Disney’s latest ice show spectacular, “The Iceman Cometh on Ice,” infuses Eugene O’Neill’s tragic masterpiece with a new life in a tour de force of skating and acting that puts recent Broadway revivals to shame.
Former Olympic figure skating champion Jamie DeSoto invests the doomed traveling salesman Theodore Hickey with a caustic edge and a masterful command of Lutz and Axel jumps that supercharges the production. DeSoto’s beguiling charm and crisp crossovers send the inebriated denizens of Harry’s Hope Saloon into flying spins that poignantly express their determination to cling to their hopeless pipe dreams. Director Michelle Neuhoff’s production daringly pushes all the boundaries of a children’s ice show in a way that Disney has not risked since its “Strindberg on Ice” show that shocked critics, parents and toddlers alike in 2008.
While some parents expressed concern about an ice show populated by hopeless alcoholics gliding about the ice with glasses of cheap whiskey and a protagonist who only comes to terms with reality by murdering his faithful and long-suffering wife, Neuhoff said she thought that the message of “abandoning one’s pipe dreams and facing the harsh reality of our Godless, existential existence can never come too soon.”