Disney's Aladdin With An Indian Flavour Will Transport You To The Fantasy World Of Agrabah

The entrance of Jawaharlal Nehru Stadium looked nothing less than a gateway to dream land, decorated for the premiere of Disney¡¯s Aladdin Broadway musical show. The stage was beautifully illuminated with more than 250 lights, over 400 crew members worked silently and efficiently in the backdrop, while actors successfully wowed the audience, recreating one of our childhood's epic cartoon episode. The crew was successful in creating the magic with the help of advanced animation techniques.

This is Disney¡¯s second outing with a Broadway-style musical in India, the first being Beauty and the Beast (2015).

Aladdin and the Magic Lamp is a tale that makes us feel nostalgic. It owe its origins in The Book of Thousand and One Nights (The Arabian Nights).

Why a musical, and that too with a twist of Hinglish? "So, after Beauty and The Beast, Disney wanted to do another show and we thought of doing Aladdin. We all have grown up reading Arabian Nights stories, watching the bromance of Aladdin and Genie on Doordarshan and the connect is much higher than any other cartoon series. The next big thing was to identify a way of making it more relevant to the Indian audience and so we introduced Hindi in it. We didn't completely translate it in Hindi as it was written so well in English, some songs were so amazing that we decided to make it Hinglish to have that impact," said Shruti Sharma, the director of the play.

The play depicts the story of a poor guy, who falls in love with a princess. The musical takes us through the story, but in a mix of urban Hindi and English and with a sprinkling of popular culture. The cast includes Puranjit Dasgupta aka RJ Mantra as the playful genie, Vikrant Chaturvedi as the evil mastermind Jafar, Siddharth Menon and Taaruk Raina portray Aladdin, while Kira Narayanan is Princess Jasmine.

Sharma feels that it was a difficult task to execute the play this efficiently as she was not sure if the audience will accept the 'a little different' from the original characters.

She tells Indiatimes, "It was very difficult to put everything together and we didn't want to copy anything from the original animated series. The decision of having a Genie, the way we have right now was a risk. He is not your regular, bald, round, fat one, but he is different, more contemporary. While I was working on it, all I wanted was to give my honest best."

Sharma believes that Broadway-style musicals as a performance genre are still a rarity in India.

On July 15 the premiere was attended by the cr¨¨me de la cr¨¨me of Indian politics, from Chief Minister of Delhi Arvind Kejriwal, Deputy CM of Delhi Manish Sisodia to Health Minister Satyendra Kumar Jain.

The lead actors, who have many years of experience in theatre, spent hours rehearsing for the role.

Siddharth Menon who essayed the character of Aladdin tells us, "We use to practice for 14 hours everyday. It was challenging to learn singing, dancing, acrobatics, but every actor looks for such demanding roles and there are not much opportunities that changes you as an artist. The major challenge was to sing, dance and perform together, we had to stitch it all up together."

If you have not watched it yet, then tickets are available for Rs 500 to 10,000.