Review: Hercules Wrestles More with Heroism Than with Female Liberation

If we’re going to update Hercules for 2019, let’s take Meg’s dreams of independence seriously.

Hercules
Photo: Joan Marcus

It has been an extraordinary summer at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. First, director Kenny Leon’s Much Ado About Nothing gave us an unforgettable new Beatrice in Danielle Brooks, as well as a new way to imagine the war in the background of the play, replacing Shakespeare’s soldiers of fortune with soldiers for racial justice. Then, Daniel Sullivan set the Bard’s Coriolanus in a dystopian future where climate disaster has brought about a water crisis and exacerbated economic inequality. With stirring performances by Jonathan Cake and Kate Burton and a set design redolent of Mad Max, Sullivan transformed one one of Shakespeare’s least likable plays into a compelling and enjoyable one.

Even more special is Public Works’s new musical adaptation of Disney’s 1997 animated film Hercules. With its simple story, Greek chorus of gospel singers, and iconic songs like “Go the Distance,” Hercules was asking to be adapted into a stage musical. The book for the show, by Kristoffer Diaz, stays close to the plot of the film while streamlining it a bit (bye, Pegasus) and updating its references. The lead actors—Jelani Alladin as Hercules, Roger Bart as Hades, and Krysta Rodriguez, a standout as Megara—are all winning in their roles, as is James Monroe Iglehart as Philoctetes (Phil for short), who delivers “One Last Hope” while an all-male workout troupe gets physical all over the stage. As Phil, Iglehart delivers the line that gets the loudest gasp of recognition from the audience: “Experience,” he says, “is what you get when you don’t get what you want.” The savvy-cynical edge of that line surfaces now and again in Hercules the musical, elevating the at times simplistic, go-the-distance source material.

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But however charming they are throughout Hercules, the actors in the main roles can’t keep up vocally with the Muses, a chorus of five thrilling gospel singers: Ramona Keller, Brianna Cabrera, Rema Webb, Tamika Lawrence, and Tieisha Thomas. The highlights of this production are those moments when all five women are on stage: in “The Gospel Truth,” “Zero to Hero,” and the strongest of the new songs, “Great Bolts of Thunder.” The Muses also get the best costumes in the musical, ranging from the sparkling white of their first entrance, when they sweep away a more conservative choir in standard black robes (“We’ll take it from here!”), to the glam camouflage coveralls they sport in a later scene.

In addition to the Muses’s vocal prowess, it’s a joy to be reminded, in a lighter strain, of another late-summer production at the Delacorte in which American gospel music was woven into an ancient Greek story and themes: last summer’s glorious Gospel at Colonus. While the two shows would not seem to have much in common, in both, gospel bridges the divide between the ancient material and our modern sensibilities.

Director Lear DeBessonet, the founder of Public Works as well as the director of a memorable Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Delacorte in 2017, directs traffic as masterfully as always, arraying the stage with a vast number of ensemble members in ways that never feel intrusive. But the creatures she and puppet designer James Ortiz summon to the stage are a mixed success. Nessus the River Centaur becomes a lovely, loping ogre, the features of his blue body responding to an expressive physical performance by Joel Frost, who wears them like a huge suit. The Hydra, however, so thrilling in the film with its multiplying jaws—it takes a mountain to bring it down—is reduced here to a few heads, like those in a Chinese dragon dance that don’t put up much of a fight. The gods, Zeus and Hera, appear on high behind enormous, wonderful masks when they are in their glory and in sparkling, colorful suits when they are in human form; the terrors that Hades summons to destroy the world make an impression, particularly Gluttony, looking like Slimer from Ghostbusters.

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It’s especially gratifying to see Hercules after seeing Coriolanus. There’s a tradition in scholarship of understanding Coriolanus as a Herculean, as opposed to an Aristotelian, tragic hero—a volcanic, out-of-place presence, rather than a flawed, mistaken one, tormented by fate—so the two plays complement each other well. Where in Shakespeare’s play the hero is destroyed by his inability to reconcile himself with the people he serves, in this version of Hercules, the people—of Greece, of New York City—band together to take their hero, who cannot make it on his own, across the finish line. This moment in the show is a little corny and probably less powerful than intended, but I felt an added resonance against the memory, from earlier in the summer, on the same stage, of Shakespeare’s wretched plebeians.

The set, just a few Greek columns and a little grotto for the band, doesn’t deliver that rush you get when you walk into the Delacorte and get your first look at what they’ve done with the stage. But this spare presentation turns out to be an advantage: With little to no set design, the action is framed, as is proper, by the great swaying trees beyond the stage and, farther off, by a clear view of Belvedere Castle. Throughout the performance, teenagers would bravely (and dangerously) creep out onto the rock face leading down from the castle to the lake below, briefly enjoying unobstructed rearview seats until police lights—but no impolite sirens—would flash them away. This, too, seemed a natural part of the show, one in keeping with the production’s desire to get all of New York City into the theater and onto the stage.

While, as always with Public Works, I was moved by the heart and humanity of the show, as we filed out of the theater, I felt dissatisfied with the handling of the original source material. Between the chorus’s promise to explore “What it is to be a hero” and Meg wondering, “What would I do in a world without men?,” the latter question seems more urgent and radical, but the former gets all the attention. This is particularly frustrating when the show’s answer to “What makes a hero?” is so familiar—that is, more than just strength. (The play does countenance the idea that real heroism would involve economic justice, but only passingly.)

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If Hercules has a future beyond the Delacorte Theater’s stage, and I hope that it does, it would be great to see the independence that Meg sings about early in the show explored in a meaningful way. While she may be more than, as Phil says in the film, “your basic D.I.D.” (read: damsel in distress), Meg gets rescued in the show’s climax—the too-brief descent into the underworld—and ends up in the arms of the male hero. If we’re going to update Hercules for 2019, let’s take Meg’s dreams of independence seriously.

Hercules runs through September 8.

Michael Plunkett

Michael Plunkett is a professor in the English department at Hunter College.

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