11 hours ago
This musical is an ungodly mess. How did so many talented people get here?
As I sat through this pretty crummy new Disney musical, the question 'Who wrote this rubbish?' rose uncharitably into my head. The answer turns out to be a show in itself: maybe a more interesting one than the merry mess so many talented people have put their names to here.
The script is credited to Robert Horn and Kwame Kwei-Armah, who until recently was the artistic director of the Young Vic. In the course of Hercules's tortuous progress from off-Broadway in 2019 to Hamburg to the West End, though, they took over from another writer, Kristoffer Diaz. He was basing it on the work of the five credited screenwriters of the entertaining 1997 animation. They, in turn, were working from a story cooked up by another 13 writers over several years. All of whom were operating from the Romanised version of the Greek myth of Heracles, son of Zeus.
