Film Soundtrack, 1997 (Walt Disney Records) (3 / 5) Hercules is plausibly one of the Disney studio’s wittiest animated musicals, leaning heavily on meta-humor and pop-culture riffs — especially those skewering celebrity, sports, and marketing. Loosely based on a mash-up of Greek myths, it follows a gangly, misfit demigod as he gains strength and confidence, battles monsters, finds love, and learns what it truly means to be a hero. But instead of taking a traditional, noble-story-telling route, the Mouse House counterintuitively turned this ancient epic-for-the-ages into a goofy, full-tilt screwball comedy fueled by thunderous funk and gospel music that could wake the entire Olympian pantheon. Like all adapted musicals of the Disney Renaissance, it has deep theatrical roots, including, in a special flourish, some of the film’s character designs having been inspired (sometimes obviously so) by the sinuous linework of none other than Al Hirschfeld. And looming over it all is the symposium of divas who periodically wail out the sung narration: Real-life Broadway goddess Lillias White leads a sassy, syncopated Greek chorus of Muses that includes her fellow Broadway veterans LaChanze, Cheryl Freeman, and habitual scene-stealer Roz Ryan alongside Vaneese Y. Thomas. The soundtrack of Alan Menken’s rousing orchestral score is paired with about 20 minutes of original songs that Menken wrote with lyricist David Zippel, all of which land — including an obligatory, humongous Disney production number, “Zero to Hero,” which chronicles Herc’s meteoric ascent from nobody to action-figure media star. Praise also for Susan Egan as fast-talking love interest Megara, wryly channeling Barbara Stanwyck in The Lady Eve, plus Danny DeVito as Herc’s crotchety trainer/satyr Philoctetes (“Call me Phil”) and, of course, Roger Bart, who in singing the title role offers wondrous performances of the Oscar-nominated motivational anthem “Go the Distance,” first as a reflective ballad and then in an exhilarating, clarion reprise in which Bart flies high as Pegasus. — Mark Robinson

Original London Cast, 2025 (Walt Disney Records) (2 / 5) After its 2019 debut at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park and subsequent tune-ups in New Jersey and Germany, Hercules finally muscled its way into an open-ended West End run in 2025. As with many Disney screen-to-stage ventures, the show sands down some of the film’s action — and, in this case, its snark — to appeal to the broadest audience and allow the performers to survive eight shows per week. Beloved characters were trimmed out (farewell, Pegasus), and others, such as Phil and Herc’s villainous Uncle Hades, reinvented into oddly familiar cousins of Aladdin‘s Genie and The Lion King‘s Scar, with puppetry stepping in for the action set pieces. This production was notably more ethnically diverse than the film, and the new songs lean even harder into Black musical traditions, pedal firmly to the floor, with mixed results. For instance, while one doesn’t expect the symphonic power heard in the film, the orchestra here often sounds surprisingly thin for a Disney release. “Go the Distance,” sung by the earnest and scantily togaed Luke Brady, here feels less about discovering heroic destiny and more about belting for applause. Hades’s new song, “Getting Even,” only occasionally has a discernible melody, and in fact, none of the new numbers are equal in quality to those from the film. Yet there is good news, mortals: All of the songs originally heard in the movie have been smartly expanded with new intros, bridges, and verses, and some of them — for example, “Zero to Hero” — have been effectively slowed down in tempo, letting us savor Zippel’s nimble wordplay. Mae Ann Jorolan’s formidable Meg matches Susan Egan’s sardonic original in “I Won’t Say I’m in Love,” while Trevor Dion Nicholas’s Phil channels his inner Little Richard in a gleeful, gloating Act II opener, “I’m Back.” Most importantly, the vocally acrobatic Muses have been given more to do; their expanded “Gospel Truth” sequences, now in five parts, allow Brianna Ogunbawo, Candace Furbert, Malinda Parris, Robyn Rose-Li, and Sharlene Hector to sweep in and comically elevate every track in which they appear, helping to rescue the album from the River Styx. — M.R.