Hale’s ambitious ‘Aida’ shows dramatic potential of new movable beast of a stage

Sandy • Everything about the musical “Aida” feels Disneyfied and over-the-top, which makes it a perfect vehicle to serve as a test drive of Hale Centre Theatre’s new movable beast of a stage.

This isn’t a stage or a musical demanding acting subtlety, thanks to the Broadway-musical-by-the-numbers-feel of Tim Rice and Elton John’s bombastic score.

In this new Hale production, even Jennifer Stapley Taylor’s extravagant costume designs, particularly the robes and headdresses of the Egyptian royalty, feel as if they are visually belting.

What works best is the repairing of Kandyce Marie as Aida, an enslaved Nubian princess, and Casey Elliott as Radames, the restlessly cocky, reluctantly betrothed Egyptian captain. (They share the roles with Raven Flowers and Zack Wilson in the Tuesday-Thursday-Saturday cast.) Marie and Elliott return to the roles they played in Hale’s regional premiere of the musical in 2006, and then again on a Chinese tour two years later.

The actors each went on to have their own elaborate lives, as the lyrics of one of the score’s best numbers tell us, before returning to the stage to retell this story of forbidden love.

Marie and Elliott display beautiful onstage chemistry, and their voices are richly showcased by the score’s anthemic pop. As actors and singers, they are well-matched, their characters cocksure and elegant on the new-gen stage. In fact, under Dave Tinney’s direction, they are almost able to make something of the book’s inelegant, clunky, anachronistic dialogue.

And the new arena stage’s shifting shapes offer dramatic theatrical spectacle. This is an exercise in scale, as the theater makes every entrance grand, to quote my husband (who likes to offer cheesy quips. Make that “delightfully cheesy quips,” he says). In fact, the stage’s first big move drew applause and gasps from the tuxedoed and sequined crowd on opening night.

You can see how the technology will add lots of tricks to the theater company’s toolbox, such as what’s suggested by the LED screens that surround the house’s back walls. The brightly lit projections often distracted from the scenes unfolding on the stage, rather than immersing us in the story, but the technology suggests eye-popping future possibilities.

The shifting stage, too, feels distracting and bulky at times, such as when the audience can see into the dark depths or can hear odd noises from the pit.

But then, this high-tech staging only highlights the script’s romance novel tone. One example is the character-establishing number for Princess Amneris (Amy Shreeve Keeler on opening night; dual cast with Kelly Hennessey-Pulver), who proclaims fashion as her “Strongest Suit.”

Even for a princess character in a Disney musical, the song seems a rock-star-scaled bludgeon (“I would rather wear a barrel / Than conservative apparel”). Keeler impressively belts, but the dazzling staging — capped by aerialists as paparazzi descending from the ceiling — doesn’t add depth or emotion to the script’s cardboard cutout character.

On opening night, Michael Gray and Danna Barney’s lighting design dazzled, particularly in later scenes of restraint, when the LED screens went dark and drew our eyes to the tragedy unfolding on the stage.

This is a hugely ambitious production with a game cast, who reportedly had only one complete run-through on the new playground of the stage. (As an actor joked before that run-through: On a rotating, shifting stage, “You gotta know your blocking.”)

Awkward movements by the male ensemble on early dance numbers smoothed a bit as the show unfolded — and it’s lovely to see real movement allowed by the larger Hale stage. Technical challenges were apparent only through a few microphone bobbles and a bit of sparks during the lovers’ reflecting pool scene. All were gracefully handled by the actors, but those sparks still prompted nervousness among theatergoers — a constant reminder of the downside of technology in live theater.

Overall, I keep thinking of the lyrics to “Elaborate Lives” (“We all live in extravagant times / Playing games we can’t all win”). As much as I want to applaud the production’s wild ambitions, I remain a theatergoing fan of “slower and gentler, wiser” stories. There’s lot of potential here, and I remain ready to be convinced by a story that’s better served by the technological tricks of the staging.