Up the Nile Without a Paddle

Aida‘s lack of musical body temperature is evident from the moment “My Strongest Suit”’s reprise ends, and extends to the cast itself. While Simone has the passion and the pipes to command our attention whenever she is onstage, her scenes with Radames play like an underfunded chemistry experiment. Part of this flows from Cassidy‘s lack of pharaonic charisma -- he also wilts whenever placed next to Fournier’s radiantly bitchy Amneris. But it is ultimately Falls‘ misguided direction and the failure of the show’s writing committee that suck the air from Aida.

The problem with Aida isn‘t that it doesn’t know what it wants to be, but that it doesn‘t care to be anything at all. Even though this is a Disney project, its adult-enough themes do not make it the kind of entertainment you’d want to bring a child to. There are moments of costume camp that border on Martha Stewart parody (“I‘ll say this for you Egyptians,” Aida reluctantly admits, “you have amazing thread count”), yet these mostly evaporate after Act 1. The librettists also occasionally play the Nubian card, but no one seriously thinks of Aida as a call for social justice or a fable about power. (It doesn’t help that most of Zoser‘s mischief -- and even his unmasking -- occurs offstage.)

“This is the story of a love that flourished in a time of hate,” Disney’s corporate marketeers trumpet -- one of those banal “now and forever” slogans that could refer to any time between now and 5,000 years ago. In the end, this Aida has less in common with Saharan Egypt than with another desert location that is more appreciative of the show‘s superficiality and bombast, an oasis called Las Vegas.