Booker High grad returns home in national tour of Disney’s 'Aladdin' at Van Wezel

When she was a senior at Sarasota’s Booker High School, Victoria Byrd was cast in Asolo Repertory Theatre’s 2015 production of “West Side Story,” which helped prepare her for a career in the theater and her role in the national touring company of Disney’s musical “Aladdin,” which comes to the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall beginning Tuesday.

“That was my first time working with a Broadway director,” she said in a recent interview from a tour stop in Jacksonville. “Joey McNeely was very intense but he taught the importance of the classics, which as a young performer who wants to do the new stuff was really important. He really broke down ‘West Side Story’ and showed the humanity in it and why it’s such a classic and the emotion that comes from the music and how it fuels the dance and how you connect emotionally to all that.”

It was like an intense college course providing the kind of experience that has served her well as she travels from city to city each week in the “Aladdin” ensemble. She is prepared to go on as one of two understudies for the leading female role of Princess Jasmine.

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The musical, which opened on Broadway in 2014, was adapted from the hit animated film to tell the story of Aladdin, a young man living off the streets who comes across a magical lamp with a genie inside who changes his life.

Director and choreographer Casey Nicholaw said he and the creative team, including composer Alan Menken, who wrote the original film with his late partner Howard Ashman, returned to the roots of the film to develop the story for the stage.

“Alan and Howard originally conceived it as a big Broadway-style musical comedy for film and animation and they just kept paring away at that, cutting those elements and they made it more of a male buddy action move with a couple of songs in there,” he said in a telephone interview.

Menken wrote the show with librettist Chad Beguelin to supplement songs from the movie with lyrics by Ashman and Tim Rice. Beguelin, who wrote lyrics to four songs in the show, has written the musicals “The Prom” and “The Wedding Singer.”

The production’s design team features multiple Tony Award winners Bob Crowley (sets), Natasha Katz (lighting) and Gregg Barnes (costumes).

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The film is best remembered for Robin Williams’ antic performance as the shape-shifting Genie, but the creators’ original idea was for the character to be more like the big band leader Cab Calloway, the “Hi-De-Ho” singer.

“We returned to that element as well. We had to think how theatrically you could do a song like ‘A Friend Like Me,’ where he shape-shifts in the movie all the time,” Nicholaw said. “To me, on stage, that meant shifting styles, a lot of different styles and a lot of different thoughts in it.”

Byrd, who makes her national touring debut in the production, said that’s the most challenging number in the show for the cast.

“I think it’s something like 12 minutes long and our Genie, Marcus Martin does it flawlessly every night,” she said. “He’s on stage every moment and we come in and out, doing flips and tap and more. It is exhausting, but by the time we get to the button, the audience goes crazy and we know it’s all worth it. The way they respond really fills my heart. The first time I heard the volume, I thought, this is why I’m doing this work and why I need to give my 100 percent every night.’

Starting a career

After Booker, Byrd earned a bachelor’s degree in musical theater from the Boston Conservatory and performed in a variety of student and professional productions that allowed her to earn her membership card in Actor’s Equity Association.

Not long after she moved to New York, she was cast in her first off-Broadway show in 2021, the York Theater Company revue “Cheek to Cheek: Irving Berlin in Hollywood,” in which she “got to sing and dance some of that classic musical theater music.”

It wasn’t long before she began multiple rounds of auditions for the “Aladdin” tour.

“The first was just a dance audition and the next round they had me prepare some Jasmine material and we learned another dance combination,” Byrd recalled. “And then the third round was even more Jasmine material and more dancing and the fourth round was kind of a mix of all that with the full creative team,” including Nicholaw and creatives from Disney Theatrical and the Broadway production.

“Aladdin” is one of two shows directed and choreographed by Nicholaw coming to Van Wezel this season. “Mean Girls,” the musical version of the hit Tina Fey movie, arrives in April.

Nicholaw is one of the busiest people on Broadway, having earned 11 Tony Award nominations for direction and or choreography, and winning for co-directing “The Book of Mormon.” His other shows include such long-running hits as “Spamalot,” “The Drowsy Chaperone,” “Something Rotten,” “The Prom” and the recently opened “Some Like it Hot.”

In adapting “Aladdin,” the creative team also eliminated the animal characters – including Aladdin’s sidekick, Abu –and Jafar’s assistant Iago, originally a bird, is now human. Nicholaw said they didn’t want to echo Disney’s “The Lion King” with animal puppets.

To replace Abu, they introduced three friends for Aladdin to turn to – Omar, Babkak and Kassim. (On the tour, Omar is played by actor Ben Chavez who was seen in Asolo Rep’s 2018 production of “The Music Man.”

Byrd said cast members have been sharing “tricks and tips” on how to adjust to the life of a traveling performer in a different city each week, and she’s enjoying the chance to see different parts of the country.

“I’m so lucky to be working, especially when so many people aren’t, and gotten where I am this quickly. I do feel I put in the work and put in the time. I’ve been doing this since high school. This path was meant for me and I’m grateful every day that I’m here.”

‘Aladdin’

Music by Alan Menken, lyrics by Howard Ashman and Tim Rice, book by Chad Beguelin. Directed and choreographed by Casey Nicholaw. Presented Jan. 24-29 at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, 777 N. Tamiami Trail, Sarasota. Tickets are $47-$122. 941-263-6799; vanwezel.org

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This article originally appeared on Sarasota Herald-Tribune: Touring musical ‘Aladdin’ arrives in Sarasota with Booker High grad