Review: Aida at the Arlington

By Sarah Hammill, March 16, 2007
Aida. At the Arlington, Monday, March 12

Tuesday night’s performance of Elton John and Tim Rice’s musical Aida—based on Verdi’s opera by the same name—suffered from the same maladies that often effect film screenplays adapted from novels. The magic that originated on paper, or in Aida’s case, on an Egyptian opera stage in 1871, gets lost in translation and even Elton John, the musical magician who brought us the Broadway smash The Lion King, can’t do it justice.

The tale revolves around Nubian princess Aida, who is captured by Egyptian troops and falls under the control of Radames, captain of the Egyptian army. Not knowing her true identity, Radames becomes enchanted by her and gives Aida to his betrothed Egyptian princess Amneris as a servant. Aida and Radames, now under the same roof, fall in love, and in the end Aida sacrifices herself to be with Radames, while somehow also managing to “free” Nubia from oppressive Egyptian rule. But we’ll get to that later.

As a whole, the production suffers from two primary ailments, the first of which is a confusing and contrived time setting. The play takes place in a futuristic ancient Egypt where the pyramids are still being built but where they have trench coats, metal ladders, and the bad guys wear patent leather space suit-looking uniforms. The second thing the play lacks is that memorable, but unnamable something special that makes a hit. In this case, call it flat acting and mostly unremarkable melodies, the two basic ingredients that musicals live and die by.

But despite the mediocre production value, there were some standout moments. Marja Harmon sung beautifully and did her best with the character of Aida, who was written more as a stereotypical heroine than anyone actually worth looking up to. But the star of the show was Leah Allers as Amneris, whose rendition of “I Know the Truth” was heartbreaking and haunting.

Sadly, even Amneris—the most relatable character in the play—became a joke in the last scene, when after presiding over the deaths of Radames and Aida, her declaration of peace throughout the land was punctuated with the raising of a flag that read: “Nubia: The Other Egypt.” The slogan sounds more like imperialism than peace, and, like the play itself, aims for a higher goal than it could ever achieve.