A swing and a miss for Disney Parks as an advertised “live event” is mostly lip syncing.
This is going to be a quick review because I’ve been given the task of rating the very short Harmonious Live special on Disney+. If you’ve seen Harmonious before at Epcot, you’ve essentially seen this special. The only difference is that Disney spent a ton of money to bring many of the artists who perform the Harmonious soundtrack. But rather than have the artists truly perform the show live, which would have been worth watching, I am 99.9999% sure that everyone involved was singing or playing… but we weren’t hearing them.
Yes, we could hear Auliʻi Cravalho and Idina Menzel as they spoke, but the singing and instrumentation all seemed to be identical in every way to the prerecorded audio you hear every night at Epcot. It would be almost impossible to have a live performance that is identical. Additionally, some of the performers had their tiny mics below their jaw lines… how could those microphones be picking up their louder notes with perfection? And top of all that, there’s no way a gospel choir could produce the interior acoustics we hear in this special when the choir is outside.
So all that is to say this was a huge bummer for me. If you were fine with what amounted to a massively expensive lip sync demonstration, you probably enjoyed this. And if you’re fine with playing pretend, you might also have had a good time. For me, I’ve seen Harmonious dozens of times live… I didn’t need to see it again on Disney+ with people playing music as if I’m hearing them when I’m not. The one and only exception to that was Lindsey Stirling. Even if I couldn’t hear what she was playing because she wasn’t even given a microphone, I could tell she was hitting all the notes on her violin while simultaneously dancing wildly in a flowing dress. For the time she was on the special, I was impressed. For the rest of it, this was a big miss for me.
Of course, that’s just my opinion. What did you think? Let me know in the comments down below!
Review Score: 4.0 (Decent)
As always, That Park Place is your place for all the news that should be fun. Thank you so much for taking the time to read!
