Disenchanted! – stream.theatre

Disenchanted! is available on stream.theatre until 11 April 2021.

Star rating: four stars ★ ★ ★ ★ ✩

Disney princesses are intrinsic to modern pup culture. From Snow White to Rapunzel, the fairytales of Grimm and Perrault have been pummelled into capitalist submission, the dark edges of their morality tales chamfered away into tales that persuade little girls that all it takes is a man to take the slightest bit of interest in you, then you fall in love, get married within days and live happily ever after.

The gulf between such tales and reality has proven a fertile ground for a variety of writers and performers over the years, from Sondheim’s Into the Woods to the altogether less cerebral ‘Portrait of a Princess’, a cabaret song written for, and regularly performed by, West End star Julie Atherton. Even Disney itself got in on the act, in some small way, with the princesses’ portrayal in 2018’s Ralph Breaks the Internet.

But few shows lean into the concept of dissing the enchanted princesses quite so fiercely as Dennis T Giacino’s Disenchanted!, which started life Off-Broadway in 2014 and now resurfaces as a digital musical directed by Tom Jackson Greaves and starring some of the West End’s most talented young women.

Hosted by Jodie Steele as Snow White, Sophie Isaacs as Cinderella and a delightfully narcoleptic Cinderella from Allie Daniel, Disenchanted! starts with Disney’s Big Three and suggests that, actually, there’s more to them than simpering women whose ultimate goal is to get wed. This is familiar ground – similarities to Six and & Juliet abound – but, like those West End hits, the light pseudo-feminism is a quick way in to reveal some deeper truths.

Unnatural body shapes also come under the satirical microscope, in the ensemble numbers ‘Big Tits’ and ‘All I Wanna Do is Eat’, both of which note that these characters’ physical dimensions often have more to with with male artists’ ideation than anything either achievable or desirable.

Among the flippancy are some more serious points, though. Courtney Bowman plays a delightful spin on a Princess Badroulbadour from the Tales of the Arabian Nights, whose bowdlerisation into Jasmine in Aladdin was part of a litany of that film’s disrespect to non-Western cultures.

But a far bigger disservice was meted out by Disney to Pocahontas, albeit their romanticisation of her character continued in a tradition which started with the Jamestown colonialists. Grace Mouat powerfully embodies a woman whose real live was anything but the glamourised, sanitised version singing Stephen Schwartz songs.

Mouat’s solo is followed by captions which go into more detail about the real Pocahontas, further underlining how badly white storytellers have maligned the woman. It’s an affecting moment, but it sits uneasily with the broad comedy encountered elsewhere.

Nevertheless, Disenchanted! provides an entertaining evening of numbers that encourage us to think beyond the Disney stereotype. None of Giacino’s songs are likely to stay in the mind beyond the show duration, though – which means that when it comes to princesses of the fairytale canon, it will remain Disney’s interpretations that persist.

Scott Matthewman