. It was so sad. It was so sad. It's like, hey, lean to the right. I can show you the lean to. It was like. It was, it was pretty sad.
- [16:06]
B
Not so magical.
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F
Not very magical. But, you know, we, but we sort of knew that going into it, okay. You know, we're like, let's make it pretty. We didn't know it was be so tilty and there were just lots of lanterns around it. So it was, it was a beautiful picture, but it was not like flying all over the place.
- [16:24]
A
Okay? So I don't know about you guys, but that is a bingeable series if ever I heard one. As someone who happens to host the longest episodes known to man about Broadway and the podcasting hemisphere, I think that these episodes are perfectly timed. 30 to 45 minutes. Just absolutely ripe for a commute to work or going to get your groceries or what have you. You know, you can dive through the whole series within a day or spread it out over the week, and I don't know what else you could want. It's Disney, it's Broadway, it's juicy gossip, it's insightful anecdotes, and look into the creative artistry of theater that we love. And yeah, I mean, I'm ready to listen to more. I hope you guys are as well. So take a listen to the magical making of Disney's Aladdin, the podcast, available everywhere you can find podcasts. Or you can go to BPN FM Aladdin and listen there. Bye, guys.