It is not often you think Disney are selling themselves short, but a recent tour of their Orlando parks leaves us thinking they ought to do more to promote some of their live entertainment.
Entering the Animal Kingdom last week, we picked up the usual park map and entertainment Times Guide, and headed out into the park.
The very first thing we came across in Discovery Island left us looking at the entertainment guide in vain for some idea of what we were actually seeing. It was a South American 3-piece musical troupe, playing traditional folk music with pipes, flute, guitar and drums. We were absolutely captivated and watched for the whole show, which lasted about 20 minutes and included two folk dancers who came out for the final song.
At the end they told us they were called Inkas Wasi and were from Peru (which we suspected, if anyone had seen the old BBC TV documentary Flight Of The Condor in the 1980s!) and we were just amazed there was no mention of them in the park info anywhere.
We then wandered into Dinoland to see another live show just under way, and, again, not mentioned anywhere on the park schedule. Smear, Splat and Dip (not the best name, but a lot of fun!) are a three-piece acrobat/juggling group, with a good line in visual humour and no small skills in the juggling department. Again, we watched the whole show and were hugely entertained, the sum total being almost an hour in the park, no rides ridden but great entertainment!
Moving on to Asia via the new Finding Nemo: The Musical show (which IS on the park info and IS a magnificent spectacle), we found a third unannounced live entertainment, The Story Walkers, who consisted of two folk-tale story-tellers who invited various audience members to be part of their tales. Good fun for the kids, if not quite up to the same mark as the previous two in entertainment terms.
It left us on a quest to see how much more live entertainment goes ‘undiscovered’ like this. For, it seems to me, it would be perfectly possible to be looking purely at the park map, just going from attraction to attraction, and miss out on all this ’secret’ fun.Amazingly, we found no less than 12 different entertainment sources that did not figure on the Animal Kingdom schedule at all, with just the four main shows, the daily parade and three character greeting locations figuring on the Times Guide. At Disney-MGM Studios, they list their six main show-times, the daily parade, the Fantasmic! show and 10 character greeting locations. But they do NOT indicate another three live entertainment outings, including the fun live music group Mulch, Sweat & Tears.
At the Magic Kingdom, there are seven show, parade and fireworks times listed on the Times Guide (including the recent addition of the Main Street Family Fun Day parade, which happens three times a day) and Story Time with Belle, plus the six character greeting locations. But again, they miss out on mentioning another 13 live entertainments, all of which add considerably to the charm and fun of a day at the park. The biggest omissions, to my mind, are Captain Jack’s Pirate Tutorial outside the Pirates of the Caribbean ride and the hugely enjoyable Dapper Dans on Main Street.
Finally, the entertainment-heavy Epcot park lists 21 different live shows and acts, along with four character greeting locations and the big-scale nightly finale of IllumiNations. As far as we can tell, there is nothing omitted here, so people can see at a glance the huge array of live offerings which help to ‘illuminate’ (ho ho!) the Epcot entertainment scene, including personal favourites Off Kilter (in Canada), Miyuki and the Matsuriza drummers (Japan), Serveur Amusant (France), Sergio (italy), Voices of Liberty (American Adventure), Dragon Legend Acrobats (China) and Mariachi Cobre (Mexico).
It is still amazing, though, that so much entertainment goes ‘missing’ in the other parks. Disney present this so well and their performers are nearly always of the highest quality, it genuinely seems they are selling themselves (and, ultimately, their visitors) short on promoting their own entertainers.Am I wrong in thinking this, or are there some ‘hidden’ things here that you have missed at the parks and would have enjoyed seeing?
