MILWAUKEE — The Broadway season at the Marcus Performing Arts Center opens with the Milwaukee premiere of Disney’s Aladdin. Chicago-based performer, Anand Nagraj (Jafar) is glad to be back in Milwaukee.
His stage credits include multiple shows at Milwaukee Repertory Theatre, and Nagraj says performers know Milwaukee has a great art culture.
“I feel like you can tell it from on stage. It’s nice to be appreciated up there,” he laughed.
Like so many Disney kids, Nagraj recalls loving the 1992 movie, Aladdin, for reasons beyond the great story.
“It was meaningful to me in a way I didn’t even know at the time,” Nagraj said. “To have the most popular movie of the time, the most popular animated film, and it was all characters that looked like me.”
With audiences already likely to know the film in and out, Nagraj recognizes they’ll come with high expectations.
“I feel that we are able to meet all those expectations of what you’re familiar with in the film, and then there is also all this wonderful material that is new and specific to the stage production,” Nagraj explained.
One thing you’ll notice pretty quickly that’s different — Jafar’s sassy friend, Iago, is not only not a parrot, he’s not even a bird.
“In the stage production, Iago was reimagined as a human sidekick,” Nagraj explained.
While audiences are filled with fans young and old, Nagraj knows many children are there for perhaps their first-ever theatre experience, and he loves that.
“So much of our experience with entertainment that way is on the screen,” he said. “To be able to expose them to something that is happening live in front of them and that they’re [experiencing] live with a whole audience of other people, it’s a remarkable thing to get to be a part of.”
Disney’s Aladdin on stage at the Marcus Performing Arts Center through Sunday. Tickets and show times: https://www.marcuscenter.org/
