Like father like son aida movie#
Like father like son aida tv#

Rice’s lyrics are serviceable and adept at moving the story along.

Song standouts range from the comic reggae number “Build Another Pyramid” and the aforementioned ’50s-inflected “My Strongest Suit” to the gospel-tinged “The Gods Love Nubia” to a variety of love ballads that tend to pile up in the second act. It marries John’s immense talent for vocal writing and his mastery of innumerable pop styles to consistently winning effect. Happily, “Elaborate Lives’ ” score is far superior. And how many of Hollywood’s trips down the Nile can be taken seriously?) The libretto to Verdi’s opera doesn’t read much better it just sounds better in Italian. (To be fair, a certain hokum quotient is hard to avoid in seeking to bring such a remote culture alive in contemporary art. “I’ll never forget you, Aida,” squeaks Amneris lamely as this romantic tragedy draws to a close. Dialogue is largely throwaway comic or banal. The contemporary pop-psych veneer that Woolverton and lyricist Rice supply - Radames (a generic Hank Stratton) comes from a broken home and sings of his “secret lack of confidence,” for example - doesn’t solve the authenticity problem and may indeed exacerbate it. And the show’s psychology is similar: Half shamelessly and endearingly silly, it nevertheless has pretensions to greater depth, as indeed it must with a storyline that ends with the deaths of two of the three main characters. When Aida admires her silks, Amneris quips, “A slave who knows her fabrics - I’ll keep her!” She then sings a doo-wop paean to the joys of getting dressed that’s a delightful show-stopper for Sherie Scott, an actress of sure comic instincts and a terrific vocalist.īut no sooner has Amneris finished flaunting her superficiality than she croons of a heartfelt wish to be taken seriously. In Linda Woolverton’s simplistic book, Amneris is amusingly typed as a sort of Tori Spelling of the Nile.

Like father like son aida tv#

Despite much discussion of expeditions reaching the “second cataract” and the Nubian-Egyptian conflict, these Egyptians sound just like post-adolescents from today’s hot-blooded TV dramas. “Suggested by the opera,” as the credits state, “Elaborate Lives” is set in ancient Egypt and follows the forbidden love that grows between Radames, an Egyptian slaver and warrior, and Aida, the Nubian princess he captures and presents as a gift to his fiancee Amneris.īut it’s hard to take the show seriously as an even vaguely sincere depiction of ancient culture. Even the interracial love theme has been tested onscreen, in “Pocahontas ,” although death by entombment hasn’t hitherto been among Disney-approved happy endings.

In both tone and plot, it hews quite closely to the company’s formula for toon tuners: exotic locale of yore, square-jawed hero, spunky heroine, generous splashes of comic relief.

Like father like son aida movie#

There’s a small irony here, for while Broadway’s “The Lion King” is an animated movie adaptation that plays like a stage original, “Elaborate Lives” is a stage original that plays like an animated movie adaptation. But it’s not a sophisticated or artfully staged production, and it will likely have to brave Broadway - presuming it chooses to - unaccompanied by a chorus of critical acclaim and without the marketing insurance of a previous history as a hit movie. Its chief assets are an infectious pop-rock score by Elton John and Tim Rice and a performance by Heather Headleyin the title role that is thrilling in every way. As a show aimed at the family audience Disney has cannily cultivated on Broadway, “Elaborate Lives: The Legend of Aida,” in its world premiere staging at Atlanta’s Alliance Theater Co., is already a polished product that’s consistently entertaining, even at its silliest (and notwithstanding technical glitches that continued through opening night).