Next Monday’s drive for Colt Prattes and Angelina Mullins is a relative breeze, seven hours from Orlando to Atlanta, where they settle in for a week’s run in the musical “Aladdin” at the Fox Theatre.
The following Monday, Jan. 15, will find them, along with their Labrador mix Mya, putting in a grueling 12 to 13 (or more) hours to make it to Grand Rapids, Michigan, in one day. The Monday after that, back in the truck and head back South, another 12 hours-plus, to Birmingham.
“People say we’re crazy,” Mullins says. But they’re also young, married and doing together what many stage performers dream of: appearing in the national touring company of a big Broadway musical. Such tours usually stay in a city Tuesday through Sunday, and travel on Monday.
“You get to be with your best friend and travel the whole country and do these amazing things,” she adds.
As for bringing Mya to every town with them, “we can’t leave her at home,” says Prattes, who’s formerly of Marietta and Mableton. “It’s a family unit. She’s been on more miles of the country than most humans.”
In the show, Mullins is a member of the ensemble and Prattes plays Kassim, Aladdin’s friend. If you’re trying to remember Kassim in the 1992 movie with Robin Williams as the genie, don’t bother. He wasn’t in it.
However, most of the stage version of “Aladdin” will be pretty familiar to those who love that film: The plucky street urchin who meets and falls in love with a princess named Jasmine, the crazy genie he summons from a lamp to help him, the evil sorcerer Jafar who wants Jasmine for himself.
But in an early version of the movie script, Aladdin originally hung out with three friends -- Kassim, Babkak and Omar – and Jasmine had three attendants. Disney executives thought there were too many characters for a 90-minute cartoon and cut them all.
A Broadway show runs two and half hours or more, however, so the creative team that was remaking the movie version of “Aladdin” with an eye toward its eventual Broadway debut in 2014 had to add a lot of new material. It was already there waiting for them; they went back to the old material, Kassim et al, and four original songs by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman that were never used: “Diamond in the Rough,” “Proud of Your Boy,” “Babkak, Omar, Aladdin, Kassim” and “High Adventure.”
“So it’s all the songs you know and love like ‘Friend Like Me,’ but there’s also new old characters that people haven’t seen,” Prattes says.
Credit: Disney
Credit: Disney
Prattes and Mullins have been in “Aladdin” together for two years and married for 10. They celebrated their 10th wedding anniversary at Disney World over Christmas break, the same place they spent their honeymoon.
Mullins fell in love with ballet when she was young, and by age 8 had been accepted into the Boston Ballet’s professional training program. An injury made her transfer to musical theater, and she was accepted to Ann Reinking’s prestigious Broadway Training Program in the early 2000s, where her instructors included Gwen Verdon, Gregory Hines and Ben Vereen.
Prattes was born in Marietta’s West Paces Ferry Hospital to two Atlanta City Police officers, now both retired. “My mom was a sergeant, in the second class to graduate women from the police academy,” he recalls, “and her office was in the Omni. I would hang out and do my schoolwork and she would be reading her officers’ reports.”
Credit: Deen van Meer
Credit: Deen van Meer
When he saw the movie “Aladdin” as a boy, Prattes had no notion of being a song and dance man. That bug bit in high school.
“I was in Pebblebrook High School in Mableton. I had bright blue hair and Doc Martens and I was trying to get out of playing basketball in gym class. This guidance counselor came in and said they are holding auditions [for musical theater]. I just ran to that for safety.”
He had no idea what he was doing. He walked in with no sheet music and no idea what to sing, so he told them he would sing “America the Beautiful.”
“My voice hadn’t changed so I sang it three octaves above normal, in this hypersonic range.” He must have been in key at least, as he was cast in “Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.”
“And I just knew,” he concludes, “I wanted to be bringing that kind of joy to people.”
THEATER PREVIEW
“Aladdin.” Presented by Broadway in Atlanta. Jan. 9-14. $29-$119. Fox Theatre, 660 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 855-285-8499. foxtheatre.org.
